Dirty Mind (1980)

Prince's critical breakthrough album did not arrive entirely from out of a vacuum. Having somehow won a major label contract as an unknown 20-year-old he already had two creditable lite-funk wanna-sex-you-up LPs under his belt (For You and Prince). But this, from the front cover image—a black and white shot of him in bikini briefs, tailcoat, bandana, skeevy 'stache, and little else—to the abrupt shift in tone in the closing seconds of the last song, "Partyup" ("U're gonna have 2 fight your own damn war / 'Cos we don't wanna fight no more!"), was something a little different. Lying about his age (he claimed to be two years younger), but not about his name (which actually is Prince Rogers Nelson), and proudly claiming his home turf of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the main agenda is plain enough from the titles alone: "Dirty Mind," "Do it All Night," "Head," "Sister," the latter of which is about incest, but ludicrously so, and at any rate lasts just a minute and a half (I think he maybe considered it a punk-rock song). This is why the closing hippie chant caused whiplash to those unprepared. It's simple enough to be preoccupied with sex, but here it appears to be just the equivalent of the carnival barker come-on. The real show, inside the tent, was a funk-rock sound absolutely stripped to the bone, keyboards, guitar, rhythm section, and a lilting falsetto that could swell up and swallow a song inside of a scream. He favored the rock guitar more than the typical funkster (all due respect to Eddie Hazel) and seemed prone to deck out the proceedings with surprising new wave flourishes. Most importantly, he was no slouch as a songwriter—this is the album with "When You Were Mine," which probably qualifies at this point as a rock standard, about the last thing you would expect from this album. In fact, this album is full of last things you would expect from this album. He took the whole thing home to Minneapolis and brought it to the stage in June 1980, appearing with nascent fragments of his band the Revolution, most of whom dressed shockingly in scattered pieces of lingerie, except for the one appearing as a surgeon. The album may have clocked in at a scant 30 minutes, the show not much longer, but nobody felt cheated. Already there was a sense that he had plenty more where this came from.