The night of their debut at the Roxy in West Hollywood on Nov. I'm going to personify sex in every possible way. This was a bold choice for someone groomed to be a black teen idol. Prince had scored a No.

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Where other pop musicians suggested sex in lewd double-entendres, Prince left nothing to hide — before its release, no other rock or funk record was ever quite as explicit as Dirty Mind, with its gleeful tales of oral sex, threesomes, and even incest. Certainly, it opened the doors for countless sexually explicit albums, but to reduce its impact to mere profanity is too reductive — the music of Dirty Mind is as shocking as its graphic language, bending styles and breaking rules with little regard for fixed genres. Artistic breakthroughs can often come from many places. Sudden strokes of genius do happen, but quite often, fluke decisions usually end up making for the best music. The guy who openly admitted he was a virgin on his first album is suddenly doing it with his sister a mere two years later? This is one of my favorite albums of all time, so this might get long. Yes, Prince grew to incorporate the sounds of psychedelia thanks to the influence of Wendy and Lisa, and incorporated more orchestration and horn charts as the years went by.
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Dirty Mind is a pop record of Rabelaisian achievement: entirely, ditheringly obsessed with the body, yet full of sentiments that please and provoke the mind. It may also be the most generous album about sex ever made by a man. Like the good lovemaking he celebrates, Prince is both subtle and forceful. As if to offset the ingratiating hesitancy of his vocals and phrasing, Prince comes on like a cocky boy wonder. Nothing, therefore, could have prepared us for the liberating lewdness of Dirty Mind. Here, Prince lets it all hang out: the cover photograph depicts our hero, smartly attired in a trench coat and black bikini briefs, staring soberly into the camera. In his favorite musical trick, the artist contrasts a pumping, low-toned drum sound with a light, abrupt guitar or keyboard riff pitched as high as his voice which is often double-tracked to emphasize its airiness. Dirty Mind jolts with the unsettling tension that arises from rubbing complex erotic wordplay against clean, simple melodies.
This week, an American DJ recalled how he was banned from playing it in, of all places, a strip joint. Yet Prince is sometimes overlooked as a lyricist, presumably for being shallow. To dive deep into his back catalogue is to discover a Tolkienesque appreciation for allusion, with quotations and iconography that draw together The Song of Solomon , Roman orgies and Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy. Prince also moralized on the subject of sex. A lot of what happens in Prince songs is considered politically incorrect these days. Prince gets away with being a Lothario because of how deftly he could navigate between exploiting people no one more than himself and joking at his own expense. My face is red, I stand corrected. Remember the fable about the princess and the frog? Separated from his history, he tells the driver he can only pay in tears and begs her to exorcise his demons. An alarming monologue follows, where Prince fucks away the problems he sees in America with every angry stroke: greed, poverty, discrimination, warmongering politicians and, as a villainous representative of the frontier myth, Yosemite Sam.