Bob: The first track is like the Buggles. The second is like the Cars. Is this a new wave record? Okay, “Do It All Night” is Prince. So, three songs in, Prince resolves his identity crisis (which is actually cool, because that very crisis is part of what makes him so good). Each record has gotten progressively tighter. When Prince slows down (“When We’re Dancing Close and Slow”), it flops, but “Gotta Broken Heart Again,” while not among his best songs by a longshot, is solid and works here, especially followed by the intensity of “Uptown.” The pacing of this record so far, is a big improvement over the first two records. “Head” is a great funk jam, but it is also one of the most overtly filthy songs I’ve ever heard (even for Prince). And then “Sister” makes “Head” look tame, but it’s the first song that lacks real purpose even if we get to hear some of Prince’s best shrieks to date. He has not developed his spiritual side which would pull on his “dirty mind” later and create another part of what made him such a dynamic artist, so these deep dives into depravity are less interesting than they would be on, say, Purple Rain where “Darling Nicki” is countered by “I Would Die 4 U.” “Partyup” does seem to seek, albeit in a really superficial way, to find some sort of redemption in the record’s otherwise hedonistic view of the world, but it doesn’t really create the tension found in the dichotomy that existed in his best work.
After one listen, this is really Prince getting very close to greatness. Dirty Mind has really good direction, but still stretches out and pushes itself. Neither of the first two records really did both of those things. I have been trying something new by grading (quickly and non-scientifically) each song on a ten point scale. Prince had three songs under 5 and Dirty Mind has none under 6. The average song score for Dirty Mind is almost two points higher than its predecessor. I know this is kind of like doing math on anecdotal evidence, but I think it does seem to hold up here.
Chuck: First reaction when it started: “Oh, dear God, it’s the ‘80s.” It took until the end of the third track (“Do It All Night”), when that scream begins at about 3:15 and then the outro dissolves into chaos, for me to stop hating the album. The outro of “Gotta Broken Heart Again,” with its literal closing line of “nothin’ left to say,” pushed me a little farther into acceptance. Then “Uptown” pulled me in, and I forgave and (almost) forgot the awful ‘80s leanings of the opening tracks.
You nailed it, Bob, when you talk about how Prince created tension between the sacred and the profane. As a kid, it was confusing to me how he could celebrate both so completely, but as an adult, I understand it’s a big part of why he was one of the greatest voices of our generation. Prince didn’t live in binaries, but rather he explored the continuum between poles: Black music and White music, spiritual and sexual, masculine and feminine, powerful and subservient (he talks about cooking for a woman and sharing clothes more than once). I never realized it before, but a huge part of Prince’s greatness is his immersion in the grey areas of humanity.
Your scoring approach is interesting. Do you score the songs on every listen? It’d be fun to see how/if the scores change.
Chuck: Started on listen #2 last night but I couldn’t get past “Dirty Mind.” I’ll try again today, but my working theory is that the first two songs are terrible.
Chuck: Just made my 2nd pass through Dirty Mind. It’s rare that I so vehemently disagree with Allmusic, but their 5-star review is absurd. In fact, my experience with this album is so different from theirs that I wonder if my own biases are making me miss something amazing. For example, is the one-two new wave punch of “Dirty Mind” and “When You Were Mine” a visionary testament to Prince’s ability to cross genres, or is it simply another example of an artist vapidly imitating a popular genre? To me, these two songs aren’t special in any way, and their attempts to cross genres land closer to “Bambi” and “I’m Yours” than his later efforts. Based on two listens, I cannot see any possible justification for going over 4 stars.
The record unquestionably gets better the farther into it you get, and I want to hear side 2 a few more times before I write more. One thing about these first three albums that really stands out to me, though, is their length. The older I get, the more I think 30 minutes is the ideal run time for an album. It’s kinda how Fitzgerald only needed 180 pages for Gatsby.
Chuck: The tempo in “Uptown” drops at about 2:20. It’s jarring but it feels kind of cool, as if he’s establishing a new groove. But then it creeps back up, and it makes me wonder what the point of that tempo change is. Maybe a screwup in the studio that he liked when he heard it back? Or was it intentional?
Bob: I think I have a higher tolerance for the 80’s than you do. I think in the context of its time, “Dirty Mind” is tapping into a wave that is still building in popular music. He does abandon too much of himself for it, but not to the point that I find it difficult. “When You Were Mine” is a little more problematic, because it is a flavor of new wave that was really cresting around 1980, so it doesn’t look forward as much. I don’t find either unlistenable, but they are not a great start to the album.
I am going to disagree with you about Prince and the gray areas. I don’t think it’s that he finds a place in the middle that is a mix of the spiritual and profane, it is that he lives on both extremes. Rather than being the gray in the middle, he is both the black and the white at the edges. He is not vacillating between them so much as committing to both. We don’t see it on Dirty Mind, because it is mostly profane, filthy even, and the only song that strays, “Partyup,” doesn’t commit to anything spiritual so much as it offers something more than the profane.
Musically, I like Dirty Mind the best so far, but it is hard to listen to the lyrics.
I’m not sure if 30 minutes is the sweet spot, but I do know that it is a lot better than the 80 minute CD that is usually half filler. More definitely does not always mean better.
Chuck: I’m finally getting over my anti-’80s bias and hearing the album for what it is, rather than what I want (or don’t want) it to be. It’s not a 5-star album, but it belongs in the 4 to 4.5 range. Interestingly, I’ve been excited to listen to Dirty Mind and I’ve played it 2-3 times every day this week.
Everything about him–songwriting, lyrics, arrangements, performances, all of it–improved here. We hear the first successful execution of the Prince scream in “Dirty Mind,” and it’s so good that the call-and-response backup vocals in “When You Were Mine” sound laughingly bad in comparison. And something I noticed about that scream: my ears aren’t great but it sounds like it’s multi-tracked, with at least two separate and different vocal lines coming together to form that defining sound. I’m curious if what I’m hearing now continues to happen on his great albums.
As for your comment about “Sister” not having purpose, I’d argue it has more depth than anything on the album, with its subtext of abuse, guilt, shame, and the conflict that accompanies sexual abuse from a family member. Prince challenged his listeners and “Sister” is one of these challenges. It’s disappointing that most people can’t look beyond their outrage or titillation, though in fairness, Prince buried the challenge beneath a very provocative approach.
Bob: I was going to disagree about “Sister,” because the context of the album is hedonistic, at least superficially. But you’re right. It is a song of tragedy and even psychological horror. It doesn’t leave open the questions that the Kinks’ “Art Lover” does (Does Ray Davies think watching little girls in the park is okay?), but it has depth and story in a minute and half that Aerosmith fails to even approach in five and a half minutes on “Janie’s Got a Gun.” I think there might be interesting parallels between those “Sister” and “Janie,” because they are both incest songs (though distinctly different stories) by artists who put a lot of their artistic focus on sex.
I think “Dirty Mind” and “Partyup,” the bookends of the album, are the songs that have grown the most on me musically (and “Sister” lyrically after you got me to rethink it).
I think you’re right about the multi-tracking on the scream. I hear two voices, I think, and the second one almost has a staccato feel that adds punch and then only one of the voices has echo. It is a very cool effect now that I’m listening to it. And it fits Prince, because there is almost two of him all the time due to the internal tension. Thinking about that along with rethinking “Sister,” I am going to backpedal on my earlier statement that he had not developed that tension. Now, I think he is very much developing it. This is still closer to a whole album of “Darling Nikki” as you mentioned in email, but I think I sold it a little short, because there are some hints, and good hints at that, on this record.
Rethinking “Sister” and a closer listen to that scream in “Dirty Mind” has really elevated this record for me. I had it as a four after one listen, but that was allowing for my personal distaste for some of the content. I still have it as a four objectively. What changed is how much I like it. After two listens, I was ready to move on, but now I kind of want to stay on Dirty Mind.
Chuck: I feel the same way. Of the three albums we’ve listened to, this is the first that I am playing out of desire rather than obligation. Today is the first day this week that I haven’t listened to it, but that’s due to a lack of opportunity rather than a lack of desire. And I feel there’s still a lot to uncover with Dirty Mind.
I might be mistaken but I think “Partyup” is the first time Prince gets political. It flops (at least lyrically) as badly as most of his other first efforts. It seems like it wants to be an antiwar song, but it reeks of the same kind of hedonistic privilege as songs like Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right (to Party)”