Prince shocks the world with his Dirty Mind

Prince : Dirty Mind

[Purchase]

On October 8 Prince released Dirty Mind, his exhilarating third album that combines funk and new wave in a way that's never been duplicated. To this day, I believe it's his best album. From his home studio in Minneapolis, Prince had stripped down the music to explore new themes that would get some attention : oral sex, incest, threesomes and ejaculation. Forty years later, it's more than a bit shocking. 

The critics were certainly shocked by what they heard. Ken Tucker of Rolling Stone wrote "Prince's first two collections established him as a doe-eyed romantic. Nothing could have prepared us for the liberating lewdness of Dirty Mind. Dirty Mind jolts with the unsettling tension that arises from rubbing complex erotic wordplay against clean, simple melodies. Across this ELECTRIC surface glides Prince's graceful quaver, tossing off lyrics with an exhilarating breathlessness. He takes the sweet romanticism of Smokey Robinson and combines it with the powerful vulgate poetry of Richard Pryor. The result is cool music dealing with hot emotions. At its best, Dirty Mind is positively filthy." 

 Robert Chrisgtau of the Village Voice gave the album an A, writing:

After going gold in 1979 as an utterly uncrossedover falsetto love man, he takes care of the songwriting, transmutes the persona, revs up the guitar, muscles into the vocals, leans down hard on a rock-steady, funk-tinged four-four, and conceptualizes--about sex, mostly. Thus he becomes the first commercially viable artist in a decade to claim the visionary high ground of Lennon and Dylan and Hendrix (and Jim Morrison), whose rebel turf has been ceded to such marginal heroes-by-fiat as Patti Smith and John Rotten-Lydon. Brashly lubricious where the typical love man plays the lead in "He's So Shy," he specializes here in full-fledged fuckbook fantasies--the kid sleeps with his sister and digs it, sleeps with his girlfriend's boyfriend and doesn't, stops a wedding by gamahuching the bride on her way to church. Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home

The album finished #9 in the Village Voice Pazz and Jop Critics Poll. My guess is not all of the critic were aware of the album or it would have finished in the top 3.