Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 10/25/1990
Run Time: 29:57
Neither
For You nor
Prince was adequate preparation for the full-blown masterpiece of
Prince's third album,
Dirty Mind. Recorded in his home studio, with
Prince playing nearly every instrument,
Dirty Mind is a stunning, audacious amalgam of
funk,
new wave,
R&B, and
pop, fueled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock. 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. Basing the album on a harder,
rock-oriented beat more than before,
Prince tries everything -- there's pure
new wave pop (
"When You Were Mine"), soulful crooning (
"Gotta Broken Heart Again"), robotic
funk (
"Dirty Mind"),
rock & roll (
"Sister"), sultry
funk (
"Head," "Do It All Night"), and relentless
dance jams (
"Uptown," "Partyup"), all in the space of half an hour. It's a breathtaking, visionary album, and its fusion of synthesizers,
rock rhythms, and
funk set the style for much of the urban
soul and
funk of the early '80s.
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
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