Review Summary: Raw and unfiltered, erotic and dirty. And, most importantly, absolutely liberated.
Dirty Mind is Prince firing on all cylinders. The third album he completely wrote and produced by himself, it makes good on the promise of his two hit singles off 1979's "Prince" by showing the world, though only a small part of it was listening, just how much of a wild and uninhibited spirit this guy was. It's an entire album, 30 minutes, about young love, but it might be its best representation ever put to vinyl. While there have been great adolescent albums, wonderful coming-of-age records from respected rock acts or indie bands, none of them have gotten the obsession with talking to attractive people, fantasizing about sex and being all around blissfully confused as right as this record. There's something exorcised on these eight tracks that makes all other albums ever written about sex and lust seem tame and hollow by comparison. The real depth of feeling, the fluttering in your stomach, the smacking and slapping and bending of sex are all here, viewed through a funky haze. The record weaves and sighs, moves effortlessly through the different moods of a sexual relationship, from the sweat of a dance floor (Partyup) to the broken pieces of a three-way relationship (When You Were Mine).
It really is about a Dirty Mind, a concept record whose unified string of songs seem to have found together almost on accident, yet no other record in Prince's discography (save, perhaps, for Purple Rain) comes close the combined ferocity and pure, raw, sensual energy of these eight tracks. Even the cover seems to fit the vision, Prince daring us to look at him in the way he likes to present himself: half-naked, a scarf draped around his neck, his eyes fixed in a stare that's part seductive, part challenging.
Nowhere is the kinetic nature of the record more evident than in its first two tracks, "Dirty Mind" and "When You Were Mine". The way the former fades out after the young narrators lays out all his sexual fantasies with a woman he seems to consider out of his league, mentioning her daddy's car and offering the line "I'll give you some money/to buy a dirty mind", screaming towards the end, seems almost like a song that might've fit better at the end the album or even its middle section. But the synths, used to great effect, fade out, and what follows are a couple seconds of utter silence before the burst of Prince's genius unleashes itself in what might be one of the catchiest guitar riffs ever written. Dirty Mind (the song) was a preamble, an introduction to the world of, well, Prince's Dirty Mind (the album), and When You Were Mine is the first chapter, a knockout performance, exhilarating and confused and brilliant, all at once. "When You Were Mine" is the most well-known song off this album, and for good reason. Prince sings in a smoky falsetto and cuts the verse section shorter every time it appears, ultimately launching into one chorus while the previous one barely has time to fade. It's bright, it's catchy. It's also one of the most sexually vague songs Prince has ever written, hinting heavily that the song's narrator has fallen in love with the guy who was the "other" in a three-way with his girlfriend. What other pop song has ever spoken so clearly to the confusion and lust of sexual experimentation? The way you catch yourself looking at people you didn't know you were attracted to in a suddenly different light, your heart aflutter and strange, but still somehow warm and pumping?
The main shortcoming of Dirty Mind might be that it blows its load so early, like an overeager lover who's glad to finally get laid. Do It All Night is a lively snapshot of a love affair just beginning, a pick-up in the process of being picked with all the little obsessions that entails. It's also got one of my favourite lines on the record - if the listener didn't yet realize just how raw the content of Dirty Mind would be, Prince singing "and baby, drown, baby, in your arms" should make it clear. On its own, this line might not sound special, but the way a quick "c'mon" is added afterwards makes it sounds like he's drowning in something other than arms, something so beautifully dirty it makes the record's title and cover seem like an understatement. Topping it off with the incestual fantasy of "Sister" and a line Prince purposefully kept vague (is she responsible for his "Uh, Sexuality" or his "Bisexuality"?) and an anti-war statement that's way bigger on the Make Love than on the Don't Make War (Partyup), the album is as tight as the lover Prince wishes for. And it's liberating to hear sex, erotic desire and weird, nigh fetishistic lust sung about so openly. It might have cost Prince some commercial success, but boy, am I glad it did.
Sex in American Culture has often been a target of shame and secrecy, especially if it moves past romantic Hollywood sex in a loving, but ultimately somewhat boring missionary position. Dirty Mind rejects shame. It rejects everything and everyone that wants to make a person feel bad about themselves because they're horny, because they're deeply infatuated with a body part or a sexual act, and instead champions and celebrates our common freakiness. It's not an album to have sex to, it might be too wry and silly for that, but it's an album that makes sexual fantasies as normal as loving moments are on others. It shows that a desire to *** somebody is just as valid and, in its own way, pure, as the wish to love them tender, love them true. And with its frequent references to sex acts, group affairs and threesomes, it's even more free-spirited and just plain insane than something like Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On could ever be. Dirty Mind might just turn some people into more sex-positive people, and its ability to shock and give you that sly grin on "Head", when a bride-to-be leaves her husband to give and receive oral from Prince's narrator, is still unparalleled and fresh. There's no erotica here, only porn, but it's sweet and consensual and incredibly F.U.N. Everyone on this record, 99% of which is Prince, is having the time of their lives, and they never sounded this sexually liberated for an entire record's length again. In fact, perhaps nobody else did, either.
Like walking into an orgy, it's overwhelmingly weird and dirty at first, but as soon as you settle in, you start noticing that our shared love for sex and all its glorious peaks and lonely valleys might be the thing that unites us after all.
