Something filthy this way comes. On face, this album isn't nearly the moral corruptor its reputation would have you believe - overall, the grooves are light and sunny, underproduced in such a way as to make them almost dismissable. This is supposed to be revolutionary? A couple of drum machines, some wiry jankle guitar, and the same synthtones Prince has been using all along, all glossed over by Prince's twee/soulful falsetto that makes every lyric sound as pure as the driven snow? I guess it was, but on the surface I don't quite get what all the fuss is about. People try to call Dirty Mind Prince's move towards rock rhythms, but I certainly don't see that, not in light of real rock tunes like 'Bambi' or 'Little Red Corvette' from a few years later. This is pop all the way, from here down to the corner porno mag store. Hell...'Gotta Broken Heart' is doo wop. What does make Dirty Mind interesting is its very stealth. The subversion of this record, the madonna (as in Virgin Mary, not pretty-fucking-far-from-virgin Ciccone)/whore disconnect between music and lyrics is like nothing I've ever come across since Shirley Temple's Let's Get in the Tub and Play With Your 'Good Ship Lollipop' album from 1938. Try a little trick: put on Dirty Mind in the car with your mother or an unsuspecting first date (hopefully both aren't the same person. but if so, Prince might be interested in talking with you). I bet you can almost definitely make it through the drive without being slapped and/or enrolled in psychotherapy. Just don't try this with Purple Rain or Controversy and expect to get by unscathed.

Oh, but Dirty Mind is naaaasty. By now, the denizen's of Prince's befouled imagination are well known - the bride-to-be who doesn't want to fuck Prince because she wants to be a virgin on her wedding night (married to someone else, obviously). So she blows him off instead and he pays her back by splooging on her wedding dress and stealing her for his own. Or when he jealously agrees to a threesome ('When You Were Mine'). Or when he learns all the bedroom tricks from his sister, who then turns around and pimps him out ('Sister'). He spends two other whole songs just expressing how much he likes to bump the wild pumpkin ('Dirty Mind' and 'Do It All Night'), and hell, even admits he's an equal opportunity hornball in 'Uptown'. Yup, listen close to Prince's often indecipherable falsetto and you'll be rewarded with the kind of lyrical gems that never, for some reason, make it onto your average Thursday night Karaoke selection. Still, each song is delivered in such an unassuming, poppy, positive manner that the only time anything comes right out and grabs you lyrically is when he chants 'You're gonna have to fight your own damn war, 'cause we don't wanna fight no more' during the coda of 'Partyup'. What? A political message in a song called 'Partyup'? Evidently. Prince's worldview, at least at the time he recorded this album, was a fiercely individualistic one...he rejects the world of politics and (sexual) morality for one he calls Uptown (also the name of the club area in Minneapolis where he played many of his early shows and built his fanbase), where sexual freedom, self-expression, and a vague subservience to God seem to be the driving forces. 'Cum on Wedding Dress' may not jibe very well with religion in most people's eyes, but it does for Prince, apparently. Go figure. Oddly enough, when listening to Dirty Mind with your ears turned on, I wouldn't necessarily call it a perverse experience. He may call his mind 'dirty', but for the most part sex/love/affection/lust isn't presented as something evil or shameful. It may be disgusting and devious ('Head'), it may be obsessive ('Dirty Mind'), and it may cause heartbreak ('When You Were Mine'), but he never stoops to the thinly-veiled woman-hating abusive lyrics that are so prevalent in a lot of rock music. Personally, I'd rather have my kids learn that sex is powerful, interesting, and fantastic rather than learn that it is used as a weapon against poor, unsuspecting boys by horrible 'debbil-wimmens' to destroy their manhood. Not for at least 12 years, though.

Music-wise, Dirty Mind is a consistently good, but not always great record. The thinness of the sound is mostly due to the fact that Prince was unable to record studio versions of the songs that satisfied him, so he simply used his home demos instead. For homemade demos, they're fantastic, and it's interesting to hear the man so stripped down to his core, but I'd still have preferred a thicker drum and bass guitar sound to give these grooves some, well...flesh. As if there isn't enough of that on this record already. Whatever. The hit was 'When You Were Mine', also a hit for Cyndi Lauper, and sounds like it was made for the Go-Go's. 'Head' has probably the best dance groove, a bass-poppin outro that provided one helluva road map for the Talking Heads to follow on their Speaking in Tongues album three years later. 'Sister' almost certainly was intended to be the 'Bambi' of the record, as the jankly guitar and the driving rock beat is foremost here, but apparently Prince's home studio doesn't include a distortion pedal, so he ends up flailing around on a thread-thin clean guitar sound that I suppose some people classify as revolutionary. Not me, natch - I think the effect is muted by its sketchy production rather than enhanced by the unique sound. Not so with 'Partyup', which once again makes clear that no one funks with his own bad self better than Prince. Can you imagine how hard it must be to record a funk jam and make it play convincingly as a live-band performance, all by yourself? No wonder the guy fell in love with drum machines...it prevented him having to play a funk drumbeat into a blackhole of blank tape every single track just to get started. I don't blame the guy one bit.

Capn's Final Word: Ground-breakingly smutty, and certainly more fit to be the best example of 'punk funk' than anything else in his catalogue, but it doesn't hit in the gut quite how people say it does.

Jeez Cap'n Crunch... break up the text a little.