thats the album that made me a fan back in those days anybody that does a cover only in breifs & didnt care what others thought about it is cool 2 me!

No album sounded like that b4 and the copiers tried but didn't succeed, Prince took a big chance alienating his R&B core fans. He had an all black soul following before this album. It got virtually no radio airplay whatsoever after the first single "Uptown". But his chance paid off. It established him as a rebel rude boy & he never looked back....

Its a masterpiece!

And the best thing was that unlike the pop world, his R and B fans followed him further, like the last person said he took a risk with his Black fans by jumping into rock and punk along with the funk, but they followed him and dug it. Dirty Mind the album and Uptown the single were Top 10s on that chart. At the same time too whereas Rick James and Parliament also incorporated white rock elements into their acts. This proved the black audience was funky and ready for a change just like Prince. Its interesting to note too, he never really lost his black audience, they dug him well into the 90s after pop radio had abandoned him for the next big thing.

Despite all the rock and shock, I still feel Dirty Mind was a great black music album from a black artist too, Prince was unique in the sense, that the album wasn't just black though, it was white too. The fact that Prince preached to both groups of music fans said a lot for the time, alot of Black music (Funk, soul, R and B etc) and white music (Rock, Metal, MOR) was aimed strictly at the same ethnic group of fans and only a few groups were brave enough to try crossover. The death of disco and the backlash towards in it 79/80 had partly to do with it, Disco was pan racial and pan sexual and peopel wanted to go back to basics in this case Rock and Funk. Prince saw beyond that and gave us this bi racial masterpiece infused with a good dollop of original sexually explicit lyrics and a breath taking level of musicality to boot.