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the Controversy era 1981 - 1982
A PUNK PROPHET OF SEXUAL ANARCHY I'm still frightened of Prince allured by the promise, alarmed by the chintzy crud of his live routine, partially assuaged by this new "Controversy". -NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS November 14, 1981
Bobby Z, Dr Fink, Dez Dickerson, Lisa Coleman, BrownMark the Time Denise Matthews Susan Moonsie People call me rude I wish we all were nude I wish there was no black and white I wish there were no rules.
The Controversy Daily U.S. Goes To Zoo - Tourist Invasion of Uptown Fails, 89 Beheaded Annie Christian Sentenced to Die * Joni* President Declares UPTOWN New U.S. Capital Free Food Stamps For Good Samaritans The Second Coming Lingerie - New Fashion Trend Sixty Thousand New Breed Schools Built by June
previous http://prince.org/msg/7/418488 the Dirty Mind era 1980-1981
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1.Controversy
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Sex and Society
BY STEPHEN HOLDEN
It should come as little surprise that on his fourth album, Prince has made his inflammatory and explicit sexuality the basis of an amusingly jive but attractive social agenda. Once you've exalted brother-sister incest (Dirty Mind's "Sister"), not to mention nearly every other sexual possibility, how else can you get people's attention?
Prince's first three records were so erotically self-absorbed that they suggested the reveries of a licentious young libertine. On Controversy, that libertine proclaims unfettered sexuality as the fundamental condition of a new, more loving society than the bellicose, overtechnologized America of Ronald Reagan. In taking on social issues, the artist assumes his place in the pantheon of Sly Stone-inspired Utopian funksters like Rick James and George Clinton. I think that Prince stands as Stone's most formidable heir, despite his frequent fuzzy-mindedness and eccentricity. A consummate master of pop-funk song forms and a virtuosic multiinstrumentalist, Prince is also an extraordinary singer whose falsetto, at its most tender, recalls Smokey Robinson's sweetness. At its most brittle, Prince's voice sounds like Sylvester at his ironic and challenging best.
Controversy's version of One Nation under the Sheets is hip, funny and, yes, subversive. In the LP's title track -- a bubbling, seven-minute tour de force of synthesized pop-funk hooks -- Prince teasingly pants, "Am I black or white/Am I straight or gay?" This opening salvo in a series of "issue"-oriented questions tacitly implies that since we're all flesh and blood, sexual preference and skin color are only superficial differences, no matter what society says. But Prince eventually brushes such things aside with hippie platitudes. Along the way, "Controversy" flirts with blasphemy by incorporating the Lord's Prayer. The number ends with the star's punk-libertine chant: "People call me rude/I wish we all were nude/I wish there was no black and white/I wish there were no rules." Though hardly inspiring, it's fitting that the Constitution of Prince's polymorphously perverse Utopia should be written in childish cant.
The strutting, popping anthem "Sexuality" elaborates many of the points that "Controversy" raises, as Prince shrewdly lists gadgets (cameras, TV, the Acu-Jac) that cut us off from each other. "Don't let your children watch television until they know how to read," he advises. Who would disagree? "Ronnie, Talk to Russia," a hastily blurted plea to Reagan to seek disarmament, is the album's weakest cut. "Let's Work," a bright and squeaky dance song, and "Private Joy," a bouncy pop-funk bubble-gum tune with baby talk in the verses, show off Prince's ingratiating lighter side. "Jack U Off," the cleverest of the shorter compositions, is a synthesized rockabilly number whose whole point is that sex is better with another human being than with a masturbatory device.
Prince's vision isn't as compelling as it might be, however, because of his childlike treatment of evil. "Annie Christian," the one track that tackles the subject, turns evil into a bogeywoman from whom the artist is forever trying to escape in a taxicab. Though the song lists historical events (the killing of black children in Atlanta, Abscam and John Lennon's murder), it has none of the resonance of, say, "Sympathy for the Devil," since Prince, unlike the Rolling Stones, still only dimly perceives the demons within himself.
After "Controversy," the LP's high point is an extended bump-and-grind ballad, "Do Me, Baby," in which the singer simulates an intense sexual encounter, taking it from heavy foreplay to wild, shrieking orgasm. In the postcoital coda, Prince's mood turns uncharacteristically dark. He shivers and pleads, "I'm so cold, just hold me." It's the one moment amid all of Controversy's exhortatory slavering in which Prince glimpses a despair that no orgasm can alleviate.
Despite all the contradictions and hyperbole in Prince's playboy philosophy, I still find his message refreshingly relevant. As Gore Vidal wrote in The Nation recently: "Most men, given the opportunity to have sex with 500 different people, would do so gladly. But most men are not going to be given the opportunity by a society that wants them safely married, so that they will be docile workers and loyal consumers."
Prince, I'm sure, would agree.
ROLLING STONE, JANUARY 21, 1982
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OldFriends4Sale said:
my goodness | |
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private joy is still my jam | |
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I like a lot this album specially the tite track, Do Me Baby, Sexuality and Annie Christian and Private Joy. | |
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mine too that is the best song on that album! | |
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Oh YEAH !!!!! Fell in love with that song as soon as i heard that album (Cassette tape at the time) | |
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is this the original,"untouched" photo of the album cover? | |
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OldFriends4Sale said:
Sex and Society
BY STEPHEN HOLDEN
It should come as little surprise that on his fourth album, Prince has made his inflammatory and explicit sexuality the basis of an amusingly jive but attractive social agenda. Once you've exalted brother-sister incest (Dirty Mind's "Sister"), not to mention nearly every other sexual possibility, how else can you get people's attention?
Prince's first three records were so erotically self-absorbed that they suggested the reveries of a licentious young libertine. On Controversy, that libertine proclaims unfettered sexuality as the fundamental condition of a new, more loving society than the bellicose, overtechnologized America of Ronald Reagan. In taking on social issues, the artist assumes his place in the pantheon of Sly Stone-inspired Utopian funksters like Rick James and George Clinton. I think that Prince stands as Stone's most formidable heir, despite his frequent fuzzy-mindedness and eccentricity. A consummate master of pop-funk song forms and a virtuosic multiinstrumentalist, Prince is also an extraordinary singer whose falsetto, at its most tender, recalls Smokey Robinson's sweetness. At its most brittle, Prince's voice sounds like Sylvester at his ironic and challenging best.
Controversy's version of One Nation under the Sheets is hip, funny and, yes, subversive. In the LP's title track -- a bubbling, seven-minute tour de force of synthesized pop-funk hooks -- Prince teasingly pants, "Am I black or white/Am I straight or gay?" This opening salvo in a series of "issue"-oriented questions tacitly implies that since we're all flesh and blood, sexual preference and skin color are only superficial differences, no matter what society says. But Prince eventually brushes such things aside with hippie platitudes. Along the way, "Controversy" flirts with blasphemy by incorporating the Lord's Prayer. The number ends with the star's punk-libertine chant: "People call me rude/I wish we all were nude/I wish there was no black and white/I wish there were no rules." Though hardly inspiring, it's fitting that the Constitution of Prince's polymorphously perverse Utopia should be written in childish cant.
The strutting, popping anthem "Sexuality" elaborates many of the points that "Controversy" raises, as Prince shrewdly lists gadgets (cameras, TV, the Acu-Jac) that cut us off from each other. "Don't let your children watch television until they know how to read," he advises. Who would disagree? "Ronnie, Talk to Russia," a hastily blurted plea to Reagan to seek disarmament, is the album's weakest cut. "Let's Work," a bright and squeaky dance song, and "Private Joy," a bouncy pop-funk bubble-gum tune with baby talk in the verses, show off Prince's ingratiating lighter side. "Jack U Off," the cleverest of the shorter compositions, is a synthesized rockabilly number whose whole point is that sex is better with another human being than with a masturbatory device.
Prince's vision isn't as compelling as it might be, however, because of his childlike treatment of evil. "Annie Christian," the one track that tackles the subject, turns evil into a bogeywoman from whom the artist is forever trying to escape in a taxicab. Though the song lists historical events (the killing of black children in Atlanta, Abscam and John Lennon's murder), it has none of the resonance of, say, "Sympathy for the Devil," since Prince, unlike the Rolling Stones, still only dimly perceives the demons within himself.
After "Controversy," the LP's high point is an extended bump-and-grind ballad, "Do Me, Baby," in which the singer simulates an intense sexual encounter, taking it from heavy foreplay to wild, shrieking orgasm. In the postcoital coda, Prince's mood turns uncharacteristically dark. He shivers and pleads, "I'm so cold, just hold me." It's the one moment amid all of Controversy's exhortatory slavering in which Prince glimpses a despair that no orgasm can alleviate.
Despite all the contradictions and hyperbole in Prince's playboy philosophy, I still find his message refreshingly relevant. As Gore Vidal wrote in The Nation recently: "Most men, given the opportunity to have sex with 500 different people, would do so gladly. But most men are not going to be given the opportunity by a society that wants them safely married, so that they will be docile workers and loyal consumers."
Prince, I'm sure, would agree.
ROLLING STONE, JANUARY 21, 1982
I disagree that Do Me Baby is "bump and grind". It's actually the best fellacio put on record that I know of. Good writing though his million dollar words were cracking me up. What? | |
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iZsaZsa said: OldFriends4Sale said:
Sex and Society
BY STEPHEN HOLDEN
It should come as little surprise that on his fourth album, Prince has made his inflammatory and explicit sexuality the basis of an amusingly jive but attractive social agenda. Once you've exalted brother-sister incest (Dirty Mind's "Sister"), not to mention nearly every other sexual possibility, how else can you get people's attention?
Prince's first three records were so erotically self-absorbed that they suggested the reveries of a licentious young libertine. On Controversy, that libertine proclaims unfettered sexuality as the fundamental condition of a new, more loving society than the bellicose, overtechnologized America of Ronald Reagan. In taking on social issues, the artist assumes his place in the pantheon of Sly Stone-inspired Utopian funksters like Rick James and George Clinton. I think that Prince stands as Stone's most formidable heir, despite his frequent fuzzy-mindedness and eccentricity. A consummate master of pop-funk song forms and a virtuosic multiinstrumentalist, Prince is also an extraordinary singer whose falsetto, at its most tender, recalls Smokey Robinson's sweetness. At its most brittle, Prince's voice sounds like Sylvester at his ironic and challenging best.
Controversy's version of One Nation under the Sheets is hip, funny and, yes, subversive. In the LP's title track -- a bubbling, seven-minute tour de force of synthesized pop-funk hooks -- Prince teasingly pants, "Am I black or white/Am I straight or gay?" This opening salvo in a series of "issue"-oriented questions tacitly implies that since we're all flesh and blood, sexual preference and skin color are only superficial differences, no matter what society says. But Prince eventually brushes such things aside with hippie platitudes. Along the way, "Controversy" flirts with blasphemy by incorporating the Lord's Prayer. The number ends with the star's punk-libertine chant: "People call me rude/I wish we all were nude/I wish there was no black and white/I wish there were no rules." Though hardly inspiring, it's fitting that the Constitution of Prince's polymorphously perverse Utopia should be written in childish cant.
The strutting, popping anthem "Sexuality" elaborates many of the points that "Controversy" raises, as Prince shrewdly lists gadgets (cameras, TV, the Acu-Jac) that cut us off from each other. "Don't let your children watch television until they know how to read," he advises. Who would disagree? "Ronnie, Talk to Russia," a hastily blurted plea to Reagan to seek disarmament, is the album's weakest cut. "Let's Work," a bright and squeaky dance song, and "Private Joy," a bouncy pop-funk bubble-gum tune with baby talk in the verses, show off Prince's ingratiating lighter side. "Jack U Off," the cleverest of the shorter compositions, is a synthesized rockabilly number whose whole point is that sex is better with another human being than with a masturbatory device.
Prince's vision isn't as compelling as it might be, however, because of his childlike treatment of evil. "Annie Christian," the one track that tackles the subject, turns evil into a bogeywoman from whom the artist is forever trying to escape in a taxicab. Though the song lists historical events (the killing of black children in Atlanta, Abscam and John Lennon's murder), it has none of the resonance of, say, "Sympathy for the Devil," since Prince, unlike the Rolling Stones, still only dimly perceives the demons within himself.
After "Controversy," the LP's high point is an extended bump-and-grind ballad, "Do Me, Baby," in which the singer simulates an intense sexual encounter, taking it from heavy foreplay to wild, shrieking orgasm. In the postcoital coda, Prince's mood turns uncharacteristically dark. He shivers and pleads, "I'm so cold, just hold me." It's the one moment amid all of Controversy's exhortatory slavering in which Prince glimpses a despair that no orgasm can alleviate.
Despite all the contradictions and hyperbole in Prince's playboy philosophy, I still find his message refreshingly relevant. As Gore Vidal wrote in The Nation recently: "Most men, given the opportunity to have sex with 500 different people, would do so gladly. But most men are not going to be given the opportunity by a society that wants them safely married, so that they will be docile workers and loyal consumers."
Prince, I'm sure, would agree.
ROLLING STONE, JANUARY 21, 1982
I disagree that Do Me Baby is "bump and grind". It's actually the best fellacio put on record that I know of. Good writing though his million dollar words were cracking me up. It was not me. What? | |
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Yes. I believe I have a few other outtakes from this photosession. I'll post them when I find them.
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^^ it looks like Prince is wearing blue or grey eye contacts....are his eyes really that color? | |
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His eyes are a natural green/hazel color | |
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OldFriends4Sale said:
His eyes are a natural green/hazel color I think they change color. My mom's eyes are "grey", but they go from gray to blue, or green, or hazel, or brown. It's mood and/or wardrobe choice. What? | |
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Yep, an ex girlfriend of mine, her eyes were generally grey, but in the winter seasons for some reason they would be blue and then turn grey as the day went on
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Prince himself referred to his own eyes as being brown, though. This is from a spontaneous line in "Blues In C", performed live in 1988: . "Then I’ll make love to you with my big brown eyes." . I’ll check on the exact date & place if anyone should doubt this. Free the music. | |
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it's not a big deal, we are talking about Controversy, it doesn't matter If his eyes are generally/most brown, then it is understandable he would call them brown My ex did not call her eyes blue, even though they were sometimes Erykah Badu calls her eyes green, even thought they are mostly hazel/light brown I know of people with 2 different colored eyes | |
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R-L Dr (Matt)Fink keyboards/synth Prince -the fearless leader Dez Dickerson -guitar Lisa Coleman -keyboards/synth
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LOGIC said: Prince himself referred to his own eyes as being brown, though. This is from a spontaneous line in "Blues In C", performed live in 1988: . "Then I’ll make love to you with my big brown eyes." . I’ll check on the exact date & place if anyone should doubt this. Butterscotch or chocolate. What? | |
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People's eyes really do change color? Is this not impossible? I know the iris can dilate and make an eye look darker by covering normal lighter color parts.
There's been a misconception that David Bowie has different color eyes, but I think it's really that one of his eyes is permantly dilated.
Here's Prince's eyes (and armpit):
My art book: http://www.lulu.com/spotl...ecomicskid
VIDEO WORK: http://sharadkantpatel.com MUSIC: https://soundcloud.com/ufoclub1977 | |
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Released September 2, 1981
Who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven and forgive us our trespasses who trespass against us into temptation but deliver us from evil and the power and the glory forever and ever
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ufoclub said:
People's eyes really do change color? Is this not impossible? I know the iris can dilate and make an eye look darker by covering normal lighter color parts.
There's been a misconception that David Bowie has different color eyes, but I think it's really that one of his eyes is permantly dilated.
Here's Prince's eyes (and armpit):
It's not impossible, my Mom is living proof. But I'm sorry I can't explain it. What? | |
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10.5.1982 @ Sam's(First Avenue) in Minneapolis
1. Sexuality 2. Why U Wanna Treat Me So Bad? 3. Jack Off 4. Head 5. Annie Christian 6. Dirty Mind 7. Let's Work 8. Controversy 9. PartyUp
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...Don't ask. What? | |
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