Why is Prince’s Dirty Mind on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
Raw, grimy, funked up danceable R&B pop. Also: fun.
Some stats & info about Prince – Dirty Mind
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Dance Music, R&B, Funk
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #326
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was Dirty Mind released? 1980
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #667 out of 1,000
Prince’s Dirty Mind on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.
What does Prince’s Dirty Mind mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
One of the most rewarding parts about embarking on this fantastic voyage of a best 1,000 albums ever project is clarifying my feelings about music that has been in my life since I first started listening to music.
With Prince, it was a process of figuring out that I’m in that relatively small pocket of fans who greatly enjoy a portion of his music but can frankly do without a lot of it. As I dug in further, I recognized that it’s Prince’s early output that I enjoy the most, and that Purple Rain, released in 1984, is the pivot point where I’m not much interested in what Prince produced after that (with a few clear exceptions here and there).
And it turns out that Dirty Mind, released way back in 1980, is the best album that Prince ever produced as far as I’m concerned. It’s raw, a little grimy, and slightly underproduced. That all works in its favor as it’s also sexy, funked up, danceable R&B pop music that is impressive and, most importantly, really fun.
The title track, “Dirty Mind,” is a great example and embodies all these qualities. When I mentioned that the album is a little underproduced, an example is how tinny the keyboards sound on this song. But it weirdly works in the songs favor, and when the pulsing beat crescendos into the chorus and Prince sings, “All I want to do is love you for a little while,” it’s fantastic.
“Head” pumps up the funk factor; it is one wild track. The spacey funk jam keyboards alone. In my notes I simply jotted down “Whoah,” for this song. I’ll let you figure out what the song is about from a lyrical standpoint.
The more I listen to Dirty Mind, I appreciate the relentless pace on songs like “Sister.” But listen closely and you’ll note how meticulous the song writing, music, and performance is.
Overall, if you were to throw a 1980-themed party that you desired to get a little wild, you could do a lot worse than to throw on Dirty Mind and let it roll… for its 30 minutes of runtime, anyway.
See also:
Pop culture stuff that has something to do with Prince’s Dirty Mind
Parts of Dirty Mind, especially “Head,” remind me of one of my favorite ultra-funked up disco songs from the early 1980s: “Do You Wanna Funk,” by Sylvester. If the song title sounds vaguely familiar but you’re not sure why, it’s because the song is featured in what is absolutely a Top 10 all-time movie for me, Trading Places, starring Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, and Jamie Lee Curtis.