SOUL POWER: They Rock. They Rule.They Reign.
A Black Music Month Series from EbonyJet.com and VH-1 Soul
2008-06-05
by dream hampton

Prince: The Early, More Dangerous Years

It was 1999, the mega successful double album with the crossover smash “Little Red Corvette” that officially signaled Prince’s arrival as an innovative musical genius with killer pop instincts. But by 1982, when that chart-topping album was released, Prince had already changed the lives of his hardcore fans with four relatively obscure, intimate, experimental albums that forever transformed what was possible when it came to music, sex and sexuality.

Beginning with 1978’s For You, Prince, in what would come to be his typically prolific approach to recording, released an album a year. The self-titled Prince, with the R&B hit “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, Dirty Mind and Controversy, served sex as their main course.
Corrupting virgin brides, fetishizing incest among siblings, creating synth-symphonies in ode to the joys of oral, masturbation, parading a seemingly fluid sexuality, nothing was off limits. Prince didn’t struggle with the sacred and profane as binary forces to be celebrated or punished, he did a dizzying dervish dance until boundaries and divides disappeared in a sandstorm of pleasure.

Where the title song of 1999 was a protest of nuclear proliferation and Reagan’s Star Wars, Prince’s early interests were bedroom based. For You was the suite of an innocent in love, inspired by the ecstasy of commitment. In ‘78 there were rumors that his muse was the equally diminutive and prodigious phenom Patrice Rushen, that she in fact had taught him his way around a keyboard, perhaps even the recording studio itself. “Soft and Wet,” a rock ballad about anatomy and “Baby”, a quiet contemplation on unplanned pregnancy may or may not have been about his relationship with Rushen, but they invoked the crazy, sexiness of live-in new love.

He may have been musically immature, with chord restrictions and a reliance on the instrument du jour, the synthesizer, but Prince has never been as sweet as he was on his first album. He promises undying devotion and monogamy on songs like “My Love is Forever”, “I’m Yours” and “Just as Long as We’re Together.” 1979’s self-titled album Prince, which many of even his serious fans mistake as his debut, was a practical companion piece to his first album. Love begins to disintegrate, dreams of intimacy are dispersed with songs like ‘Why You Wanna Treat Me so Bad”, “Still Waiting” and “It’s Gonna Be Lonely.” He catches his lover in a bisexual tryst in “Bambi” (and discovers his inner guitar hero).

The following year, with the raunchy, sexually charged Dirty Mind, Prince seems to have vacated his spring awakening, love has dissolved and left him only with his erotica. The album opens “I was only 16/But I guess that’s no excuse/My sister was 32, lovely and loose/she don’t wear no underwear/she said it only gets in her hair/and it’s got a funny way of stopping the juice/My sister never made love to anyone else but me/she’s the reason for my sexuality…incest is everything it’s said to be.”  You’d have to take it back to the Bible to find a more shocking verse in pop culture.

Though 1981’s Controversy begins with “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” a scolding about presidential Cold War standoffs, the album quickly hits the sheets. “Jack You Off”, “Let’s Work” and “Sexuality” let you know where Prince’s true passions lied. The sprawling, brilliant “Do Me Baby” a seven minute, ecstasy-inducing ballad (in as much as Prince was beginning to reinvent the “ballad”), ended Controversy, his fourth album and his final effort so focused on sex. He certainly didn’t abandon the erotic as a major theme, there are countless songs scattered throughout his thirty-year career that are as sticky as anything he recorded early on. But as his musical soundscape expanded, his worldview and interests matured, his themes became more multi-faceted and less focused on straight up sex (a good thing, I’m sure).

A reformed Jehovah’s Witness whose been known to talk strippers off poles in L.A. clubs so he can lecture them about Iran (true story), Prince won’t even perform most of the early, sexually charged songs. Prince in his early twenties may not even recognize the comparative prude he’s become. Still those early albums remain road maps to sexual exploration, freedom and ecstasy.

dream hampton is an author, filmmaker and critic. She writes about culture and music and is a contributor to EbonyJet.com