Podcast: 40 Years of Dirty Mind

I love listening to the three of you talk! Your thoughts are always so spot on, and you give me things to think about.

This album can out when I was 19, and when I bought it, it was my 2nd Prince album purchase. Most days, it is still my favorite Prince album. In 1980, I had just moved to Minneapolis. Just about every time SueAnn Carwell played somewhere, throughout the early 80s, that’s where my friends and I would be (and Prince would sometimes be there, taking in her bar sets as well)—I was in spaces like this, near him, before I ever saw him perform.

Anyways, as you say, Uptown can’t possibly be Uptown-the-real-neighborhood, and I can’t imagine any Prince fan would have thought that at the time. I’ve heard people say Uptown was aspirational, what Uptown the physical place could be brought into being at some future day—and maybe that kind of is Paisley Park. I loved hearing you talk about these things in this podcast!

Back then, I did understand Uptown to be an idea, in the mind, but more specifically, I can tell you for certain what the meaning of Uptown in the song was to me and my friends at the time—I was Uptown, Prince was Uptown, the fans were all part of this moveable Uptown that was very real and literally embodied in us, the fans.

Also want to remind you of the kind of siege mentality that fans had at the time. Prince was not popular or beloved outside of the fan base, and was, if he was heard of at all, in the dominant culture of MN, dismissed, reviled, and warned against. It’s even hard for me to imagine now, and I was there, but a person could lose friends for sticking up for Prince, he was that hated by mainstream people.

Coincidentally, side-note, there was also an anti-smut campaign going on in the early 80s—the force of it was to try to protect the Black and brown communities adjacent to the porn shops on Lake Street—(white) men who drove in from the suburbs would also harass and menace women and girls in their close-by neighborhoods. In my mind, this was all happening right around the time Vanity showed up, but I’d have to check the dates to be sure. An ordinance was passed, written by feminist guest-lecturers at UW, Katherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. I went to every full day of hearings down at the city council. It was later overturned in court.

Yes, in and after Purple Rain, there was the aesthetic of new wave dress up. In 1980 there was none of this. When I bought my Rude Boy button down at the record store on Block E, one of the few legitimately sketchy blocks in the entire Twin Cities area, that was me putting myself into the Prince camp, the Uptown. Speaking for myself, fans dressed more like what The Time would dress like—fashion and accessories that were readily available in shops downtown and on Lake Street with a fair amount of 2nd hand/Ragstock mixed in.

In my tiny, multi-cultural group of fans, we did think we were on the brink of solving racism—not in a color blind way at all. And homophobia (though we didn’t have that word at the time, we knew that “queer bashings” after bar time downtown were a somewhat regular horrifying occurrence and we were obviously against that). I fully, fully agree that Uptown isn’t an “all lives matter” song—it’s liberation song. We knew Prince was Black, and we knew Prince was straight/hetero—I was hanging out with people who went to high school with Prince. This was part of what we loved and what gave us courage—I perceived him to be, essentially, sticking up for gay people by drawing some of the cultural ire to himself. That’s part of what gave us courage to stick up for him, to stick up for Black and brown people, to stick up for multi-racial/multi-cultural spaces, to stick up for gay people, and drag queens, and anti-racist skinheads, and underdogs of all kinds.

Ha ha well I wrote a little too much, but mainly I just wanted to say, Uptown is—or was back then–the 1980+ fan base, in my experience.