D / M / S / R Year Five in Review

Well, we’ve made it: Another year of Dance / Music / Sex / Romance is now in the rear-view mirror. As always, my output has fallen short of my loftier expectations: I count a total of 30 “proper” posts this past year, of which 12 were your typical song posts, six were Patreon-exclusive “bonus tracks,” seven were briefer write-ups of promotional singles, and three were reviews of recent books and films; there was also one patron-requested “alternate timeline” post and one personal reflection on the five-year anniversary of Prince’s death.

Still, like I said last year, I’m no longer losing sleep over things like “productivity.” My interest is primarily in quality, of life and of content, and I know from experience that both will suffer if I don’t pace myself. Besides, I actually think my output was pretty damn good, all things considered: After all, I wrote nothing (aside from some discarded drafts of “Cloreen Bacon Skin”) between the months of October 2020 and January 2021, and very little this March and May. As for what I did write, several of my posts from the past year (particularly the three tracks from Purple Rain) are among the longest and most complex in the history of the blog.

All of which is to say that, yes, I only completed one “chapter” in 2020-21–and even that one included posts from as long ago as 2018:

Ephemera, 1981-1982

But I also recorded a three-hour podcast on Dirty Mind (which, before you ask, I do plan to follow up on soon)!

40 Years of Dirty Mind

Perhaps most importantly, though, I’m still having fun, still proud of the work I’m creating, and still planning to keep it up for a long time into the future. I’m sure there are people out there who are frustrated by my pace, and to those people, I will just say I’m sorry, and also, please give me a grant so I can quit my job and become a full-time Prince scholar. In the meantime, I’m going to keep writing as much as I can, as well as I can, to document what I consider to be the greatest body of work in the history of recorded music. Here’s to another five years, or 50–as long as it takes!