Tag: 1984
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Podcast: 40 Years of Dirty Mind
Darling Nisi and Harold Pride return for a third episode in our series of in-depth retrospectives on Prince’s albums, this one for the 40th anniversary of 1980’s Dirty Mind.
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Baby I’m a Star
“Baby I’m a Star” has the familiar air of Prince self-actualizing through music: projecting himself toward a celebrity status he was still years away from achieving.
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1999
What set Prince apart from his early-’80s peers was his insistence on greeting Judgment Day, not with solemn gravity or mordant gallows humor, but with a seemingly irony-free display of millenarian ecstasy.
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Onedayi’mgonnabesomebody
Recorded around the same time as “777-9311” in late Spring 1982, “Onedayi’mgonnabesomebody” was a slight, palate-cleansing trifle to fill out the first side of the album.
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Automatic
On “Automatic,” Prince distills the intricacies of romantic and sexual connection into a clean, simple cause-and-effect relationship: love and lust as a computer programmer’s conditional expressions.
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Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)
If “Something in the Water”’s music wasn’t so beautiful, the self-pity and solipsism of its lyrics would begin to feel ugly: an adolescent projection of self-loathing into a spitefully generic female tormenter.