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Ephemera, 1984

Love and Sex (1984)

The Purple Rain era marked a subtle, yet perceptible shift in Prince’s attitudes toward sex. On 1999 less than two years earlier, he’d reveled in his libertinish “Rude Boy” persona: promising to “fuck the taste out of your mouth” on “Let’s Pretend We’re Married,” then actually demonstrating his technique on “Lady Cab Driver.” But by the follow-up album, his pendulum was beginning to swing away from the raw mechanics of lust, toward something approaching more conventional romance. “The Beautiful Ones” found him not just pretending he’s married, but considering it as a real possibility; “When Doves Cry” and the title track earnestly grappled with the dissolution of a relationship. Even “Darling Nikki”–the closest the album came to vintage, “dirty” Prince–treated its sexual encounter as a quasi-Satanic temptation, before ending with a palate-cleansing gospel coda.

It’s easy to assume that this shift was motivated by commercial calculus: Purple Rain was designed to be Prince’s entrée into the mainstream, and heteronormative monogamy plays better to “mainstream” tastes than unfettered promiscuity. There is doubtless some truth to that interpretation; but there’s also ample evidence to suggest that he felt a genuine conflict between his spiritual convictions and his carnal appetites. A song like “Possessed” (written during the 1999 sessions, and revisited in multiple iterations for Purple Rain) depicts the repentant “Rude Boy” as an unwilling vessel for “demonic lust.” “Love and Sex,” recorded at Sunset Sound on February 27-28, takes a different approach: envisioning an afterlife where the spirit and the flesh could exist in harmony.

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Prince Track by Track: “Sex in the Summer”

It’s been a minute since my last appearance on Prince: Track by Track, but I’m back again to chat with host Darren Husted about one of my guilty pleasures from Emancipation:

Prince Track by Track:
“Sex in the Summer”

Also in semi-related news, my other project Dystopian Dance Party has launched our fifth annual celebration of wet, silky ’80s R&B, Jheri Curl June. If you’re a fan of Prince’s ’80s work, you’ll find a lot to like about the stuff we cover. Check out the podcast kicking of the festivities here:

Dystopian Dance Party Podcast:
Jheri Curl June 2K18

You should also check in on the blog, as we’ll be posting a vintage Jheri Curl track every weekday this month. Some of them, I’m sure, will be Prince-related. Meanwhile, over here I’ll have an end-of-year-two wrap-up post this week, and then it’s on to our next Prince track, “She’s Just a Baby.”