Tag: orgasm

Categories
Controversy, 1981 Podcast

Podcast: 41 Years of Controversy – A Conversation with Harold Pride and De Angela Duff

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | RSS

Here we are again, my first podcast in more than a year, and I couldn’t have asked for better guests than Harold Pride and De Angela Duff to discuss Prince’s fourth and quite possibly most underrated album, 1981’s Controversy. If you’ve been listening to these deep-dive album retrospectives, Harold needs no introduction; and, since the Prince scholarly community is a pretty small one, De Angela may not need one either. Suffice to say that she’s the biggest advocate of Controversy I know, and she makes a convincing case that it’s not only a great album in its own right, but also the linchpin of Prince’s entire career.

One quick note: you will likely notice that there was a significant drop in audio quality this episode; this was due to a perfect storm of technical issues that, unfortunately, left the low-quality Skype call recording as the only usable audio source from our conversation. I think you’ll get used to it, but I will assure you anyway that I’m taking steps to make sure we sound better next time. And yes, speaking of “next time,” I do have plans for more episodes in the coming months–probably not in October, but maybe one more before the end of the year, and then more to come in early 2023. If you want to hear the episodes as soon as they drop, remember to subscribe on your podcast service of choice using the links above!

Continue reading “Podcast: 41 Years of Controversy – A Conversation with Harold Pride and De Angela Duff”
Categories
Ephemera, 1983

Vibrator

Vintage ad for an impressively-sized vibrator; photo stolen from the Reprobate.

After returning to Minnesota from Los Angeles at the end of April 1983, Prince continued work on a prospective second album for Vanity 6. On Saturday, April 30, he cut the initial basic tracks for “Sex Shooter” and “Promise to be True,” both of which would be reworked extensively before eventually seeing release (or, in the later case, not seeing it). The following day, he revisited “No Call U”–a holdover from the 1999 sessions of the previous year–and recorded a new song called “Moral Majority.”

The latter, named after the notorious Christian Right movement led by televangelist Jerry Falwell, is described by sessionographer Duane Tudahl as “a synth-based track about nonconformity with lines like[,] ‘don’t want to be like anyone, I want them all to stare.’” While not in circulation, it reportedly features a gang vocal recorded by Vanity, Brenda Bennett, Susan Moonsie, manager Jamie Shoop, and Brenda’s husband Roy, while crammed into the bathroom of Prince’s Chanhassen home. “I remember… sitting on the handle of the toilet, right in the middle of the session,” Roy recalled to Tudahl. “It gave away where we were” (Tudahl 2018 81).

Later that month, Prince would record two other potential Vanity 6 tracks containing a similar cocktail of topical vulgarity. “G-Spot,” later recorded by backing singer Jill Jones for her 1987 solo album, was inspired by the so-called “Gräfenberg spot”: a (likely apocryphal) erogenous zone of the vagina that had captured the popular imagination through the 1982 bestseller The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality. Meanwhile, “Vibrator” commemorated a popular sex toy during a watershed year in its own journey to the American mainstream.

Continue reading “Vibrator”
Categories
Controversy, 1981

Private Joy

Prince's not-so-private joy, the Linn LM-1 Drum Computer; photo stolen from the Analog Synth Museum.

By June of 1981, Prince had recorded mostly complete versions of “Controversy,” “Annie Christian,” and, possibly, “Sexuality,” at his home studio. He recorded four more songs that month at Hollywood Sound Recorders in Los Angeles: “Let’s Work,” “Do Me, Baby,” “Ronnie, Talk to Russia,” and “Jack U Off.” The HSR sessions were completed with Bob Mockler, the engineer who had helped put the finishing touches on both Prince and Dirty Mind. According to biographer Per Nilsen, Prince booked a full week at the studio, but completed the songs in a handful of days: “We just worked so fast together,” Mockler recalled. “Prince would just go and put the drum part on the tape, and then he’d put everything to the drums, playing a bass part, then a keyboard part, then a guitar part, background vocals, a rough lead vocal. Once he got the backing tracks down, he did a serious lead vocal. Everything was in his head. We’re out of there in a day with a finished track” (Nilsen 1999 80).

In August, Prince returned to L.A. to finish his fourth album; but equipment problems at HSR necessitated that he move operations to nearby Sunset Sound. He booked the largest room, Studio 3, as a “lockout session,” meaning “he had that studio 24 hours a day for as long as [he] wanted,” engineer Ross Pallone recalled. Pallone would have the studio ready each afternoon around four; Prince “would show up sometime between [eight] and 10, and we would work all night… I remember going home to my house between [four] and [six] in the morning, and sleeping till about [two], then going back to the studio every day” (Brown 2010).

One of the perks of the lockout session was that Prince “could have anything equipment-wise he wanted set up in there–be it outboard gear or musical instruments–and no one could touch it,” Pallone told author Jake Brown (Brown 2010). The artist took this opportunity to record a new song, “Private Joy,” with a brand new toy: the Linn LM-1, a state-of-the-art drum machine designed by musician and engineer Roger Linn. Released in 1980, the LM-1 was the first drum machine to use digital samples of live acoustic drums, rather than the synthesized white noise and sine waves utilized by earlier models. Prince wasn’t the first artist to own an LM-1; Fleetwood Mac, Peter Gabriel, Leon Russell, Boz Scaggs,  Stevie Wonder, and even Daryl Dragon–the “Captain” of Captain & Tennille–all ordered theirs direct from Linn (Vail 292).  But more than any of his contemporaries, Prince would leave an indelible mark on the machine’s prominence in pop music and its expressive possibilities.

Continue reading “Private Joy”
Categories
Uncategorized

Prince Track by Track: “Papa”

Prince's funereal cover for Come, 1994; photo by Terry Gydesen, © Warner Bros.

Allow me to begin this post with a few simple facts: when I first started guesting on Darren Husted’s chronological Prince: Track by Track podcast last September, I had just started writing about 1980’s Dirty Mind, and Darren was in the middle of 1985’s Around the World in a Day. Now, a little more than six months later, I’m a few tracks away from starting 1981’s Controversy, and Darren is over halfway through Come from nineteen-fucking-ninety-four. Whatever, it’s not a race, etc. Here’s us talking about “Papa,” one of the weirdest, toughest listens in Prince’s body of work:

Prince Track by Track: “Papa”

As we all know, April is a big month in the Prince world, so I’m hoping to kick d / m / s / r back into high gear pretty soon. Keep your eye out for more updates!