Prince

Nothing really sounded like this record when it first came out, and it still stands up as a bizarre amalgamation of electro-funk, rock and new wave. Prince's voice is in top form, shrieking and delivering bedroom asides like a man possessed (which he surely is). Did we mention the sex? Well, there's plenty of that, too.

Dirty Mind is a pop record of Rabelaisian achievement: entirely, ditheringly obsessed with
the body, yet full of sentiments that please and provoke the mind. It may also be the most
generous album about sex ever made by a man. Like the good lovemaking he celebrates,
Prince is both subtle and forceful. His voice is a high, tinkling soprano that curls into
delicate squeals when he's excited and dips into a scratchy murmur when he's f... More >

After going gold in 1979 as an utterly uncrossedover falsetto love man, he takes care of the songwriting, transmutes the persona, revs up the guitar, muscles into the vocals, leans down hard on a rock-steady, funk-tinged four-four, and conceptualizes--about sex, mostly. Thus he becomes the first commercially viable artist in a decade to claim the visionary high ground of Lennon and Dylan and Hendrix (and Jim Morrison), whose rebel turf has been ceded to such marginal heroes-by-fiat as Patti Smith and John Rotten-Lydon. Brashly lubricious where the typical love man plays the lead in "He's So Shy," he specializes here in full-fledged fuckbook fantasies--the kid sleeps with his sister and digs it, sleeps with his girlfriend's boyfriend and doesn't, stops a wedding by gamahuching the bride on her way to church. Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home. (Grade - A)