RECORDS
Sex and Society
CONTROVERSY
PRINCE
Warner Bros.
BY STEPHEN HOLDEN
It should come as little surprise that on his fourth album, Prince has made
his inflammatory and explicit sexuality the basis of an amusingly jive but
attractive social agenda. Once you've exalted brother-sister incest (Dirty
Mind's "Sister"), not to mention nearly every other sexual
possibility, how else can you get people's attention?
Prince's first three records were so erotically self-absorbed that they
suggested the reveries of a licentious young libertine. On Controversy,
that libertine proclaims unfettered sexuality as the fundamental condition
of a new, more loving society than the bellicose, overtechnologized America
of Ronald Reagan. In taking on social issues, the artist assumes his place
in the pantheon of Sly Stone-inspired Utopian funksters like Rick James and
George Clinton. I think that Prince stands as Stone's most formidable heir,
despite his frequent fuzzy-mindedness and eccentricity. A consummate master
of pop-funk song forms and a virtuosic multiinstrumentalist, Prince is also
an extraordinary singer whose falsetto, at its most tender, recalls Smokey
Robinson's sweetness. At its most brittle, Prince's voice sounds like Sylvester
at his ironic and challenging best.
Controversy's version of One Nation under the Sheets is hip, funny
and, yes, subversive. In the LP's title track -- a bubbling, seven-minute
tour de force of synthesized pop-funk hooks -- Prince teasingly pants, "Am
I black or white/Am I straight or gay?" This opening salvo in a series
of "issue"-oriented questions tacitly implies that since we're
all flesh and blood, sexual preference and skin color are only superficial
differences, no matter what society says. But Prince eventually brushes such
things aside with hippie platitudes. Along the way, "Controversy" flirts
with blasphemy by incorporating the Lord's Prayer. The number ends with the
star's punk-libertine chant: "People call me rude/I wish we all were
nude/I wish there was no black and white/I wish there were no rules." Though
hardly inspiring, it's fitting that the Constitution of Prince's polymorphously
perverse Utopia should be written in childish cant.
The strutting, popping anthem "Sexuality" elaborates many of the
points that "Controversy" raises, as Prince shrewdly lists gadgets
(cameras, TV, the Acu-Jac) that cut us off from each other. "Don't let
your children watch television until they know how to read," he advises.
Who would disagree? "Ronnie, Talk to Russia," a hastily blurted
plea to Reagan to seek disarmament, is the album's weakest cut. "Let's
Work," a bright and squeaky dance song, and "Private Joy," a
bouncy pop-funk bubble-gum tune with baby talk in the verses, show off Prince's
ingratiating lighter side. "Jack U Off," the cleverest of the shorter
compositions, is a synthesized rockabilly number whose whole point is that
sex is better with another human being than with a masturbatory device.
Prince's vision isn't as compelling as it might be, however, because of
his childlike treatment of evil. "Annie Christian," the one track
that tackles the subject, turns evil into a bogeywoman from whom the artist
is forever trying to escape in a taxicab. Though the song lists historical
events (the killing of black children in Atlanta, Abscam and John Lennon's
murder), it has none of the resonance of, say, "Sympathy for the Devil," since
Prince, unlike the Rolling Stones, still only dimly perceives the demons
within himself.
After "Controversy," the LP's high point is an extended bump-and-grind
ballad, "Do Me, Baby," in which the singer simulates an intense
sexual encounter, taking it from heavy foreplay to wild, shrieking orgasm.
In the postcoital coda, Prince's mood turns uncharacteristically dark. He
shivers and pleads, "I'm so cold, just hold me." It's the one moment
amid all of Controversy's exhortatory slavering in which Prince glimpses
a despair that no orgasm can alleviate.
Despite all the contradictions and hyperbole in Prince's playboy philosophy,
I still find his message refreshingly relevant. As Gore Vidal wrote in The
Nation recently: "Most men, given the opportunity to have sex with
500 different people, would do so gladly. But most men are not going to be
given the opportunity by a society that wants them safely married, so that
they will be docile workers and loyal consumers."
Prince, I'm sure, would agree.
ROLLING STONE, JANUARY 21, 1982
NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS November 14, 1981
Some Day My Prince Will Come...
Prince
Controversy
Prince has an urge in him which sometimes comes out as a nightingale, sometimes
a vulgar pierrot and then occasionally just a babyish gurgle. Here is a minstrel
who sings of his bedtime succour - a modern prince, mark you, and may have
the captives seduced, only to dash the accomplishment away; straddled o'er
an earthquake of rocky showtime guff and peacock proud of Mr Reagan to boot.
I'm still frightened of Prince allured by the promise, alarmed by the chintzy
crud of his live routine, partially assuaged by this new "Controversy".
Prince's value continues to lie in the merger he affects, implicit rather
than explicit, of categories usually taken for granted as token dualities
(love/sex, rock/soul) or as irreconcilable opposites (pleasure/politic, gaiety/acuity).
We will get nowhere quickly searching Prince's practice for principles of
judgement: he is not uniformly lovable or loyal.
A Christian God. A God-fearing Country. The Original "funk" -
Sex. Triplets which Prince plays with during the course of Controversy-inconsistently,
with an often absured nobility of purpose. Prince obviously does not regard
Sex, Politics and Popular Music as perverse bed (wherever) mates: they are
alignable aspects of Being. The screwiest thin about "Controversy" is
the dispersed division between rosy-cheeked humanist and slutty confessional;
the Moral Majority will nog know whether to fete or castrate this hammy spritualist.
Prince refuses the Outlaw part offered him, detects nothing unnatural in
his private or public affairs: his sex, his singing, are accomplices of Law
and Order (in a symbolic sense) rather than crimes against it. To regard
himseld as indecent, a kink, devious - this would render the pleasure of
his deeds a cerebral rather than sensual one, the vicarous intellectual pleasure
of the away-day Outsider (a popular pose amongst rock'n'rollers both nimble
and thick) thinking he is engaged in forbidden activities. Prince beleives
- in some kind of God, in the onslaught of a universal love. Or is there
a gag in his mouth?
To put it bluntly: Prince's prick is the source of his pride, the guarantee
of his love. The fissures of the flesh intrude upon even his more visionary
Political plateaux. There can be no knowledge, Prince avers, without bodies
set free from the bondage of repressive persuasions. Or, as the irresistibly
titled "Sexuality" puts it: "Sexuality is all I ever need?
Sexuality I'm gonna let my body be free."
Of course it is not wise to take this sort of stuff too literally; does
a "freed" body come that simply? Perhaps by necessity of the (word)
processes of his chosen medium, any transference of his political views into
reord will condense the heterogeneity of Prince into an easy entertainment,
a potted provocation, little more than a glib fib. Thus transcribed he conspires
or compares with Reagan and the Moral majority not insofar as anyone is "left" of "right" of
the impossible centre, but because their politics are all somewhere over
a rainbow..... "People call me rude/I wish we all were rude/ I wish
there was no black and white/ I wish there were no rules". ("Controversy").
When Prince gets "explicit" about earthly as opposed to earthy
powers, it's no less ambiguous: a kind of polymorphous perversion of policital
life. In "Ronnie, Talk To Russia" he seems to be putting the blame
squarely on those nasty Reds and urging Ronnie to play a conciliatory Audie
Murphy type, pipe of peace 'n' all that, complete with the sort of advice
the barrom whore with a heart of gold (sic) might give here avenging sheriff: "Ronnie,
if you're dead before I get to meet you/Don't say I didn't warn you."
Prince' work ethic ("Let's Work") has got more to do with the
subject viewed exclusively as sex machine than with the New Protestantism
and in "Annie Christian" he seems to be (that phrase again) shifting
the blame back to the harbingers of New Amerika; whatever, the track in question
is eerie, incorrigibly subjectieve and very funny (the punchlines have a
lot in common with Defunkt: "Everybody say 'electric chair' - ELECTRIC
CHAIR!!!!!"
Maybe Prince is as utterly wet and naive as it all seems to unfortunately
hint. He simply can't understand what all the fuss is about! Prince himself
doetn't appear to be in any pain over his manifold contradictions. He doesn't
even present them as such: they are present. His polemic comes in pouts rather
than shouts, spouts or spurts.... and perhaps he secretly realises that,
of course, contradiction is ultimately more intensely "thought provoking" than
bald, blank policy statement can ever be. So, so. 'Controversy' is packaged
as a collection of quibbles and queries unified under a vagueley 'conceptual'
sign. And I like it. I obsessively like two of the eight inclusions ('Do
Me, Baby' and 'Annie Christian') and all in all it's a more elaborately and
easily realised music than last year's 'Dirty Mind'. Prince can get geally
expansive with his voice (how the abstract gospel intro shifts into a sexy
smoky falsetto stutter in 'Private Joy') and his contructieve appliance of
synth techniques assures that the sheer aesthetic and structural power of
the music, thud and skim, shudder and tightening, has as much in common with
Kraftwerk as with the more abvious Hendrix and harmony funk lineage.
Sex is his shrine, and that's where Prince's confusing charm works best. "Do
me, Baby' recalls the likes of imagination in its slippery slipstream, but
is so much better. Prince comes complete with a dischord, jettisoning the
eleborate arrangement and shivering in a silent afterglow. It's Smokey Robinson
singing aobscene moonbeams, lust imploring love, and the strains on the pillow
aren't the tracks of our tears.
Does he want to do much more than put his tongue in our cheek? I'm not sure
that I'd vote for him if he did. Prince is ultimately conservative, but temporarily
valorous; that's funk?
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