Album dossier / 1980

Dirty Mind

Prince · Funk/New Wave

Recorded in a makeshift 16-track studio in the basement of his home on Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota, Dirty Mind was largely written on tour while Prince and his band opened for Rick James, then tracked in May-June 1980 with Prince engineering under the pseudonym Jamie Starr and playing nearly every instrument himself. Deliberately raw and unpolished -- several tracks are essentially souped-up demos -- the album fused funk, new wave, punk and R&B with sexually explicit lyrics and an androgynous image that critics later credited with reshaping urban black music's direction in the early '80s. Though it peaked at only #45 on the Billboard 200, it is now retrospectively ranked by Pitchfork, Slant, Rolling Stone and NME among the greatest albums of the decade.