People Call Me Rude

It was thirty years ago today that Controversy by Prince was released.

We’ll come back to that.

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Rhythm and Blues – R’nB – music had been through several phases over the decades, intertwining with “white” pop music on and off (on in the fifties through the late sixties, off in the seventies).

And in about 1990 it went back to “off”, and stayed there.

But for a brief stretch of time – part of a decade, really – R’nB and rock and roll and white pop co-mingled in a dizzying melange of creativity.

And after about 1990, black and white music split again, never again to meet.

So for about five years in the eighties, black and white music intersected and overlapped again – rock, R’nB and everything in between…

…when “everything in between” included everything that was going on in the early eighties – twitchy synth-pop, the fragments of punk, the beginnings of rap, and of course classic rhythm and blues.

And Controversy covered it all.

It started with the title cut, a slinky funk rave-up:

As usual, Prince recorded almost all the instruments –  but the beginnings of the “Revolution”, one of the great funk bands and one of the great rock and roll bands, were starting to coalesce; Bobby Z Rivkin, Lisa Coleman, Brown Mark, Dez Dickerson and Matt Fink (on drums, keys, bass, guitar and keys, respectively) all turned up on Controversy.

And while the previous couple of Prince albums – Dirty Mind and Prince before that – had seen some experimenting, Prince was starting to cover a lot of stylistic turf.  It included his first shot at politics…

…the groaningly-simplistic gospel-via-synth-pop “Ronnie Talk To Russia”, to perhaps the greatest late-night slow-dance grind ever…

…”Do Me Baby”.

I’m covering Controversy party because it’s a great album – and mainly because it sets up the burst of untramelled creativity Prince launched in about a year that’d lead to one of the most amazing decades a single artist has ever had in the pop music era.

So stay tuned.

4 thoughts on “People Call Me Rude

  1. Mitch, thanks for the clips. I needed that.

    I was a huge Prince fan, and still admire his work, though some of his later stuff escapes me. I raised my kids for 13 years within a mile of Paisley Park and Prince’s home. I once slept outside on a frosty November night for tickets to the Purple Rain tour. I wound up going to the concert two days in a row–one on Christmas Eve. I couldn’t hear anything but the ringing in my own ears at our family celebration later that evening. I was in heaven.

    We took both of our kids to his concert in about the early 2000’s (the name of the tour escapes me, but he was giving away free CDs to every ticket holder.) Just another class in the stellar musical education we tried to build for our children, which also included two Yes concerts at the State Theater, one with Rick Wakeman, one without. Prince was stellar that night, as always.

    Prince is, and always will be a true genius and a unique find. One of my favorite guitar performances of his is when he was inducted into the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame the same year they inducted George Harrison. At the end he, Harrison’s son (Harrison was dead by then) and some true guitar heroes played an extended jam of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Fantastic.

    Anyway, I do run on. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

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