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.
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