We didn’t grow up with a lot of “black” music in North Dakota. Part of it was that North Dakota is, well, about the whitest place in America. It was even moreso back in 1980.
So one just didn’t run across a lot of R and B in North Dakota back then.
Still, every once in a while you’d get little whiffs of it. Kids from the college would bring music from other parts of the country. Something like R and B would get on the radio once in a while.
And every once in a while, something would turn things upside down.
30 years ago today Prince’s Dirty Mind was released. And it probably wasn’t until the next year, when I was at college, that I actually heard it. But it changed everything.
I’ve written in the past – the period from about 1980 through about 1986 was one of the best in pop music history precisely because the traditional racial barriers in pop music dissolved; it was a stretch of time when white hard rock got spun by street-corner DJs into beats for rappers; where white musicians pillaged R and B for influences, and black guys played rock and roll…
…and nobody blurred music’s traditional distinctions better than Prince. 22 years old when Dirty Mind came out, it was a grab bag of things; one of the better rock and roll records of the year (pardon the atrocious dropouts in the video below) – like any “new wave” record of the era, but with soul…:
…while also doing R ‘n B in the same tradition as, say, Sly Stone, but accessible, but still very, very R’nB…
… while still turning on the funk, by way of showing that he did, in fact have…
…the album’s eponymous dirty mind.
28 years before Barack Obama’s fans started talking about “post-racial society”, Prince’s band was the real thing. Actually, the album featured Prince playing every single instrument – but the touring band, on a tour that really put Prince on the map as a performer, included Bobby “Z” Rivkin on drums, Matt Fink and Lisa Coleman on keys, and Andre Cymone and Dez Dickerson on bass and guitar, respectively.
I’m trying to picture that happening today; a great, half-white funk band; a great half-black rock and roll group; a group that just plain makes it all work, and does it memorably.
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