Tag: Controversy

Controversy (1981)
André Cymone says he wrote Do Me, Baby and put a version to tape in 1979, during a recording session with Pepe Willie who backs up his claim. Without hearing this early version it’s impossible to know how much Prince took (if any) for his Do Me, Baby but regardless of origin it’s a Prince song through and through – his ur-ballad that spawned a dozen sequels and marked the arrival of the scream. There were screams pre-Controversy but buried low in the mix and easily missed. Sexuality is the first track that brings his cries to the fore but they’re more like James Brown vocal stabs – warm-up exercises for The Unleashing that occurs next. When Do Me Baby starts, anybody familiar with Prince’s later output knows where it’s heading, but back then there were no clues to the tumult ahead. The first sign you get is at 2:45 where he holds a note and feels the power surge within. Thirty seconds later he takes practice swings at an “ooooh”, each one increasing in intensity. Then at 3:54 comes the first bona fide scream. It’s his “power of Grayskull” moment. What starts out as the word “yeah” ends as a sonic boom of primal pain and desire. At 4:18 he gives it another go – all that he’s got – and it breaks both him and the song. The final three minutes are spent shivering and asking for help. It wipes him out but there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. He’s now able to break the sound barrier of anguish at will and just past the halfway point on the album’s next track he’s ready to go again.

Controversy (1981)
Following a headliner is always tricky. When an album puts its best foot forward on track 1 should the following track step off and allow a less lofty peak to build? Or is it better to grab that momentum and ride the coattails in a glow of reflected glory? Sexuality chooses the latter and starts with the jolt of a licked battery. This energy can only last so long though and two-thirds of the way in there’s nothing left in the tank. The synths have nowhere to go and the lyrics become a live reading of a teen activist’s button badges. Like most attempted revolutions it peters out with a whimper but for two and a half minutes Sexuality is a battle cry for a sexually-liberated future. Uptown with less clothes. Two decades later Prince would change the lyrics and rename the track Spirituality In live performances. He also appropriated the chorus chant for his religious song Rainbow Children. As his spiritual views became more orthodox I imagine he felt he had to airbrush out his youthful depiction of the Second Coming as an orgy. Luckily it wasn’t possible to alter his back catalogue too otherwise he’d have to change the album title to No Longer Controversial.

Controversy (1981)
On the surface Private Joy isn’t a huge departure from anything found on the previous two albums; a lighthearted synth-pop song full of sunshine, baked in the mould of Uptown or I Feel For You. But if you look closer Prince has a whole new toolkit at his disposal. Firstly there’s the trademarked, anguished scream, a calling card that’s used all over Controversy and kept in the bag ever since. Then there’s the angsty guitar feedback that drenches the final minute; a subterranean howl later lifted wholesale for Orgasm on the Come album. Also introduced is Prince’s first use of the Linn drum, the machine that subsequently went on to power the majority of his 80s’ output. And finally there’s the dual interpretative nature of the lyrics which either see Prince being possessive over a girlfriend or singing a masturbatory ode to his penis. Choose your own adventure. If you take the high road then you get to speculate who Valentino is, the character also referenced in Manic Monday (and possibly inspired by the actor Rudolph Valentino). If you go the low road the only option is to assume it’s the name Prince gives to his Little Prince. I’m inclined to tread the second path and I can only send my sincere apologies to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Controversy (1981)
A sound so fun and uniquely Prince that he would attempt to recreate it several times over the next few years. But only Delirious would come close to bettering the neo-rockabilly lunacy of Jack U Off. It was the first live band recording on a Prince album and the first to utilise his trademark Princebonics, with his spelling of ‘U’. When he performed it to 94,000 Rolling Stones fans as part of a warm-up set in 1981 they couldn’t stomach this assault on their rigid, conservative tastes and booed him off stage. But if your notion of rock’n’roll excludes a gender-flipping hand-job singalong performed by a black man in bikini briefs then you’re doing it wrong. This is weapon-grade Little Richard and should always be deployed in areas of high pretension.

Controversy (1981)
Prince’s political songs (Annie Christian, Sign O’ The Times…) are usually restrained, calculated affairs, coldly spoken more than sung. However Ronnie, Talk to Russia is a rockabilly nursery rhyme with gunfire and dated Cold War lyrics which thankfully explodes in a mushroom cloud before it can take the Controversy album down with it. You have to admire its chutzpah. It flies in through an open window, crashes about, upsetting furniture and decorum and just as suddenly defenestrates itself not two minutes later in a flurry of feathers and feedback. It’s the wild excitement of “There’s a dog in the playground!” There’s a whale in the Thames! A disruption that’s felt long after side two finishes, leaving you with a feeling of “what just happened?” which is an impressive achievement on an album that also features the flippant bustle of Jack U Off.