Prince
Dirty Mind
Over a music career that has lasted over 40 years the late Prince sold an impressive 150 million albums. In doing so, he has become a household name all around the globe. He has also become a very complex musician to write about because of the strong mythology behind him as an artist. Much like the late Freddy Mercury, he is one of only a few musicians of his generation to have achieved universally acclaimed legendary status in show business without the mindless flirting with our celebrity obsessed media. He rarely gave interviews and when he did he commonly banned the use of recording devices.
There are some weird and wonderful facts about Prince that might surprise you. He is credited for producing and playing all 27 instruments on his 1978 debut album For You. He converted to Jehovas Witness in 2001 and is an astonishingly small 5ft 2 in height. Prince is an artist who has also been extremely active on promoting artist rights over the years and in reference to a long-standing dispute with his record label Warner Brothers, he famously attended the 1995 Brit awards with ‘Slave’ written on his face which he followed up further and changed his name to a symbol.
Alongside his fantastic song-writing skills, these are just a handful of reasons why there is such a strong mythology behind Prince; there can be no doubt that this man has more than earned his stripes in the music industry.
Uptown is a track from Prince’s third album Dirty Mind released in 1980. This album was controversial due to the sexually explicit nature of many of the lyrics on the songs but it was also revolutionary. In what has come to be known as The Minneapolis Sound, a genre that Prince pioneered, Dirty Mind was an album that sounded like no other when released and has been immensely influential since. This new style of music was a fusion of Funk, Pop, Synth-Pop, Rock and New-Wave and Uptown is the perfect track to demonstrate the sound of it. Everything about this song is smooth, sexy and uplifting.
There are some weird and wonderful facts about Prince that might surprise you. He is credited for producing and playing all 27 instruments on his 1978 debut album For You. He converted to Jehovas Witness in 2001 and is an astonishingly small 5ft 2 in height. Prince is an artist who has also been extremely active on promoting artist rights over the years and in reference to a long-standing dispute with his record label Warner Brothers, he famously attended the 1995 Brit awards with ‘Slave’ written on his face which he followed up further and changed his name to a symbol.
Alongside his fantastic song-writing skills, these are just a handful of reasons why there is such a strong mythology behind Prince; there can be no doubt that this man has more than earned his stripes in the music industry.
Uptown is a track from Prince’s third album Dirty Mind released in 1980. This album was controversial due to the sexually explicit nature of many of the lyrics on the songs but it was also revolutionary. In what has come to be known as The Minneapolis Sound, a genre that Prince pioneered, Dirty Mind was an album that sounded like no other when released and has been immensely influential since. This new style of music was a fusion of Funk, Pop, Synth-Pop, Rock and New-Wave and Uptown is the perfect track to demonstrate the sound of it. Everything about this song is smooth, sexy and uplifting.
