The classic album Prince accused of being too “contrived”
If there ever was an artist who was totally immune to artistic criticism, it was Prince.
Aside from the fact that the legendary songwriter boasted a near-enough flawless discography, having balanced commercial pop triumphs with ambitious artistry for multiple decades, there really wasn’t much you could say about Prince that he had not already said himself. After all, being a constantly evolving artist inevitably meant that some of his earlier work fell out of favour with him as he moved on to a new kind of sound.
This is, of course, an affliction that affects most great artists; growing to hate the music that made you popular in the first place, for how it limits your growth as an artist. Prince, to his credit, never seemed to take much notice of the wants and demands of either the music industry or his own fanbase, choosing instead to live entirely individually, creating music to suit purely his own desires. Still, that did not stop him from wincing at the thought of some of his earlier records.
In particular, Prince’s view of his sophomore record, 1979’s aptly named Prince, soured very soon after its release. Despite containing some of the guitarist’s biggest and most beloved hits, from the opening ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ to the pop mastery of ‘I Feel For You’, later repopularised by Chaka Khan, the album didn’t seem to scratch Prince’s artistic desires as well as some of his other albums.
During one 1983 interview, in fact, Prince went as far as to call his second album “pretty contrived,” sharing, “After the first record, I put myself in a hole, because I’d spent a lot of money to make it. With the second record, I wanted to remedy all that, so I just made it a ‘hit’ album.”
He added, “I usually write hits for other people, and those are the songs I throw away and don’t really care for.”
First of all, the very fact that Prince was able to rattle off hits as timeless as ‘I Feel For You’ at the drop of a hat, if only to rid himself of any debts, speaks to the seemingly endless resources of artistic talent at the songwriter’s apparent disposal.
If anybody else had created that self-titled record, it would undoubtedly stand out as a highlight within their discography – indeed, there are countless Prince fans out there who would put it among his greatest works – so the fact that he did it out of seeming necessity is bewildering.
Nevertheless, Prince seemed to view himself as getting back on track with the follow-up record, Dirty Mind, which satisfied his appetite for artistic development in ways that his self-titled album apparently did not. “Dirty Mind started off as demo tapes: they were just like songs inside that I wanted to hear,” he revealed. “So I took it to my manager and he said, ‘This is the best stuff I’ve heard in a long time. This should be your album.’”
As it turns out, arguing with Prince is not really an option, so those demos didn’t change much between that initial exchange and the final release of his third album in 1980. Although it didn’t boast the same pop power as his 1979 effort, the sheer genre fusion, spanning from old-school R&B and funk to new wave rock, was enough to make the album a crowning jewel in Prince’s discography, along with appeasing his own tastes and ambitions as an artist.
