‘Partyup’: Prince’s “pretty basic” protest anthem
Prince was no stranger to protest songs. Throughout his career, the musician regularly turned his pen to real world issues of race, sexuality, violence and inequality. While standing as one of the most singular and supremely talented musicians in history, Prince balanced catchiness and rich meaning perfectly.
Only Prince could turn a protest song into a party. Refusing to relegate serious or real-world topics to sad, slow songs, he never believed that heavy topics requested a dull soundtrack. Finding a way to make the subject of politics as catchy and exciting as any of his other hits, ‘Partyup’ stands as the finest example.
“We don’t give a damn / We just want to jam, party up,” Prince declares in the opening lines of his 1980 track. Sitting on the Dirty Mind album, the finale number was Prince’s take on the politics of the time. The meaning is simple: “Fighting war is such a fucking bore.”
Though he rarely discussed the meaning behind his tunes, Prince spoke to NME about ‘Partyup’ in 1981. Amidst the tumultuous societal atmosphere that littered the previous decade and seemed set to become an unwelcomed backdrop for years to come, the musician was moved to write about it. “I was in a lot of different situations when I was coming up to make that record,” he said. “A lot of anger came up through the songs. It was kind of a rough time. There were a few anti-draft demonstrations going or that I was involved in that spurred me to write ‘Partyup.’”
“I just seem to read about a lot of politicians who’re all going to die soon, and I guess they want to go out heavy, because they’re prepared to make a few mistakes and end up starting a war that they don’t have to go out and fight,” he continued. “I just think the people should have a little more to say in some of these foreign matters. I don’t want to have to go out and die for their mistakes.”
While being an anti-war song through and through, Prince came at it from a different approach than the folk icons of the 1960s and ’70s. Rather than delivering a heavy, pessimistic number on the issues going on in the world or the multitude of reasons why politicians should push for peace, Prince instead gave the people a track to move to. Turning the party into a protest, he harnessed the power of a good time for a good cause.
“Really, that song is just about people who’d rather have a good time than go and shoot up one another,” he said of the song, “That’s all – it’s pretty basic.”
‘Partyup’ and its engagement with politics seemed to open Prince up to a whole new world of lyricism. On his next album, Controversy, in 1981, the topic would be covered extensively in tracks like ‘Annie Christian’ or the outright protest track ‘Ronnie, Talk To Russian’. In future tracks like ‘Sign O’ The Times’, ‘America’ and ‘We March’, the musician tackled increasingly sensitive subject matters like the AIDS crisis and enduring inequality.
An artist who was never afraid to use his voice for good, he knew that music held real power and that a party could always be a protest.
