What is Prince’s most controversial song?
Prince was never one to shy away from controversy. This can hardly be a surprise when you look at the people who inspired his sound and image. His music is deeply rooted in rock ‘n’ roll, a genre born out of rebellion. Additionally, his image was based on some of the funk and social artists who blurred the lines between genres and created head-turning art.
With the combination of the above, Prince was always going to be a symbol of controversy. Rather than dance around the topic a little, he wholly embraced it, both in his image, marketing and the music that he made. This was met with the disdain of people around the world, who went to great lengths to stop people from listening to his music.
Questlove was one of these kids, whose parents went to great lengths to destroy his copy of 1999 because they weren’t fans of the themes or imagery used in the record. He constantly tried to re-purchase and hide the record, but to no avail.
“My mom found the record and threw it away. Winter came. I shovelled snow until I had enough money to buy it a second time. That one went into the garbage, too,” he said, “There was a third record that just vanished without a trace and a fourth that got broken over my father’s knee. That fourth infraction came accompanied by a month of punishment. A little while after that, I got smarter, meaning sneakier. I found a friend to make me cassettes of Prince’s albums.”
Of course, Prince released a number of songs that could be seen as controversial, but one stands out as his worst. This is his 1980 release, ‘Head’, which took his sexual nature to a whole new level. The entire album that he released, Dirty Mind, was incredibly explicit, but ‘Head’ was the worst of them all (yes, the song is about exactly what you think it is).
The song has a story attached to it, which Prince takes us through during it. It begins with him meeting a young bride on the way to her wedding. Rather than congratulating her, he instead manages to convince her to leave her partner at the altar and go with him to have what he promises to be great oral sex. The woman agrees to go with him, and they end up doing the deed.
This was seen as controversial for a couple of reasons. It wasn’t just the fact that it was so explicit, even though it was, but it was the fact he was essentially breaking up a marriage in a song. People already thought he was a musician with no shame, and this song just cemented it. The fact that not only was he willing to write openly about having sex with someone but that he was happy to break up a marriage in the process was enough that people had no interest in listening to it. There are a number of other Prince songs that could be seen as deeply controversial, but this is one of the most disliked.
