Being a *secret* Prince fan in the 80s

I'm from Detroit. Everyone loved Prince here.

 

I was in my senior year in high school when I first saw a Prince video on late night TV. He was dressed in the bikini bottom outfit, which turned me off right away. However, that wasn't the reason I didn't care for Prince in the beginning, the reason I didn't care for Prince at that time was because I didn't like his music. It just wasn't what I was listening to at the time, which was primarily hard rock. I like the song 'Little Red Corvette', but I didn't care for the rest of the 1999 album. So along comes the album Purple Rain, and the first single I heard was 'When Doves Cry'. I liked WDC a lot, but the next single 'Let's Go Crazy' I didn't like at all. I ended up buying the albun Purple Rain, and that is about as far as I ever went with Prince, or probably ever will go.

 

*secret* ???

 

I grew up in Minneapolis in the 80's. I don't think it would have been UNCOOL to be a Prince fan, but it wasn't exactly cool either, at least with the people I was hanging out with. In retrospect, I wish I had embraced the possibilities at that time (though as I was under 18, there were much fewer opportunities open to me than the older fans enjoyed).

 

I've been trying to listen to this, there's seems to be some very interesting stuff in it, but I can't get it to play properly, it keeps going silent after a while (at different points), and there's no way to scroll through the program if you restart, you have to listen from the beginning...

 

In case anyone is interested, I solved the problem by finding it on Mixcloud: Nothing Compares 2 U- A Celebration Of The Life And Music Of Prince

 

I got a little bit of flack from some of the self-conscious "popular kids" but the actual non-poser cool kids knew what was up. I certainly never hid it. This was high school. But I do understand the OP.

 

I was born in '81, so I wasn't there at the time...but there's a lot of stuff I love that I'm pretty sure I would've either had to enjoy in secret, or just dismissed on principle at the time. Like, if I'd been a kid in 1983, I don't know if I would've been allowed to love both Iron Maiden and Duran Duran. I'm not sure where Prince would've fit in on this spectrum, but I definitely understand the notion of having to keep certain things to yourself at a young age, because, well, kids are @#$holes to each other.

 

My friends and I were all into classic rock in the 80s. I think the reason most people in the 80s had a bad attitude about contemporary R&B was that it was too much like disco. It was dance club music. In the late 70s, the whole disco phenomenon was everywhere, and it was painful. 99% of disco fans were women & girls. It was like if N sync had been ubiquitous in the 90s. In the blockbuster movies, all over the radio, piped-in music, etc. I loved Prince after I started to broaden my musical horizons. He was a brilliant musician, composer, and showman

 

I can understand some fans hesitating in buying the Lovesexy album due to the cover.

I became a fan late (1996). I think like a lot of people once I became a fan I quickly became obsessed. I was never ashamed but I do recall one odd incident. When I (finally!) received the Crystal Ball set it included a t-shirt which I proudly started wearing to school. I wore it a few times before anyone noticed/commented on it. When they finally did I heard "is that Prince?!?" and they started singing "My Name Is Prince" at me in a derisive fashion. I always thought it was strange that they knew and sang that particular song as it wasn't a big hit.

 

Prince just wasn't my thing for much of the 80's. A group that I hung out with were really into all of that. Purple Rain was a big deal. But I was more into "new wave" 80's bands, different types of artists (i.e. Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Sting, Joe Jackson, etc.), and a bunch of other more traditional rock bands and artists.

Around '88 I had my first good listen to 1999. Yeah, I realized I was missing out on something. Lovesexy had just come out, so I heard a lot of that too. By the early 90's I started to pick up his stuff, both on LP and CD.

 

No.

 

I'm a HUGE Prince fan. Funny part is when PR was released my sister was a big fan. So I kinda distanced myself from it, but to be fair I was listening to The Blasters, Los Lobos, The Pretenders, English Beat and The Cars!
When i heard Raspberry Beret I was impressed but still did not run out and purchase that album. This all changed in 1987 when I read the review of Sign o The Times in RS. I decided to take a chance on the double
cd set which at that time was very expensive, I think it was over $20.
Once I played SOTT it never left my cd player and is still my fave Prince and maybe my fave album of all time. After that i went in deep by the time 93-95 came around that is all i spent my money on, Prince boots.
I had a source from Chicago that would call me at my business during photo shoots and play me snippets of new boots. I crack up thinking about it, I had clients on the set and I am up in my loft listening on the phone and whispering yea , yea I'll take it.
Funny part is once Sign O The Times came and went I was the huge fan and my sister had moved on. She never listened to Prince again.

 

I was at a summer camp at the age of 10 and a bunch of older boys & girls (how cool was that) asked me if I did like Prince. The When Doves Cry video was in heavy MTV rotation and I thought the man was simply untouchable. My undisputable gestures of admiration were followed by a collective vomit simulation by the whole crowd.
Coming to think about it, it was mostly the boys that tried to look macho through that anti Prince attitude. They were jealous of that ladies laying machine alien.

 

Have you ever heard the hit single "Why You Wanna Treat me So Bad", or "Bambi" from his second album released in 1979? How about "Ronnie Talk To Russia" from the "Controversy" album? I was on board for that second album, and I was delighted that he wasn't just a run-of-the-mill R&B artist. And that "Dirty Mind" album? That was very rock, with it's defiant nature. Of course, there were a lot of males who just couldn't get past his wearing bikini briefs on stage. They thought he was gay. This was the early 80s, after all.

Prince made it clear from the very beginning that he would not be tied down to one musical style. It was part of his initial negotiations with Warner Brothers.

Don't stop at "Purple Rain"! There's a lot of his work for rockers to get into.

 

Funny how self-identification and self-image play an ever bigger role than peer pressure in what we like and listen to.

 

My cousin Noe gave me the entire Prince discography when I was 13. He was in a Prince cover band in high school.

 

The standard CDs sound decent to my ears.

 

Funny you should say that, because they may be my 2 favorite acts ever (or at least in the top 5, depending on the day )

 

They can be better- I was listening to "SOTT" and "1999" recently, and think a good sensitive engineer could remaster these for more clarity and more bottom end. And Steven Wilson once said that "Sign" would be one of his choice projects to remix in 5.1

 

This reminds me so much of something I heard Scott Poulson-Bryant, who was then a music critic for Vibe once say : namely , that when you're younger, you identify with "your" music as part of you, as something that defines you. As you get older, people start to appreciate music for the sheer art of it, even if you don't have say, a cultural connection to it

 

I bought Dirty Mind in high school at a local Sam Goody's and the cover image and content of that record was certainly the most "out there" thing I had brought home at that point. I only listened to it when no one else was home. But I really loved the sound of that album. Made 1999 seem tame when it arrived.

 

I'm on board with this sentiment. I didn't hide the fact that I enjoyed Prince' music, but I didn't talk about it much. My peer group would've still been my peer group had they known, but they certainly would've ribbed me a little. I also kept my love of The Cure silent for the same reason.

 

Way back in '82, I began slowly veering away from pop music after discovering SRV which then lead me onto electric blues, blues rock and so on. However, I always enjoyed listening to Prince, just never got around to buying any of his albums during his heyday.

 

I was 12 when Purple Rain came out, the summer before I entered middle school. I remember catching a lot of grief from classmates for liking Prince. Most of my more unenlightened peers assumed that he was "gay" and that I must be "gay" by association for liking him. I don't recall it particularly stopping me from admitting I was a fan, though.