Happy Anniversary: Prince, Controversy

33 years ago today, the artist who was then known as Prince – you know, before he went on to become the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and, eventually, went back to being Prince again – released an album with an album destined to court the very thing cited in its title…because, really, if you’re going to close your album with a song called “Jack U Off,” you can’t really expect to find full-fledged mainstream acceptance, now, can you?

Prince released no less than four singles from Controversy, starting with the title track, which earned him a #3 R&B hit, his third top-5 single on that particular chart (it also hit #70 on the pop charts, just so you know), and the album’s second single, “Let’s Work,” was a #9 R&B hit. Sadly, neither of the two subsequent singles, “Do Me, Baby” or “Sexuality,” managed to make any sort of chart impact, but if that disappointed Prince, one presume that he managed to shrug off his disappointment by the time his next album rolled around: 1999 gave him all of the success he’d been after from the beginning.

When Stephen Holden reviewed Controversy in Rolling Stone, he wrote, “Prince's first three records were so erotically self-absorbed that they suggested the reveries of a licentious young libertine. On Controversy, that libertine proclaims unfettered sexuality as the fundamental condition of a new, more loving society than the bellicose, over-technologized America of Ronald Reagan. In taking on social issues, the artist assumes his place in the pantheon of Sly Stone inspired Utopian funksters like Rick James and George Clinton.” Boy, does that sound pretentious…and yet you look back and consider the truth of the statement, and somehow it doesn’t come across as the least bit ridiculous. That’s Prince for you.