Being born a Black woman is an unintentional revolutionary act. Not only are you set to experience a life that many believe doesn’t matter because of your skin color and the racism that comes with it, but you also have to deal with the misogyny that comes with being a woman. Specifically, a particular brand of misogyny reserved especially for Black women that combines both misogyny and racism into something called  “misogynoir.” Along with that are sexualized stereotypes that you must encounter while trying how to figure out how to express yourself as a sexual being without being exploited. This is particularly true of Black female musicians.

The first Black female musical group to gain worldwide recognition was The Supremes, coming out of Motown in the 1960s. In the 1970s there were groups like The Pointer Sisters, Sister Sledge, and The Jones Girls – all of whom were groups of siblings. By the 19880s, you began to see different representations of Black women in the groups Klymaxx, Mary Jane Girls, and of course among the first of these was Vanity 6. In the 90s, TLC challenged the notion of the female sex symbol in how they dressed and what they sang about, but by their second album, Crazy Sexy Cool, which contained a Prince cover, the group vastly changed their image and other girl groups of that era pulling from the 80s women and began crafting a new style of sexy Black women – in fact, there was an abundance of groups, mostly one-hit wonders, who followed this style as well and that style transformed a generation of young women born in the 70s and they inspired the women who came after them like Beyonce, Rihanna, and Lizzo.

A historical look at how the images of Black womanhood over time were ultimately challenged by Black female artists in the 80s.

The rise of home video pornography in the late 1970s and early 1980s created a new boom in accessibility for sexually explicit media, with a concomitant influx of porn-inspired aesthetics in mainstream media. Arguably the most enthusiastic adopter of this new aesthetic in the music world was Prince, whose famous 1979 vow to “portray pure sex” was directly inspired by the visual and thematic language of softcore–and, occasionally, hardcore–porn.

If Prince, as writer Touré has argued, was the “King of Porn Chic,” then the self-titled album he wrote and produced for Vanity 6 in 1982 was his Deep Throat (Gerald Damiano, 1972): a heterosexual male creator’s attempt to grapple with the “problem” of female sexual pleasure, with all the ideological tensions such an arrangement implies. That makes Vanity herself, by extension, Prince’s Linda Lovelace: the ambiguous sex symbol upon whom he projected his fantasies, who by the end of the decade would bitterly reject the fetishized image created for her.

This presentation will examine Vanity 6 through both the aesthetic lens of pornography and the historical context of the “porn wars” that raged among feminist scholars and in American political discourse more broadly in the 1980s–ultimately enveloping Prince, whose 1985 branding as an exemplar of “Porn Rock” by the Parents Music Resource Center would alter the trajectory of his lyrical content for the latter half of the decade. A work of aural softcore as audacious as anything in Prince’s solo catalogue, Vanity 6 embodied the complexities of power and pleasure inherent in women’s subjective relationship with porn, while pointing the way toward the “sex-positive” movement that continues to shape contemporary discourses of sexuality in media.

Although they only released one album, Vanity 6’s influence is still felt today, as artists like Beyoncé continue to incorporate the work of Vanity 6 into their performances. This presentation considers the generational impact of Vanity 6 by examining Gen Z’s assessments of Vanity 6’s self-titled album. In particular, we will explore the perspectives from enrolled students in the University of Minnesota’s “Prince, Porn, and Public Space” course. The class thinks through the intersections of music and sex culture in Minneapolis during the 1980s, and so the students’ responses—and this presentation—will pay particular attention to the place and power of race, gender, and sexuality on Vanity 6. In all, this presentation will highlight how students make meaning of Vanity 6, and how they find resonance with this groundbreaking all women’s band and their 1982 debut.

Ever since the release of The Time’s sophomore studio effort, What Time Is It? (1982), “777-9311” has repeatedly proven to be a steadfast favourite amongst both fans and critics alike. Undoubtedly one of the track’s most striking and noteworthy characteristics is the intricate and syncopated Linn LM-1 drum pattern that serves as the rhythmic bedrock upon which the entirety of “777-9311” is predominately based. However, while the technical intricacy of the track’s complex rhythm pattern has been afforded a great deal of attention in the intervening forty years, the lyrical component of “777-9311” has largely not been subject to the same degree of rigorous critical engagement. Indeed, while “777-9311” initially appears to strike the same amorous tone that lyrically characterises much of the content featured on What Time Is It? (1982), upon closer inspection, the track’s striking lyrical singularity becomes readily apparent. Furthermore, by shedding light on the singular lyrical nature of “777-9311,” we are likewise able to discern the manner in which the track’s aforementioned noteworthy Linn LM-1 drum pattern rhythmically evokes these same emotional concerns at a musical level.

The narrative of Prince as “creator” of The Time and acts such as The Family, Vanity 6, Apollonia 6, Carmen Electra, and others evokes Ovid’s “Pygmalion” myth from Metamorphoses. The artist, Pygmalion, sculpts his version of the ideal woman in ivory, falls in love, and she in turn comes to life thanks to Aphrodite’s divine intervention. This myth of creating and curating the object of one’s desires exists solely on the erasure of the “creation’s” autonomy. Prince put The Time together for myriad reasons, including the desire to have musical peers, an additional outlet for his artistic production, and some healthy competition, but this narrative ignores Morris Day’s agency. This presentation will explore the iconic style of Morris Day and the Time in the 1980s while deconstructing the myth of Prince as Pygmalion-creator of musical groups and pop stars in the purple universe.

The Time is a definitive example that we have of Prince exploring and grappling with who he is as an artist. On his early records, Prince deals with introverted subjects in which he muses to himself aloud. With The Time, Prince is externally musing about who he is by recreating himself as an entire band. Even though many believe, as retold in Dave Hill’s Prince: A Pop Life, that The Time may have been primarily founded to pay a musical debt to Morris Day, it is obvious that The Time is an alter-ego of Prince, created to hold Prince’s R&B audience while he explores other musical genres. Where Prince is introverted, abstract, and whimsical, singing about social revolution through sexuality and individuality while waiting on the Armageddon to deliver us all, The Time is extroverted, realistic, and straightforward, singing about being hip and cool and identifying with a particular race of people. Where Prince is indefinable in clothing and music styles, The Time is black. In a period when Prince is attempting to explore all of his possibilities of being a rock star, The Time allows him to stay in touch with his R&B roots, write songs about partying, chasing girls, being cool, and being in love without being trapped in the genre. Ultimately, Prince uses The Time to force America to face the misconceptions about the dimensionality of the black race.

What Did Prince Do This Week? #WDPDTW is an interactive, online, weekly book club, every Saturday at noon ET at @polishedsolid on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch to discuss what Prince did during the parallel week, beginning in 1983. It is a very, very slow read of Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions: 1983 and 1984 (Expanded Edition) by Duane Tudahl over the course of two years. Since the beginning of the year, we have been reading about the 1999 tour and songs Prince recorded while on this tour. We’ll be up to week 13 during the symposium. De Angela L. Duff and Michael Dean will co-host the book club in-person from the symposium.

While we all know Jill Jones performs the role of the “Lady Cab Driver” in the song, I would like to reflect on this character—who she is, what else she might say—in order to get at the question of 1999 and its (if we can coin such a term) “working-class-ness.” Prince’s music spoke to, for, and about the Black working class from the very beginning, but 1999 advances the story by depicting an anxious struggle for liberation in a world where movement is restricted, and existence is under threat of annihilation. The industrial automation and the grind of capitalism evoked by the Linn LM-1 drum machine become the rhythms which turn discipline into pleasure on a computer-age dance floor; “movement” starts to take different forms: bodily, geographical (“carceral” vs. “abolition” geographies, scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore might argue), and political. In this presentation, we will “read” 1999 through the lenses of historical context, racial capitalism, and intersectionality in order to illuminate the album’s class dynamics.

In a February 1981 Rolling Stone feature, “Will the Little Girls Understand”, Bill Adler writes, “Prince may be the unlikeliest rock star, black or white, in recent memory.” But what led Adler and his journalistic peers to continually refer to Prince’s music as “rock” when his biggest accomplishment before “Little Red Corvette” was a “soul” hit called “I Wanna Be Your Lover”?

Focusing on Prince’s use of lead guitarist Dez Dickerson, this presentation will examine the “bridges” that Prince used to connect his music to listeners outside his core audience group. It will demonstrate how these bridges continue to be used to inform and present Black American music in popular culture. And it will ask, what if Dez stayed in The Revolution during the Purple Rain era?

This analysis reviews the 1999 Super Deluxe Edition box set released in 2019 in the context of the original 1982 double album release and in relation to established archival reissue norms. The presentation examines the visual representation and the audio compilation, reviewing several decisions related to the repetition, inclusion, or exclusion of Prince’s recorded work from this era.