Why Prince’s Self-Titled Second Album Is A Post-Disco Classic

Praised by Rolling Stone for giving the world “the most thrilling R&B falsetto since Smokey Robinson”, and later hailed by hip-hop producer Timbaland as “one of the most innovative songs ever released”, I Wanna Be Your Lover was a snappy introduction to Prince’s rapidly developing skills: its live 4/4 drums keep it fixed firmly on the dancefloor, but its squelchy synth lines and chicken-scratch guitar, delivered with the lightest of touches, pull the song into the post-disco world of late-70s R&B, signposting the major leaps Prince would make on his first album of the following decade, 1980’s Dirty Mind.

As if continuing the story, the second cut on the album, Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?, again finds Prince on the back foot, though it’s his guitar prowess he now flexes, giving the song a muscular heft that still holds its own among the best Prince songs while also making good on its creator’s ambitions to target the white rock market. Elsewhere on the album, Bambi finds Prince’s nascent rock god in full flow, firing out flurries of riffs that offer early evidence he would develop into one of the best guitarists of all time.

“I think we just saw the Second Coming”

These telling excursions aside, Prince’s self-titled second album is, in the main, set in the R&B mould – albeit one which reflected how the club market was changing right beneath its scenesters’ platform-booted feet. The songs With You and Still Waiting offer comfortable slow-dance moments for those under-the-mirrorball smooches, but it’s on the record’s most upbeat tracks that Prince starts to feel his way towards the future. Clocking in at a taut four minutes – but also given a nine-minute 12” mix that would make No.3 on Billboard’s Disco 100 – Sexy Dancer sits in confidently lustful support of Prince’s claim, to Right On! magazine, that his second record was “a lot nastier” than his first. With an arrangement as sparse as I Wanna Be Your Lover’s, it also proves that Prince was beginning to make an art of building simple grooves which – like the lover in the previous single – he could turn inside out forever but still keep fresh with just the simplest of elements.

Meanwhile, I Feel For You is a three-minute gem that, remarkably, wasn’t lifted for single release under Prince’s name, but which Chaka Khan would turn into the hit it always deserved to be, just as Prince was soaring to new charts heights with the Purple Rain album. Riding the sort of synth lines which would become central to Dirty Mind’s new-wave punk-funk hybrid, it was also the type of song that Rolling Stone had in mind when, reviewing the album, they noted that “the simplicity of Prince’s words, hooks and rhythms are pure pop”.

Released on 19 October 1979, Prince’s self-titled second album peaked just outside the Top 20 in Billboard’s Top LPs & Tapes chart but went all the way to No.3 on the magazine’s Soul LPs chart. Befitting the confidence with which he constructed the album, Prince also set out on his first tour, throughout late 1979 and early 1980. It was a just reward for an artist whose label, Warner Bros, had previously deemed too inexperienced to hit the road following the release of his debut. Now, however, less than a year later, it was a very different story. As former Warners exec Marylou Badeaux recalled for Lives Of The Musicians: Prince, a showcase for the label left her astounded: “I couldn’t even sleep that night. I said, ‘Oh my god. I think we just saw the Second Coming.”

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