The album is notable for Prince's increasing reliance on rock music elements, high register vocals, sexually explicit lyrical themes and an androgynous image.
A fusion of funk, new wave, R&B and dance, Dirty Mind also contains more rock-oriented beats than Prince's previous albums,[1] as well as elements of punk rock on the track "Sister".
[1] Walters notes that the song's descending key changes mixed with ascending church organ chords are "a particularly Prince-like juxtaposition that offers a peek-a-boo glimpse into the convolutions—sexual and otherwise—of his psyche.
[9] "Gotta Broken Heart Again", a minimalistic ballad featuring "effortless falsetto", "breezy piano",[9] and "soulful crooning",[1] forecasts Prince's work on his 1986 album Parade.
[7] "Uptown", another song featuring a heavy disco beat,[10] is billed by Partridge as a "utopian funk-rock anthem [...] about racial and sexual tolerance", melding the styles of Kool & the Gang and the Clash.
[9] Walters hailed it as being "among the most daring R&B radio hits of the '80s", due to its lyrical themes about "how homophobia constricts even heterosexuals":[10] While minding his own business, a passing hottie asks him point blank, "Are you gay?"
[7] Walters stated that the song "celebrates incest like the rest of the record toys with sexual identity; it's blatantly performative", and felt that the music, with its Ramones-like guitars and constantly changing time signatures, echoed the unstable nature of the lyrics.
[12] Day has stated that the original track he recorded, consisting of only bass and drums, was "a lot slower and funkier", and that he was unhappy with the funk-rock direction in which Prince ultimately took the song.
"[7] Lyrically, the song finds Prince "furious [...] at war",[11] inspired by then-President Jimmy Carter's 1980 reinstatement of military draft registration, and features a "'60s-worthy closing chant".
[19] According to the writer Simon Reynolds, the album's "rave reception [...] saw rock critics anointing [Prince] as the genre-crossing, gender-bending, races-uniting saviour of modern music".
"[21] Ken Tucker of Rolling Stone wrote that the album finds Prince shifting from the "doe-eyed romantic" of his first two records to a "liberating lewdness" which "jolts with the unsettling tension that arises from rubbing complex erotic wordplay against clean, simple melodies", all along an "electric surface".
Tucker remarked on how Prince casually delivers lyrics with a "graceful quaver" and "exhilarating breathlessness", combining "the sweet romanticism of Smokey Robinson" and "the powerful vulgate poetry of Richard Pryor".
[17] Writing that same month in The Village Voice, Robert Christgau found the music's "metallic textures and simple drum patterns" comparable to both Funkadelic and the Rolling Stones, while acknowledging Prince as being in the generally shy-mannered "love-man" tradition because of his falsetto singing, but ultimately distinct in his "aggressively, audaciously erotic" character: "I'm talking about your basic fuckbook fantasies—the kid sleeps with his sister and digs it, sleeps with his girlfriend's boyfriend and doesn't, and stops a wedding by gamahuching the bride on her way to church.
[2] Walters deemed it Prince's "first fully actualized album" and "an unrelenting dance party that pointedly invited New Wavers to boogie down alongside funk bunnies and dancefloor fashionistas.
[7] Partridge called the album an "absolute essential — an eight-song, 30-minute glimpse into the mind of a thong-rocking pacifist with some interesting ideas about marriage and sibling relations", and added that it "benefits from its complete lack of outside perspective.
It was the first album on which he successfully synthesized the rock and soul he had grown up on into a vibrant, strikingly original sound, at the same time turning his own sexuality and flamboyance into a clear-cut style and stance.
"[10] In Christgau's opinion, Prince's impact as a "commercially viable" yet "visionary" artist with the album was comparable to John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix.