Simply referring to Prince as “prolific” doesn’t add anything to his well-established storyline. At 24, Prince had already released four solo albums and co-written, produced, and played nearly all the instruments for The Time‘s 1981 self-titled debut. It would be just a few weeks before another Time album, What Time Is It?, would be released and two months before he would release his 5th album, 1999. Nevertheless, a musician with so many musical ideas churning around in his head that he needs to create several pseudonyms and side projects to ensure they are all heard would seldom be satisfied creatively.
Denise Matthews, aka Vanity, Brenda Bennett, and Susan Moonsie entered the Purple One’s orbit as he pondered his next side project. These three women would be dubbed Vanity 6 by Prince. Prince had the idea for the band and was the primary creative force behind it, but he enlisted several members of The Time to help write and record the songs for the one-time album.
The collection was initially conceived to serve the fantasies of teenage boys and men with its risqué lyrics and double entendres. Two years later, Madonna would cover much of the same themes to the delight of a mostly female audience. And like Madonna’s controversial works, the Vanity 6 albums’ genre-fluid tracks have become better identified with stiletto feminism and women’s autonomy as they’ve aged.
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At the time, the album played out as a sleepover scenario where the women boasted of their sexual conquests and ridiculed men as “dull” and not being endowed enough to satisfy them. They do this while also inflating the egos of the boys/men in their lives through come-ons (“do it baby, drive me wild”) and compliments (“he’s my wet dream’s number one star”). The sleepover motif is further advanced by the hilarious rap battle ‘If a Girl Answers (Don’t Hang Up),” an irresistibly funky track where two women fight over the affections of one man on a telephone call. It’s a gender-flipped and much more raw version of Michael Jackson‘s and Paul McCartney‘s ‘The Girl Is Mine.’ It’s ultimately more entertaining as well.
New wave audiences were drawn to more rock-minded tracks like “Bite the Beat,” “Make-Up,” and the Go-Go’s influenced “He’s So Dull.” Stand-out track “Make Up” is about bratty, entitled Mean Girl, who keeps her guy waiting so she can primp in the mirror (“I wanna look good for you”).
The album’s best-known track, ‘Nasty Girl’, epitomizes Vanity’s “cooler-and-way-sexier-than-you” persona. The song’s dominant theme is that some men may not have the physical traits to be satisfying, but you might have to settle for less – at least for a night. We don’t know if Prince wrote this or if Denise Matthews interpreted it as anything more than sexual. But in the almost four decades since its release, it has become a legit feminist anthem based on its hints of female empowerment, never failing to pack the dance floor and often used in social and political circles to indicate men coming up short on issues that matter. Remember how women wore the label as a badge of honor when Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton a ‘nasty woman?’
Do real women talk like they do on this album? Sure we do. Our locker-room talk can be just as explicit as the boys’.
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This album bridges the gap between traditional gender roles and the sexually aggressive, empowered woman perspective of the ’80s. By allowing women to be the sexual aggressors, Vanity 6 flips the script on the well-worn narrative that “men are dogs.”
Vanity 6 only released one album with this crew before Vanity parted ways with Prince in 1983, as plans for her to star in Purple Rain fell through. Matthews was swapped out for Patricia Kotero, also known as Apollonia, and that’s how Apollonia 6 came to be. Despite the changes, Vanity 6 left us with a killer album to groove to, showcasing Prince’s knack for crafting a lively and playful record with a touch of sass from a female viewpoint – wild, decadent, trashy, and a type of feminism before its time.
