Tag: 1999

1999 (1982)
While on the Controversy tour in 1982, Prince and his band watched a Nostradamus documentary called The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. The film spends its first hour priming the viewer to believe that the French astrologer’s predictions have been coming true for hundreds of years. It then turns its attention to the near future. Experts believe, Orson Welles soberly informs us, that Nostradamus predicted World War III by the end of the millennium and in 1999 nuclear bombs will fall, wiping out all of New York City’s inhabitants first. Even with the knowledge of hindsight it’s not a cheery watch, but in the midst of the Cold War it would have been chilling. Not to Prince though. “I just found it real ironic how everyone around me whom I thought to be very optimistic people were dreading those days, and I always knew I’d be cool”, he later told Larry King when talking about how it inspired him to write 1999, “I just wanted to write something that gave hope”.

That wasn’t a hope the bombs wouldn’t fall, but a hope we make the most of our time before they do. Having been raised a Seventh Day Adventist, Prince was taught as a child not to fear the end of the world as it would accompany the Second Coming of Christ. The denomination originated out of several failed predictions of this happening sometime in the 19th century and the Book of Revelation plays a prominent role in its eschatology. ”Can’t run from Revelation” Prince sings, so let’s dance until the end. Or, as instructed at the start of the song, “don’t worry” and “have some fun”. 

The spoken intro, distorted to sound like the words of a divine messager, echoes the Book of Revelation which begins with Christ telling John to not be afraid. Instead of being told to have some fun, John is told to write down everything he sees in his apocalyptic vision. 1999 has Prince, while dreaming, also writing down his vision of the end of the world. In John’s account, seven trumpets are blown by seven angels which sets in motion the return of Christ to start his new reign. In 1999, the fanfare is played by an ARP Omni-2 synthesiser which heralded the return of Prince to the charts and truly announced the beginning of his purple reign. 

Other artists took note. That synthline allegedly inspired Thriller and Phil Collins has admitted he ripped it off for Sussudio. Prince even recycled the riff himself on his 2006 single Fury. The thick chords are the most iconic part of 1999 – pure stadium-fuel – but they’re so ear-catching, so headline-grabbing, I’ve never fully appreciated, until now, what happens underneath. The interplay of the various background voices and wah pedal, especially from three minutes onwards, paint a psychedelic portrait of partydrunk rapture. It must be an aural illusion but I hear the wah guitar in the right channel sing actual words along to the chorus, especially on the remastered version. And that sustained note which starts at 4:08 and nearly lasts until the end of the song sounds like one of Revelation’s stars falling to Earth or Nostradamus’s great king of terror falling from the sky.

Post Cold War, people weren’t looking to the skies so much for their existential threat. When 1999 came around, mankind’s extinction was expected to be launched by computer date-formatting errors. As ridiculous as it sounds today, the millennium bug was a genuine fear to many and I do wonder how much Prince was responsible for this panic. 1999 may be a party anthem intended to spread hope but it conditioned two generations to equate the year 2000 as “party over, oops out of time”. More so than a forgotten documentary about the writings of an astrologer who actually predicted the world wouldn’t end until 3797. Everybody understood the concept behind dancing like its 1999, especially when the song had been playing non-stop that year, and it must have contributed to the pre-millennial tension on New Years Eve. The timing of Nuclear war being launched at midnight was a little too neat to be considered. Armageddon launched by computers resetting to 00 was just stupid enough to be feasible.

As 1999 turned into 2000, neither the millennium bug nor World War III came to pass. And what of Nostradamus’s great king of terror that was meant to have arrived in the seventh month? Not a peep. Although, going by the Julian calendar of Nostradamus’s time that was the month Vladimir Putin came to power. So let’s not write that one off yet.

1999 (1982)
In the summer of 1979, disco was at its peak and The Bee Gees were celebrating their sixth consecutive number 1. The US charts looked ripe for the brand of falsetto-sung R&B that Prince had just finished recording for his sophomore album. Then a rock DJ made headlines when he detonated a crate of disco records at a baseball game and rioters stormed the field chanting “disco sucks” and “death to disco”. Fueled by homophobia, racism and the surge of conservatism that would usher in the Reagan era, this violent backlash soon ballooned nationwide, not only venting its ire at disco, but at any music not deemed white and heterosexual enough. The disco bubble burst. My Sharona replaced Chic’s Good Times at the top of the charts and it was another decade until the tainted Bee Gees got near the top 10 again. Classic rock and country began their long chokehold of the airwaves.

Prince must have sensed these winds of change. On that night of the Disco Demolition in Chicago, he and his band were in Colorado, recording throwback rock songs under the name The Rebels, including a diss on disco written by Dez Dickerson called Disco Away. The songs were deemed too generic though. A creative dead end. If he was to cross over it wouldn’t be by pandering to demand and watering down his sound. It would be on his terms.

A year and two tours later Prince unveiled his new approach for the new decade. Inspired by new wave, he incorporated rock elements into the funk of his childhood and gave birth to the Minneapolis Sound – a genre that would transform the charts by the mid-80s. Introduced on Dirty Mind, and developed further on Controversy, The Time and Vanity 6, it was on the 1999 album where this genre found its perfect form. Despite being omitted on early CD versions of the album, DMSR is the Minneapolis Sound par excellence. A synth and drum machine manifesto to all those about to follow in his funksteps. It resurrected disco’s call to lose yourself on the dance floor, and even featured a tom tom breakdown, but was cloaked in the grit and grime of funk that never would have passed Studio 54’s door policy. Instead of revelling in extravagance, Prince the dance instructor tells us to “work your body like a whore” and how it doesn’t matter what we’re wearing – in fact the less clothes the better.

This wasn’t the disco-world of celebrity excess, this was an invite for everybody to let their hair down and get a-freakin. The White, Black and Puerto Rican Uptowners were encouraged to sing, as were the Japanese albeit over a slightly racist synth hook. New fans attracted by Little Red Corvette’s rock choruses received helpful instructions on when to clap, whereas old fans got Jamie Starr references to dissect. All were catered for. There’s a reason why the word “everybody” is mentioned 21 times. As long as you enjoyed dancing, playing music, sex or romance, there was a space for you in this discotheque of the disaffected.

But as he tells us on the album’s title track, parties weren’t meant to last. Like every memorable all-nighter, DMSR doesn’t peter out but ends in mayhem and someone calling the police. An actual emergency or shut down by a Disco Sucks killjoy?

Disco didn’t die. It retreated underground to be nurtured by clubs like the Paradise Garage. But during its hibernation, Prince knew something that record-makers have known since the days of Chubby Checker. People will always like dancing to dance records about dancing.

1999 (1982)
Do you know that Watchmen comic panel which became a meme? The one of Dr Manhattan on Mars saying he’s tired of Earth, people and being caught in the tangle of their lives. That’s Prince in his taxicab solitude. He’s doing exactly what he said he would do in Annie Christian, and using taxis as a transitory, liminal space to retreat into and shelter from the world’s evils. It’s his coping mechanism for fleeing trouble-winds. But he’s not alone in this escape pod and it soon becomes the setting for one of his fantasy conquests, like The Ballad of Dorothy Parker or Darling Nikki, where redemption is delivered via a sexual encounter with a stranger. I say it’s the setting but presumably when we start hearing the bed-springs we’ve left the cab and are at the nameless driver’s “mansion” after she accepted his fare in tears. Or could this sexual fantasy be playing out in the passenger’s mind while he’s still in the back seat, drifting off to the bass-led funk of the cab’s engine? When this section starts three minutes in, Prince’s vocals, previously drained of any emotion other than ennui, suddenly flare up with Yeats’ lust and rage. Jill Jones’ pleasured moans accompany the sound of Prince thrusting out his anger on subjects including jealousy of his half-brother Duane, politicians, discrimination, greed, Yosemite Sam (?!) and, to pick up his theme from Sexuality, Disneyland tourists. Once he hits his stride, he mellows and starts dedicating each thrust to the creator of man, heavenly bodies, and those Disneyland tourists again. He eventually remembers his manners and addresses the woman he’s having sex with – a dedication which, in a lightning-quick scaling of Diotima’s ladder gets expanded out to women in general, and then to platonic love. Prince’s final tribute is to the wind, as he now recognises the cold trouble-winds of the first verse and chorus as the motivating force propelling him onward. Like Dr Manhattan, a sexual partner has helped him reach an epiphany in his solitude. He realises life isn’t something he should be trying to escape from. “This galaxy’s better than not having a place to go” he concludes and we’re returned to the gentle pace of the opening section, now with seagulls and seven chimes of a clock. Could this be the new dawn? Welcome bursts of guitar follow which unfortunately do not spiral out of control and drown out the rest of the track like it does in its initial template: the posthumously released Rearrange. That wouldn’t have fit the narrative of an existensial crisis averted but given the choice of listening to turmoil or inner peace, I would pick turmoil every time. Plus, it beats trying to work out what the sound of a mouth gargle and a trumpeting elephant represent.

1999 (1982)
When Prince called Darling Nikki “the coldest song ever written” he had obviously forgotten about Something In The Water (Does Not Compute). This ice-plunge into loneliness and alienation can be found in the middle of Prince’s coldest album, sandwiched between Automatic’s tears and the cool healing zephyr of Free. A depth where even those space-surviving water bears fear to tread. Other than Prince’s voice, the only sounds you hear are a shivering Linn drum, minor synth chords and Prince’s logic board bleeping unsatisfactorily as it fails to compute why every girl treats him so bad. His internal computer will eventually concede that its faulty programming is to blame, but that’s for the next album’s more introspective Computer Blue. For now, contaminated drinking water is the best answer it can grasp at. The ‘original’ version of Something in the Water (posthumously released on 1999 Deluxe) provides an interesting insight into how the song progressed. This first take was a fuller composition with bass and piano and though still powerful, isn’t quite as chilling as the one he re-recorded, where he strips the instruments out and leaves in their place a howling void and a piercing scream that emits from the iron core of his being like a death ray of despair. Few screams in his catalogue match it. And after he delivers it, where can you go from there? Like in Do Me, Baby he’s left depleted. You hear a spat curse and then a mic knock (on what sounds like the phrase ‘second coming’) as Prince stumbles towards the exit, mumbling semi-incoherently. It will take a couple of tracks before he regains the energy to try and flee this desolation with the help of a lady cab driver.

1999 (1982)
Prince’s brief rockabilly fascination started, according to Dez Dickerson, with them seeing the Stray Cats in London and being so in awe of the band they both started styling their hair like them. It ended a year or two later with Prince’s ultimate take on the genre: Delirious. Along the way he churned out several lesser attempts – with B-side Horny Toad and Controversy’s Jack U Off the only two he saw fit to release – but with Delirious he found his sound and could hang up his blue suede shoes (although not his pompadour which would make several later appearances) for good. It’s little wonder why a genre initially deemed too black for country radio and too white for R’n’B stations would appeal to someone trying to escape radio segregation himself. And this may be another reason why he abandoned the genre post-1983. Little Red Corvette proved to be his skeleton key to unlock the pop, rock and R&B charts but if Delirious had bridged the divide instead would Purple Rain have been an album of synthy 8 bar blues and Elvis impressions? I shudder to think. Luckily, in this universe’s timeline Delirious remains the culmination of a flirtation. A quirky counterweight to the scary techno future that’s unfolding around it. The rest of the album casts its hooks deep into your psyche, activating dark, unexplored areas you have no name for. Delirious aims for the big red button in your sternum marked ”goofing off’. Listen to the Indigo Nights rendition and it has the same effect. Break glass in case of dangerous levels of seriousness. You can see why Eddie Murphy borrowed the title.