Track 11: 1999
Prince, 1999
By 1982 Prince had stirred up a lot of excitement in the music industry. He’d caught the critic’s collective eye, and music writers everywhere were on the edge of their seats in anticipation of his next arrival. What was delivered that year astounded even the most visionary of rock’s sages. On October 27, just 12 months since his last issue, the commercially nubile artist released a double album. It was unthinkably monstrous: four sides of new material, all of it “produced, arranged, composed and performed” by the multi-instrumental wunderkind – the same wunderkind who was redefining stage performance and was the reputed marionette behind two of R&B’s most eventful side acts. The album had a very big title:
…show more content…
Like his Vanity product, his new material was heavily chip-driven. Playing out his “Nasty Girl” mechanics to completion, he advanced a new standard for ‘80s pop with his synthetic dance sounds. The Linn drum machine supplied untiring rhythms, and it was obvious the sleepless studio technician had met his soul mate. Unstoppably funky, inexhaustibly bountiful. Prince plugged in his ultimate sex toy and got off on its groove. He produced robotic beats that had an intoxicating effect and kept the action from leaving the dance floor. Only twice in 12 tracks did his perpetual-motion machine pause to take a breather. The ass-moving power was inescapable. So enthralled was U.K. mag Melody Maker that its critic proclaimed 1999 “one of the most inspiring dance epics known to man.” 1999 was a magnum opus of invention, the Young Funkenstein’s crowning achievement. It was the grand masterpiece his talents had promised, the chef d’oeuvre of his genre-busting sound. High-tech yet raw, rocking yet funky, mysterious yet approachable, it wasn’t black music, and it wasn’t white. It was purple. It crossed categories, not because it straddled them, but rather, because it was its own format. For lack of a better description, the critics called it “techno funk,” and in three record stores on one street, it would be filed under three different