Prince is foundational shit for me. I feel like he's at the center of everything I look for in music. When talking about his music everyone talks about the sex and the controversy, but what people don't mention is how fucking weird it was. Prince was definitely the most experimental, challenging musician to reach that level of fame. More than Nirvana, more than Pink Floyd, certainly more than the Beatles. The only people who come close are Bowie, who got big off of glam rock and whose weirdest stuff was mostly a commercial failure, and Kanye, who I'd argue was at the peak of his fame in the 00s and needed that public goodwill to get away with dropping Yeezus on the public. 1999, an album that opens with the voice of God and ends with airline-themed sex role play, was Prince's BREAKTHROUGH ALBUM. Calling 1999 the weirdest album ever made would be an overstatement, but it's definitely the freakiest album ever made, both in the literal and sexual sense. You'd think Dirty Mind would hold that title, but Dirty Mind is a fairly simple album, its thesis being that Prince is a horny little freak who wants to have dirty sex. In "Let's Pretend We're Married," however, the purple one goes from referencing Tina Turner to growling "I sincerely wanna fuck the taste out of your mouth" to talking about God within seconds. If that isn't Prince in a nutshell, I don't know what is.
Of all Prince's classic albums, 1999 actually took the longest to grow on me. I loved the first three songs to death, but then as soon as "Delirious" ends with that off-putting baby sound, you're plunged into a world of filthy sex, technology, and confusing, baffling political statements. Songs like "All the Critics Love U In New York" and "Automatic" were the reason I had trouble getting into the album, but now I can say they're a big part of why I always come back to it. I think the gateway for me was "Baby Cab Driver," which has one of the tightest grooves Prince put to wax. Then, four minutes in, the song devolves into Prince fucking someone in the back of a cab, while monologuing about corrupt politicians, Yosemite Sam, tourists at Disneyland and the like. It's absolutely fucking insane, and as soon as the monologue winds down, the beat stutters, we get hit with a searing synth blast, and then Prince goes into one of his signature face-melting guitar solos, the kind that make Eddie Van Halen look like Dot Wiggin. Throughout the eight minute runtime, that groove stays intact. Somewhere down the line I realized that a big part of why it appealed to me was because of the confusing absurdity of it all and not in spite of it, and that's when the rest fell in place.
The reason I'm writing about this album and not Sign O' the Times, which is probably my favorite Prince album, is that this is the album that made me realize just how much of a genius Prince was. Sign O' the Times, for me, is like a double-album-length flex. Prince was trying out all these styles and ideas and making perfect music out of all of them because that's what he can do, and on that album, that’s what he does. 1999, on the other hand, is challenging and complicated, and Prince still thrives. "All the Critics Love U In New York" is a good example of this dynamic. Even by this albums standard, the lyrics are utterly inscrutable. I guess he's shitting on the pretentious music critics who slacked on his music early on, but I have no idea where lines like "It's time for a new direction / It's time for jazz to die / Fourth day of November / We need a purple high" fit into that. Musically, the song is one of those super minimalistic grooves he later perfected on songs like "When Doves Cry" and "Kiss." There’s not much more to the song besides the robotic drum machine beet, the repetitive bleep-bloopy synth line, and those lyrics. Like many of the songs on this album, it's pretty long. This is all a recipe for an absolute fucking mess, and yet it works. Everything here does.
Noted purple one scholar Questlove has written at length about Prince's drum machine prowess, citing this album in particular. He's much more qualified to write about it than I am, and is also a much better writer than I am (read Mo' Meta Blues!!!) so I'll just say that the drum rolls here are utterly hypnotic. As nerdy as it is to fixate on drum machine rhythms, even people who aren't fluent in musical jargon can immediately recognize a Prince song by the drums, whether they know it or not. The little drum rolls that come after each synth riff on the title track are as much a part of the hook of the song as "two-thousand-zero-zero part over oops, out of time." This album helped me notice and appreciate little details like those, which is a big part of why I'm writing about it right now instead of Prince's many other masterpieces. No one made better use of big synthetic 80s production than Prince and Kate Bush, who I've always thought had kind of an inexplicable connection to Prince. More than anyone else, if either of them had hit their stride in any other decade, it wouldn't have been the same. The musical trends that bogged down so many other artists in the 80s gave them the tools to transcend.
I've talked a lot about the deep cuts, because I fell in love with this album when I fell in love with them. The big three that open the album I fell in love with immediately, they're all pretty famous, they're all perfect pop songs, there's not much I can say about them that hasn't been said already, but I do have a lot of thoughts about "Little Red Corvette". I remember when I was a little kid, my mom desperately tried to make me appreciate Prince. She'd play "1999" and tell me it was my song, because I was born in 1999. I wasn't having it. Even before I had internalized society's notions of masculinity and normalcy, even before I knew what any of these lyrics meant, I thought Prince was the scariest fucking person on the planet and I wanted him to leave me alone. That being said, even in those dark ages I still liked "Little Red Corvette" a lot, which makes sense. I'm not sure I'd call it his best song (there's too goddamn many great Prince songs to judge, though it's certainly up there) but it feels like his most objectively good song, if that makes any sense. There's simply no denying that song is a pop songwriting masterclass, there's so many fucking hooks it's staggering. Those last two minutes of the song, where all the synth and drum riffs and backing vocals seem to be crashing into each other, and Prince riffs on it and does a falsetto croon all over the place? That's pop music heaven to me. The lyrics are as freaky as anything else on the album, it's classic Prince. "I guess I must be dumb, she had a pocket full of horses, trojans, some of them used." It's hard to tell where one sexual metaphor begins and the other ends. On the chorus he's admonishing this girl, telling her she needs to "slow down," which would seem hypocritical coming from anyone else but even before he says “move over baby, gimme the keys, I’m gonna try to tame your little red love machine” you can tell he loves to fuck just as much as she does. It feels totally self aware, which Prince always was, contrary to popular misconceptions. He was one clever bastard.
I've always gravitated to weird, freaky music, whether it be 70s era Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart, Yoko Ono and the like. But it was this album that showed me that not only is pop music ample ground for experimentation, it can be the most ample ground for experimentation. I love Captain Beefheart, but hearing pop music so thoroughly debased and deconstructed as Prince does here is far more disquieting, perplexing, and utterly thrilling than anything on Trout Mask Replica. Prince helped me appreciate that, and for me, this album also was probably a major gateway to appreciating electronic music. Carl Craig and Gerald Donald were definitely making music within the same freak universe that Prince, and especially this particular album, orbited. This is a deeply mechanical and computerized album, both in the music and the lyrical themes, but it's still a deeply humanistic work of art. No robot could ever have ever made the drum machine rhythms on "Something in the Water" or (ironically) "Automatic." Only Prince. If we're talking albums that shaped my music taste, it's hard to see anything covering the scope of the impact this album has had on me.