WHY PRINCE made "1999"

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HAPPY 40th 1999!
Prince was definitely the main 82. It was a year of epics such as “Automatic”, great pop songs like “Raspberry Beret”, and soulful tunes like “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” Had he quit after Controversy from the year before, he might’ve been forgotten. However, he’d put in enough hours by the time he was 23 to produce a masterpiece with almost unconscious ease.

between disco and MTV, it was hard to be noticed as a young, black phenom. Prince was out there telling stories about his race and cultivating a guitar-god appeal to the rock kids on the other side of the radio dial.

1999 is the sound of Prince deciding not to give a @&#. Dez Dickerson of the newly formed Revolution played insane guitars. Meanwhile Prince still wrote great pop songs. 1999 is one of the most uncompromising records ever made by a star who could be considered new.

1999 finds room for monologues, dialogues, codas, solos, sound-effects orgies, and long segments where an instrument will just build by itself. What makes “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” sound like the marathon sex it describes isn’t its perfectly deployed F-bombs (the word sounds genuinely transgressive in Prince’s mouth), but its Linn LM-1 patter. The Linn is the instrument Prince masters on 1999 in lieu of guitar, and the legions of Chicago house producers who bought their own after its release found replicating Prince’s programming as daunting saving up the money for one. With each passing second, we drift further away from the light into the record’s guts.


Morris Day, a friend and early band member/cameraman in the band called Grand Central and later Champagne, remained close. Day co wrote Partyup for Prince’s Dirty Mind album while Day was in another band, the funk group Enterprise. Prince soon asked Day to be lead singer of his side-project The Time.


This concert, the fabled 1999/Triple Threat tour which was a breakout for them as well as another Prince project Vanity 6.