It does not require a particularly close reading to see 1999 as a text about partying in spite of looming disaster, or even to stave it off. There’s that coda to “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” (“You and I know we gotta die someday” sandwiched between one lyric about giving yourself to God and another pledging to “have fun every motherfucking night”); there’s the title track, which opens the album by signaling that the whole thing might be a fever dream, and ends with Lisa Coleman cooing, “Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?” It might have been tempting, in 1982, to see Prince’s experiments with synthesizers and programmed drums to be of a piece with these anxieties, emerging sounds turned against emerging fears. It might be tempting, now, to let those once cutting-edge technologies—which now read as obvious date markers—cast those same anxieties as relics of a far-off era.
But those competing threads that Prince drew out so well—a smirking nihilism and a kind of empathy that posits lust and humanism as the same thing—have never disappeared from pop music, and his ability to marshal the Reagan years and the LM-1 for his own purposes, the way he had already done with the tropes of rock and funk, has rarely been replicated, before or after the Berlin Wall came down. And so 1999, which is now being reissued by Warner Records as part of a five-disc set that also includes B-sides, demos, unreleased songs, and concert footage, is the rare record that has come to define its era while also existing outside of it, a masterpiece that immediately precedes the albums Prince fashioned, conspicuously, as masterpieces.
The album proper sounds, as it always has, like a computer breathing. (The songs have been remastered, and while they sound rich and clear on car speakers and in headphones, it feels beside the point to listen to “D.M.S.R.” out of anything but the nearly-blown monitors inside an overheated First Avenue.) Even a massive, mainstream hit like “Little Red Corvette”—the first Prince song that charted higher on Billboard’s pop chart than the R&B one—begins as if it’s climbing out of a digital muck. “Delirious” sounds like it comes from a very sexual lab experiment that went exactly according to plan. The music is unfailingly funky while still remarkably controlled, precise in the way that a purposefully askew movie prop is precise.
And still, 1999 sprawls: ten of its 11 songs clock longer than five minutes, spiraling outward or, in the case of “Automatic,” locking into a long groove that asks, as we all have at one time or another, ‘What if the aliens fuck?’ It is exploratory without ever becoming impenetrable, “indulgent” but never boring. There is as always the tonal slipperiness that makes Prince’s music so rich to revisit: All the in-jokes and scathing subliminals of “All the Critics Love U In New York” come just two tracks after “Free,” which is marked by disarmingly sincere patriotism. Of course, there’s only one utterance of the word “sincere” on the album: “I sincerely wanna fuck the taste out of your mouth.”
The demos, alternate takes, and edits of 1999 album tracks, which are mostly confined to this set’s second disc, almost invariably give the impression that Prince and his bandmates arrived at the correct stopping point when assembling the final version of the record. But this reissue includes a number of truly essential B-sides from the album’s rollout, like the tender, piano-only “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore?” and the brief, buoyant “Horny Toad.” (Devoted fans will recognize songs like the stuttering “Purple Music,” which was included in live sets for years and has been floating around in various forms since the ‘90s; it also features “Moonbeam Levels,” which was first released on the posthumous greatest-hits album 4Ever.)
The final disc of the set, the audio from a concert that took place on November 30, 1982 in Detroit, is brimming with the energy that Prince routinely brought to stage. (Also included is a DVD of a show from a month later, in Houston.) And while there are more of those edits and alternate versions than almost any fan will want to wade through, some of these completely (or mostly) unheard songs, like the shimmering “Money Don’t Grow on Trees” or “Rearrange,” which cleverly juxtaposes a playful vocal with a serrated electric guitar, deliver what box sets of this kind almost never do: the thrill of discovery, the feeling that a genuinely great song is, at last, free.
Buy: Rough Trade
