1999 |
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Released: October 27, 1982 Peak: 7 US, 4 RB, 28 UK, 23 CN, 35 AU Sales (in millions): 4.32 US, 0.3 UK, 6.08 world (includes US and UK), 11.87 EAS Genre: R&B/funk/pop |
Tracks:Click on individual song titles for more details, including songwriters, recording and release dates, chart peaks, versions recorded by other artists, and basic information aobout the song.
Total Running Time: 70:33 Tracks, Disc 2: Promo Mixes & B-Sides (2019 super deluxe reissue)
Tracks, Disc 3: Vault Tracks I (2019 super deluxe reissue)
Tracks, Disc 4: Vault Tracks II (2019 super deluxe reissue):
The collection also included a fifth disc. Click to see details of Live at Masonic Hall in Detroit, Michigan. Other Songs from This Era:
O featured on Originals (recorded 1981-91, released 2019) B featured on The B-Sides (recorded: 1981-89, released 1993) CB4 featured on Crystal Ball (box set, achives: 1983-1996, released 1998) |
Rating: 4.548 out of 5.00 (average of 23 ratings)
Awards:(Click on award to learn more).
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The Early YearsThe Minneapolis-born singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Prince Rogers Nelson was all of 19 years old when he unleashed his genius on the world with his debut album, 1978’s For You. That album didn’t make much noise, but it did introduced his “funkified falsetto.” PM On his 1979 self-titled sophomore release, he struck gold with “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” a slab of disco-funk that soared to the top of the R&B chart and reached #11 on the Billboard Hot 100.On his third album, 1980’s Dirty Mind, Prince “established a wild fusion of funk, rock, new wave, and soul that signaled he was an original, maverick talent, but it failed to win him a large audience.” AM While 1981’s Controversy was “a furiously funky album that featured some of the artist’s most complex songwriting” SL ““it was also the first Prince album that felt like he was simply spinning his wheels.” SL A New SoundFor his next album, 1999, Prince “confirmed that he was in it for the long haul” SL by revamping is sound. “No one can deny the quantum leap in sophistication and scope it represents.” SL “Where his earlier albums had been a fusion of organic and electronic sounds, 1999 was constructed almost entirely on synthesizers by Prince himself,” AM not to mention “drum machines, sensual moans and screaming guitars.” PM “Naturally, the effect was slightly more mechanical and robotic than his previous work and strongly recalled the electro-funk experiments of several underground funk and hip-hop artists at the time.” AMWhile it was “an album dominated by computer funk” AM Prince “didn’t simply rely on the extended instrumental grooves to carry the album.” AM The “mechanical beats and treated voices are not a million miles from Funkadelic’s The Electric Spanking of War Babies – but Prince had the songs to match the sonic trickery.” RD His “songwriting was improving by leaps and bounds.” AM 1999 “became Prince’s widest, and most musically ambitious, landscape of sex and love.” PM He “ably demonstrates…[that he] is virtually peerless in creating musical textures of unparalleled sexiness.” SL “In one album, Prince managed to turn his own particular brand of horn-dog begging into poetic story-songs every bit as eloquent as those of his hero Joni Mitchell.” SL The album “is a massive, sexy, rump-shaking, and sometimes even disturbing masterpiece.” SL The Album’s Influence“With 1999, the bar for ’80s funk had been raised.” SL It “was the perfect test-drive for a sound Prince would fully harness on Sign ‘O’ the Times five years later. Yet, it was here, in-between the shimmying struts of showboating, apocalyptic electronica, where the multi-instrumentalist fully dove into the glamorous androgyny that codified him as such a singular, auteur figure in the 1980s.” PMA Wealth of MaterialPrince’s influence was being directly apparent in spin-off groups such as The Time, which featured “Prince’s own personal mini-me Morris Day,” SL who had had top-ten R&B hits in 1981 with “Get It Up” and “Cool,” both penned by Prince. There was also “the fetished-up girl group Vanity 6,” SL who reached the top 10 on the R&B chart with “Nasty Girl,” another song written by Prince.That also indicated just how material he was sitting on. He had “enough still-unreleased songs…to piece together three or four more solid LPs.” SL “Even the B-sides for 1999’s singles, like How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore? and Irresistible Bitch, have gone on to become unassailable classics.” SL The Songs“The first side of the record contained all of the hit singles, and, unsurprisingly, they were the ones that contained the least amount of electronics.” AM “Prince stretches out a bit too much over the course of 1999, but the result is a stunning display of raw talent, not wallowing indulgence.” AMHere’s a breakdown of each of the individual songs. |
 | 1999Prince |
Writer(s): Prince (see lyrics here) Recorded: July 1982 at Kiowa Trail home Studio in Chanhassen, MN Released: 8/7/1982 as a single, 1999 (1982), The Hits 1 (1993), The Very Best of (2001), Ultimate (2006), 4Ever (2016), Live at Masonic Hall in Detroit, Michigan (2019), Live in Utrecht (2020) B-Side: “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” First Charted: October 16, 1982 Peak: 12 BB, 14 CB, 12 RR, 33 A40, 4 RB, 15 CO, 2 UK, 6 CN, 2 AU, 1 DF Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): 0.72 US, 0.4 UK, 1.13 world (includes US + UK) Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, 18.0 video, 72.62 streaming About the Song: The song shares a commonality with Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” which gives lead vocal duties to two other singers before Wonder takes charge. “1999” was initially intended as a three-part harmony, but Prince decided to separate out the voices starting each verse. WK Lisa Coleman sings the first line of the song, followed guitarist Dez Dickerson. Both were members of Prince’s backing band, the Revolution. Prince doesn’t sing until the third line of the song. Jill Jones, a backup singer, also sings a line in the song: “Got a lion in my pocket / And baby he’s ready to roar.” While the song’s “we’re gonna party like it’s 1999” feels like a celebratory line, it has a deeper meaning. During the Reagan administration, the United States stockpiled nuclear weaponry in an arms race with Russia known as the Cold War. The massive arsenals of both countries provoked a fear of Armageddon. SF Prince sings “Everybody’s got a bomb / We could all die any die.” Of course, Prince still plans to have fun until the end: “But before I’ll let that happen / I’ll dance my life away.”
In a CNN interview with Larry King in 1999, Prince said, “We were sitting around watching a special about 1999, and a lot of people were…speculating on what was going to happen…Everyone that was around me whom I thought to be very optimistic people were dreading those days, and I always knew I’d be cool. I never felt like this was going to be a rough time for me…So I just wanted to write something that gave hope.” SF
“It’s been said that sex and death guide nearly every aspect of human thought. So if Prince had already proven that he sings about sex like B.B. King sang about the blues, then 1999 is, in retrospect, the first indication that Prince’s preoccupation with death was equally voracious.” SL The song “parties to the apocalypse with a P-Funk groove much tighter than anything George Clinton ever did,” AM effectively turning “the Rapture into an excuse to boogie down.” SL/sup>
On “the exquisitely climactic final few minutes…Prince’s familiar sequenced drum patterns go haywire, sounding like a rolling torrent of artillery fire.” SL It is “the masterpiece that preceded masterpieces. When the record begins, he asks what we should all make of the end of the world; by its end, there is only one right answer: we must go out grooving, with our bodies pushing against one another lovingly.” PM
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Awards:(Click on award to learn more).
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 | Little Red CorvettePrince |
Writer(s): Prince (see lyrics here) Recorded: 5/20/1982 at Kiowa Trail Home Studio in Chanhassen, MN Released: 2/9/1983 as a single, 1999 (1982), The Hits 2 (1993), The Very Best of (2001), dance remix: Ultimate (2006), 4Ever (2016), Live at Masonic Hall in Detroit, Michigan (2019), Live in Utrecht (2020) B-Side: “All the Critics Love U in New York” First Charted: February 26, 1983 Peak: 6 BB, 6 CB, 5 RR, 11 RB, 17 AR, 2 UK, 5 CN, 8 AU Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): 0.9 US, 0.2 UK, 1.1 world (includes US + UK) Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, 9.0 video, 29.77 streaming About the Song: Songfacts.com suggested that while some of his earlier songs were too blatantly sexual to be embraced by radio, this one was “just ambiguous enough not to offend most listeners.” SF However, All Music Guide calls this “one of the most sensual and frankly explicit hits ever to crack the charts.” JA It is “just on the verge of being obscene, [but] it never succumbs to blatant tastelessness.” JA The story goes that Prince fell asleep in the back of keyboardist Lisa Coleman’s car “after an exhausting all-night recording session. The lyrics came to him in bits and pieces during this and other catnaps.” SF However, Coleman says he was always borrowing her car, which she called “the perfect cruise mobile on a beautiful day in Minneapolis.” BBC She said he and then-girlfriend Vanity would be “making out, or doing whatever, in the back seat and they probably had a wonderful moment of afterglow, which is when he got the seed of the idea…But it’s not a red Corvette, it’s a pink Mercury!” BBC The title song for the 1999 album was released as the first single, but stalled at #44. After the success of “Little Red Corvette,” “1999” was re-released and hit #12. Prince’s “synthesizer riffs, usually consisting of closely clustered chords that give off a sense of suffocating closeness (listen no further than the intro of Little Red Corvette), have a pleasant sensual friction.” SL That song “is pure pop,” AM “an unfathomably hot, metaphor-drenched, post-disco rock number about casual one-night-stands.” PM It “helped Prince carry his funk roots over the line into full-fledged pop rock (a transition he’d fully embrace two years later on Purple Rain.” PM |
Awards:(Click on award to learn more).
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 | DeliriousPrince |
Writer(s): Prince Recorded: 5/9/1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 8/17/1983 as a single, 1999 (1982), The Hits 2 (1993), Ultimate (2006), 4Ever (2016) B-Side: “Horny Toad” First Charted: 9/3/1983 Peak: 8 BB, 9 CB, 7 RR, 18 RB, 27 CN Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming About the Song: |
 | Let’s Pretend We’re MarriedPrince |
Writer(s): Prince Recorded: 3/30/1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 11/23/1983 as a single, 1999 (1982) B-Side: “Irresistible Bitch” First Charted: 12/17/1983 Peak: 52 BB, 46 CB, 55 RB Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, -- video, -- streaming Covered by: Tina Turner (3/1/1985 as B-side of “Show Some Respect”) About the Song: |
D.M.S.R.Prince |
Writer(s): Prince Recorded: 4/20/1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 1999 (1982), Live at Masonic Hall in Detroit, Michigan (2019) About the Song: |
AutomaticPrince |
Writer(s): Prince Recorded: 4/20/1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 1999 (1982), Live at Masonic Hall in Detroit, Michigan (2019) About the Song: |
Something in the Water Does Not ComputePrince |
Writer(s): Prince Recorded: April 1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 1999 (1982) |
FreePrince |
Writer(s): Prince Recorded: 4/25/1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 1999 (1982) About the Song: |
Lady Cab DriverPrince |
Writer(s): Prince Recorded: 7/7/1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 1999 (1982) About the Song: |
All the Critics Love U in New YorkPrince |
Writer(s): Prince Recorded: 1/21/1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 2/9/1983 as B-side of “Little Red Corvette,” 1999 (1982) About the Song: |
International LoverPrince |
Writer(s): Prince Recorded: 1/14/1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 1999 (1982), Live at Masonic Hall in Detroit, Michigan (2019) About the Song: |
Notes:The album was reissued in 2019. A 5-CD set included previously unreleased tracks, single edits and remixes, and a live 1982 show from Detroit.Resources/References:
Related DMDB Pages:
First posted 3/23/2008; last updated 7/27/2025. |
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