Avril Lavigne's Let Go released

Let Go Avril Lavigne

Released: June 4, 2002 Charted: June 22, 2002 Peak: 2 US, 13 UK, 12 CN, 17 AU Sales (in millions): 6.8 US, 1.71 UK, 17.1 world (includes US and UK) Genre: pop

Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to singles charts. Losing Grip (4/1/03, 64 US, 17 RR, 33 A40, 22 UK, 20 AU) Complicated (4/13/02, 2 US, 1 RR, 13 AC, 1 A40, 3 UK, 1 CN, 1 AU) Sk8er Boi (8/27/02, 10 US, 1 RR, 23 A40, 8 UK, 29 CN, 3 AU) I’m with You (11/19/02, 4 US, 1 RR, 18 AC, 1 A40, 7 UK, 18 CN) Mobile Unwanted Tomorrow Anything But Ordinary Things I’ll Never Say My World Nobody’s Fool Too Much to Ask Naked Total Running Time: 48:37

Rating: 3.675 out of 5.00 (average of 24 ratings) Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

About the Album: “Talk about pressure – being under 21 and having a record deal no longer qualifies as extraordinary. And as mass-produced teen pop makes its exit and a glut of young singer/songwriters enter, child prodigies no longer have built-in marketing appeal. So if newcomer, 17-year-old Avril Lavigne truly wants to be Anything But Ordinary, as she sings on her debut album, Let Go, she’ll have to dig deeper.” AMG “Luckily for Lavigne, aside from youth, she does have talent. Her debut runs the gamut from driving rock numbers like Losing Grip – where Lavigne shows off her vocal range, powering into the anger-fueled, explosive rock chorus – to singer/songwriter pop tunes like My World, where Lavigne fills listeners in on the past 17 years of her life.” AMG “Lavigne handles a variety of styles deftly, but she still has some growing up to do lyrically. Sk8er Boi has a terrific power pop bounce, but shows her lyrical shortcomings: ‘He was a punk/She did ballet/What more can I say’ – a lot. The phrasing is awkward and sometimes silly: ‘It’s funny when you think it’s gonna work out/ Till you chose weed over me you’re so lame,’ she sings on Too Much to Ask.” AMG “Not surprisingly, the standout track is the first single, Complicated, a gem of a pop/rock tune with a killer chorus. But listen carefully and you'll realize that [its] sing-song melody borrows just enough from Pink’s ‘Don’t Let Me Get Me’ to make it familiar and likeable. Nonetheless, the song is a knockout radio hit.” AMG “Lavigne, a self-professed skater punk and labelmate of Pink, shares her Take Me As I Am credo as well. And that said, it’s hard not to look at this record, executive produced by Arista label head Antonio ‘L.A.’ Reid, who is thanked by Lavigne for allowing ‘me to be myself,’ and feel cynical about the music industry’s willingness to reproduce a hit over and over. Lavigne, however, is a capable songwriter with vocal chops, and at her age, one imagines, she is still finding her feet, borrowing from the music she’s grown up listening to. The problem is Lavigne is still so young she's listening to the radio hits of the ‘90s and early 2000s: she’s Pink when she’s bucking authority, Alanis Morissette when she’s angry, and Jewel when she’s sensitive. Let Go shows promise, but the question is whether Lavigne and only Lavigne will shine through on her next effort.” AMG

Resources and Related Links: DMDB encyclopedia entry for Avril Lavigne AMG All Music Guide by Christina Saraceno WK Wikipedia First posted 3/29/2008; last updated 5/4/2022.

 

Jay-Z 'sThe Blueprint hit #1

The Blueprint Jay-Z

Released: September 18, 2001 Charted: September 29, 2001 Peak: 13 US, 13 RB, 30 UK, 3 CN Sales (in millions): 2.3 US, 0.21 UK, 3.5 world (includes US and UK) Genre: rap

Tracks: Song Title (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to singles charts. The Ruler’s Back Takeover Izzo (H.O.V.A.) (7/21/01, 7a US, 2a RB, 21 UK) Girls, Girls, Girls (9/29/01, 15a US, 11 UK, 4 RB) Jigga That Nigga (11/3/01, 64a US, 26a RB) U Don’t Know Hola’ Hovito Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love) Never Change Song Cry (4/27/02, 45 RB) All I Need Renegade (with Eminem) Blueprint (Momma Loves Me) Total Running Time: 63:25

Rating: 4.148 out of 5.00 (average of 15 ratings) Quotable: Nobody in New York could match Jay-Z rhyme for rhyme and nobody in New York had fresher beats.” – Jason Birchmeier, All Music Guide Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

About the Album: After the death of the Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z “claimed New York’s hip-hop throne” AMG At the time, “many smirked and some even snickered.” AMG However, he “solidified his position with gigantic hits like ‘Big Pimpin’ and ‘I Just Wanna Love You (Give It 2 Me).’” AMG On The Blueprint, “everything came together to assert Hova as the best rapper around” FO and “no one was smirking and no one dared snicker.” AMG “Everything that makes Jay-Z a true king can be heard on this LP. From the soulful seventies beats, the introduction of Kanye as his producer, to the way he tells stories with consummate ease.” FO “Nobody in New York could match Jay-Z rhyme for rhyme and nobody in New York had fresher beats – and many would argue that Jigga’s reign was not just confined to New York but was, in fact, national.” AMG “Jay-Z took on anyone and everyone who wanted to sit on his throne.” RS’20 For example, on Takeover, “one of the greatest diss tracks of all time,” FO “he brutally dismisses two of his most formidable opponents, Mobb Deep and Nas.” AMG “There’s little doubt that Jay-Z’s status as the top MC in the game is justified.” AMG “Leadoff single, Izzo (H.O.V.A.), dominated urban radio numerous weeks before the album hit the streets, generating so much demand that Def Jam had to push up the album’s street date because it was being so heavily bootlegged.” AMG “With dynamic production by Kanye West,” RS’20 and “a joyous sample of the Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’” NRR it “gave him his first Top 10 single. Jay-Z elevates clever rhymes and innovations with an unmatched air of calm control and a cavalier confidence” RS’20 in a song complete “with a rumination on changing perceptions of black wealth.” NRR “Jay-Z continues the braggadocio with U Don’t Know.” Perhaps the most bombastic song on the album – if not Jay-Z’s career (‘I will not lose, ever’) – it doubles as a financial history of his life…He opens up about the wealth gathered as a drug dealer (‘So much coke that you could run a slalom’) before explaining a musical revelation (‘Could make forty [thousand dollars] off a brick, but one rhyme could beat that’) and offering an accounting of his millions – ‘Put me anywhere on God’s green Earth,’ he explains, ‘I triple my worth..’” NRR All the songs are “stunning, to the point where the album seems almost flawless.” AMG “The album packs a powerful range of topics and emotions into its 60-plus minutes.” NRR “When Hova isn’t taking shots at record executives, cops, critics, haters, biters, and his absent dad (and still, sadly, using the word “faggot”), he inches toward vulnerability on Song Cry.” RS’20 The song “reveals a version of the rapper willing to show emotion and admit mistakes,” NRR such as when “he reminisces over a lost love, his voice crackling with partially-supressed grief as he acknowledges the toll his infidelity took on the relationship.” NRR Far Out referred to that song and Never Change as “moments that will live in his legacy for a long time to come.” FO “Besides rhymes that challenge those on Reasonable Doubt as the most crafted of Jay-Z’s career to date in terms of not only lyrics but also flow and delivery, The Blueprint also boasts some of his most extravagant beats, courtesy of impressive newcomers Kayne West and Just Blaze.” AMG “If the rhymes and beats alone don’t make The Blueprint a career highlight for Jay-Z, the minimal guest appearances surely do.” AMG With the exception of a duet with Eminem, “listeners get exactly what they want: Jay-Z and nothing but Jay-Z, over beats so loaded with marvelously flipped samples the songs don't even need big vocal hooks.” AMG “Jay-Z spent the first half-decade of his career in a delicate balancing act: trying to stay true to the hard-edged sound and subject matter that drew fans to his debut, while capturing new crowds with the glitzy production and pop hooks that characterized his second. Perhaps more than any album in his career--and certainly more than any to that point – Blueprint accomplished that feat.” NRR “Uneven albums like Hard Knock Life were the crossover attempts.” AMG This is “a fully realized masterpiece” AMG and “easily Jay-Z’s greatest album of all time.” FO The album has the noted accomplishment of being the first of the 21st century to be selected by the National Recording Registry. It represents a peak in the career of “a son of Brooklyn’s notorious housing projects who became hip-hop’s first billionaire in 2019” NRR and would be crowned as the solo artist with the most number one albums for a solo artist. NRR

Resources and Related Links: DMDB encyclopedia entry for Jay-Z AMG All Music Guide review by Jason Birchmeier FO Far Out (7/16/2021). “The 21 Best Albums of the 21st Century” by Jack Whatley, Joe Taysom, and Tom Taylor NRR National Recording Registry essay by Zack O’Malley Greenburg RS’20 Rolling Stone (9/22/2020). “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” WK Wikipedia First posted 3/30/2008; last updated 4/28/2022.

 

Prince 1999 released

1999 Prince

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. 1999 Little Red Corvette Delirious Let’s Pretend We’re Married D.M.S.R. Automatic Something in the Water Does Not Compute Free Lady Cab Driver All the Critics Love U in New York International Lover Total Running Time: 70:33 Tracks, Disc 2: Promo Mixes & B-Sides (2019 super deluxe reissue) 1999 (7” stereo edit) 1999 (7” mono promo-only edit) Free (promo-only edit) How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore? (recorded 4/28/1982, released 9/24/1982 as B-side of “1999”) B Little Red Corvette (7” edit) All the Critics Love U in New York (7” edit) Lady Cab Driver (7” edit) Little Red Corvette (dance remix promo-only edit) Little Red Corvette (special dance mix) Delirious (7” edit) Horny Toad (recorded 6/5/1982, released 8/17/1983 as B-side of “Delirious”) B Automatic (7” edit) Automatic (video version) Let’s Pretend We’re Married (7” edit) Let’s Pretend We’re Married (7” mono promo-only edit) Irresistible Bitch (recorded 9/7/1982, released 11/23/1983 as B-side of “Let’s Pretend We’re Married”) B Let’s Pretend We’re Married (video version) D.M.S.R. (edit) Tracks, Disc 3: Vault Tracks I (2019 super deluxe reissue) Feel Up Up Irresistible Bitch Money Don’t Grow on Trees Vagina Rearrange Bold Generation Colleen International Lover (take 1, live in studio) Turn It Up You’re All I Want > Something in the Water Does Not Compute (original version) If It’ll Make U Happy How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore? (take 2, live in studio) Tracks, Disc 4: Vault Tracks II (2019 super deluxe reissue): Possession (1982 version) Delirious (full-length) Purple Music Yah, You Know Moonbeam Levels No Call U Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got Do Yourself a Favor Don’t Let Him Fool Ya Teacher Teacher Lady Cab Driver / I Wanna Be Your Lover / Head / Little Red Corvette (tour demo) The collection also included a fifth disc. Click to see details of Live at Masonic Hall in Detroit, Michigan. Other Songs from This Era: Gigolos Get Lonely Too (Prince) [4:41] (The Time, 10/5/82, 77 RB) O You’re My Love (Prince) [4:24] (Kenny Rogers, 1986 album cut) O Nasty Girl (recorded late March 1982, released 8/11/1982 as a single by Vanity 6) Baby, You’re a Trip (Prince) [5:51] (Jill Jones, 1987 album cut) O Cloreen Bacon Skin (recorded 1983) [15:37] CB4 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).

The Early Years The 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 Sound For 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.” AM While 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.” PM A Wealth of Material Prince’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.” AM Here’s a breakdown of each of the individual songs.

1999 Prince

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: While “1999” is well remembered as one of Prince’s best songs, it wasn’t one of his biggest hits. Based solely on peaks on the Billboard Hot 100, twenty Prince songs fared better on the charts than “1999.” That includes nineteen top-10 hits and the #11 hit “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” In fact, the song didn’t even hit the top 40 – the first time around. When it was released as the lead single for the album of the same name, “1999” stalled at #44. After “Little Red Corvette” reached the top 10, “1999” was re-released and peaked at #12. In the year 1999, the song resurfaced, hitting #40. It then charted for a rare fourth time in 2016 after Prince’s death, reaching #27. It became the first song to chart in three different decades. SF 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

Awards: (Click on award to learn more).

Little Red Corvette Prince

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: BBC News says “‘Little Red Corvette’ is the song that made Prince a star” BBC and All Music Guide even says it “may be his very best.” JA He’d actually gone as high as #11 on the charts with “I Wanna Be Your Lover” in 1979, but this was his first top-10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. This one also was more radio-friendly because it featured “more shiny keyboards and less raw funk.” SF 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 Everything about this “after-dark masterpiece…is suggestive, from its moaning synthesizers to its bump-and-grind rhythm to the orgasmic squeals which punctuate Prince’s vocals.” JA It’s hard to imagine listeners didn’t pick up on the automobile metaphors as references to a one-night stand and even more laughable to think that people didn’t catch on that a line such as “she had a pocketful of horses, Trojans, some of them used” was a reference to condoms. 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).

Delirious Prince

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: “Delirious takes rockabilly riffs into the computer age.” AM

Let’s Pretend We’re Married Prince

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: “Let’s Pretend We’re Married is a salacious extended lust letter.” AM Tipper Gore (wife of future Vice-President Al Gore) “reportedly leaped from her couch to save her children’s ears from the raunchy lyrics of ‘Let’s Pretend We’re Married,’ but the droning, double-time grind of the bassline of the song is, if anything, even more suggestive.” SL

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: “Even though in the straight-up party-funk bomb D.M.S.R. Prince shouts, ‘I don’t want to be a poet ‘cuz I don’t want to blow it,’ the evidence strewn all throughout 1999 suggests that Prince can blow it out in his sleep.” SL

Automatic 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: “Automatic is what Kraftwerk would sound like if they exchanged their bicycles for loveless sex.” RD On the “nine-minute-long, bursting heart of ‘Automatic’” PM Prince “fashions a sonic that is as accessible as it is indescribable and provocative, with insatiable, well-paced lyrics about the art of pleasure and coveting (‘I’ll rub your back forever, it’s automatic’ and ‘Baby you’re a purple star in the night supreme’). The song is Prince’s forgotten opus.” PM It features “the atonal chorus of female orgasms sounding like the last few survivors of an orgy massacre.” SL

Something in the Water Does Not Compute Prince

Writer(s): Prince Recorded: April 1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 1999 (1982)

Free Prince

Writer(s): Prince Recorded: 4/25/1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 1999 (1982) About the Song: “Nearly every song on the album feels like a new direction for Prince.” SL “Free is an elegiac anthem” AM that “seems, upon first listen, to be a straightforward celebration of American freedoms” sup>SL but “the tremulously saccharine tone of the song stands in stark contrast to the balls-out assertiveness of the rest of the album.” SL “For a change, Prince had written a song whose meaning was not clearly discernible upon one listen.” SL

Lady Cab Driver Prince

Writer(s): Prince Recorded: 7/7/1982 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles Released: 1999 (1982) About the Song: “Lady Cab Driver, with its notorious bridge, is the culmination of all of his sexual fantasies.” AM It finds “Prince angrily rattling off an endless litany of life’s disappointments with each hump.” SL It “is funk with an itch begging to be scratched.” RD

All the Critics Love U in New York Prince

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: “All the Critics Love U in New York is a vicious attack at hipsters.” AM

International Lover Prince

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: This “is splendid silliness writ large.” RD The song landed Prince his first Grammy nomination – for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Male.

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: AM AllMusic.com review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine JA All Music Guide review Of “Little Red Corvette” by Jason Ankeny BBC BBC News (11/27/2019). “The real story behind Prince’s ‘Little Red Corvette’” by Mark Savage BC Benoit Clerc (2022). Prince: All the Songs – The Story Behind Every Track. Octopus Publishing Group Ltd.: Great Britain RD Robert Dimery (2006). 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Quintet Publishing Limited: New York, NY. Page 485. PM PasteMagazine.com (6/3/2024). “The 300 Greatest Albums of All Time” PV PrinceVault.com SL Slant Magazine (6/30/2003). “Vital Pop: 50 Essential Pop Albums” by Slant staff SF Songfacts page for “1999” song SF Songfacts page for “Little Red Corvette” WK Wikipedia page for “1999” song WK Wikipedia page for “Little Red Corvette” Related DMDB Pages: First posted 3/23/2008; last updated 7/27/2025.