Review Summary: One of the greatest pop albums ever made; also one of the most insane
I remember when my old bandmate Julian introduced me to Prince. We’d just finished a few slapdash recordings, just the two of us and a dusty old Casio. We both decided we needed a break, so Julian put his iPod on shuffle. After a few horrible Green Day songs, something different came on. It was “Free,” from Prince’s breakthrough album 1999. At first, I listened pleasantly and couldn’t really distinguish it from any other soul ballad. And then the scream came in. 3 minutes and 39 seconds in, an explosion of vocal ecstasy which could be one of the single greatest moments in all of pop music. And the first thing I thought was why can’t I scream like that? I felt a bit like one of those teen girls who feel they should look like the outrageously thin and PhotoShopped models in all the magazines, even though the better part of them knows that look is absolutely unnatural. I thought, I should be able to do this! while at the same time, I knew that to be able to do what Prince was doing was an extremely rare ability. I’m not saying Prince made it look easy--he just makes it look possible.
I then found my parents’ copy of the album and gave it a few listens. After I was finished obsessing over his voice, I thought, not only is he gifted with this insane voice, he’s an amazing guitarist, keyboardist, and lyricist. Then the complexities of the album began to unravel. Here’s this dude who’s ugly as *** but manages to sound unbelievably sexy on record. And he’s trying to seduce your ears over these long extended beats that don’t go anywhere at all. Wait a minute... 75 percent of this album is just beats and dry-humping! Why is it so good? Maybe it’s because he has the ridiculous chops to pull it all off. I’m still finding new reasons why 1999 is such a masterpiece.
Actually, 1999 often seems like the kind of album that would be shockingly easy to create. The whole thing is very minimal, excluding the first two songs (the title track and the shockingly beautiful “Little Red Corvette”). He could have created it with GarageBand loops today for a similar sound. But it’s the hidden complexities that count--the way all the chaos is shockingly organized, the way he can find exactly the right spots in the seas of repetition to actually change something, the barely noticeable but brilliantly placed musique concrete samples (“Lady Cab Driver”’s inexplicable seagulls).
It’s tempting to say this album is split into two--the pop songs and the avant-garde experiments. While all the songs on the album are split into one of those two camps, they mesh so perfectly it would be inaccurate to create any type of split or rift between them. Look at how “Delirious,” the most concise pop song on the album, yields to the droning, seven-and-a-half-minute humpfest “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” Or the aforementioned “Free” into the sprawling, seething musical rant “Lady Cab Driver.” And it works. Similar attempts at such a harshly divided synthesis between all-out experimentation and radio-friendly songcraft have mostly met with failure, but Prince pulls it off, and how is anybody’s guess. Perhaps it’s because he’s equally good at both.
But behind all the myriad things we can say about the album stylistically, there are songs--which is what this whole dealie is all about, anyway. Prince knows how to toss together a good song, and it shows--he has a strong grasp of songform, and when he’s not squealing and moaning over some beat for ten minutes, he creates pop songs that are absolutely immaculate in terms of general form. On the entire album, there is only one song on which he falls flat in this sense--”D.M.S.R.,” one of the most annoying tracks the dude has ever put together. But both Julian and I had the original CD edition, which excluded "D.M.S.R." for length-related reasons, and most of this review excludes “D.M.S.R.” from discussion.
There is so much to say about 1999, it seems impossible to take all my different ideas and merge them into something coherent. I would need to find exactly the right places in what I have of the review so far to create an article that reads as one continuous piece. The funny thing is, that’s exactly what Prince succeeds in doing on this album--it’s a sprawling hour and a half of music, yes, but a tight and enjoyable one that is never dull and always fast-paced. There is simply too much that is good about it, and after dozens of listens, I still get lost in my own love of this album.
