Personal Best

Prince, "1999"
(Warner Bros., 1982)
http://archive.salon.com/...60617.html

By MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS



He'd had hits before, and his stunningly salacious previous albums "Controversy" and "Dirty Mind" had attracted a solid following of fans. But in 1982, Prince, a scrawny little man who'd barely cracked his 20s, exploded into superstardom with "1999."
In the early '80s, every new wave band worth its weight in cynical detachment had a synthesizer, but it was Prince who took the instrument's chilly sound and made it funky. And while it wouldn't be long before the term "gender bender" would come to mean cuddly camp or flinty androgyny, Prince wore eyeliner and bikinis with an in-your-face masculine swagger that clearly stemmed neither from sexual confusion nor fashionable artifice. He may just have been the last musical artist whose sound and image had the power to truly surprise anybody.

There'd certainly been predecessors (a tip of the hair gel and the flashy showmanship to Little Richard and James Brown), but Prince pushed the envelope further and did it with greater musical virtuosity. In his lacy, lipsticked persona, he took the long-standing soul tradition of the falsetto -- sounding like a girl to woo a girl -- and extended it to his whole body.

He could give a song a cozily euphemistic title like "Let's Pretend We're Married," dispense with his own formalities in the lyrics by suggesting that he'd like to fuck the taste out of your mouth, and wind up by invoking his love of God. He chanted "dance, music, sex, romance" and it sounded not like a party song but a battle cry. He made a quick screw with a lady cab driver into a social statement, as he thrust away with equal parts sexual passion and political rage. And for the pièce de résistance, the apocalyptic title song, he observed, "party over, oops, out of time" in a Strangelove-like warning and celebration that quickly established it as the anthem for the millennium. Prince made the end of the world sound like the biggest bash ever imagined.

With "1999," he was at the crossroads between the outrageously horny Prince of earlier works and the more mature and complicated artist-formerly-known-as-Prince he would become. His blend of youthful exuberance and world-weary exasperation made this his crowning achievement, one of the most intelligently insouciant works ever recorded. It was in many ways, the perfect album for the '80s -- for the beginning of AIDS and the end of the Cold War, for junk bonds and downward mobility. Neither naively optimistic nor gloomily nihilistic, "1999" was a brilliantly eyes-wide-open affair. It said, yes, we are in fact hurtling toward oblivion, let me show you how to enjoy the ride.