Prince, ‘1999’, and the rise of a new kind of rock star
It’s the fall of 1981, and Prince and his bandmates are sitting in a hotel room, half of the shows of the Controversy tour complete, whiling away the night with a movie. The movie is The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, and in it, the message that the world would end in 1999 became lodged in Prince’s brain, so much so that it sent shockwaves down to his vocal cords and fingers. Thus, the story begins.
There was never a moment when Prince wasn’t a genius. He was always bursting with creativity, but until then, though his music was doing fine, he wasn’t reaching the heights he knew he could. It’s impossible to pinpoint the different elements of Prince that make him such a renowned figure; to chalk it off as something like ‘innovation’ or ‘ingenuity’ would be lazy and an insult to his memory. Instead, a million little moments came together to create something the world hadn’t experienced and won’t experience again.
Prince is A Saturday On La Grande Jatte, and his innovation is spread out amongst the 1000s of dots that make it up. We get to see the masterpiece in all its glory, but to truly understand how it works, we need to focus on the minor details contributing to it. Prince wasn’t just a musician; he was an artist who wasn’t afraid to reject the norms of funk and rock music to create something the world wasn’t ready for. A sound that would bring it to its knees as much as the apocalypse itself.
In turning away from the initial blueprint set out in the music world, Prince was able to create something that stood out, was met with positive and negative uproar and managed to covey a political message simultaneously.
Questlove recalled the first time he heard the song, “When I first got Prince’s 1999 album, it was 1982. I was 11, newly in charge of my own record-buying habits. And I couldn’t resist the cover, with its purple field of stars, Prince’s name, the numbers, and all the hidden-meaning illustrations… My parent’s didn’t agree. They were born-again Christians at that point, and Prince – with his overt sexuality and profanity – was a bridge too far. Plus, when you turned the album cover upside down, the 999 went to 666, the mark of the beast.”
This was a mindset shared by many conservative parents in America. Despite ‘1999’ being an anti-war party song, a lot of Prince’s other music was overtly sexual, and as such, it was strictly off-limits. People were enticed by him, though; the excellent musical ability, the flamboyancy, and the talent were infectious, so people found a way to listen even if the record had been banned.
“My mom found the record and threw it away,” remembers Questlove, “Winter came. I shovelled snow until I had enough money to buy it a second time. That one went into the garbage, too. There was a third record that just vanished without a trace, and a fourth that got broken over my fathers knee. That fourth infraction came accompanied by a month of punishment. A little while after that, I got smarter, meaning sneakier. I found a friend to make me cassettes of Prince’s albums. At home, I loosened the heads of my drums and hid the contraband in there. I listened when I was practicing, playing something totally different on the drums so that my parents wouldn’t know what I was actually hearing.”
Prince was a new kind of rockstar. He trusted his intuition so much that the work that followed might have sounded experimental, but it was just a perfect reflection of his mind. To make a song in 1982, called ‘1999,’ that still sounds futuristic in 2024 is all that it takes to recognise his genius, one of the best musicians ever to pick up a guitar. And if the world were to end tomorrow, at least we existed at the same time he did.
