In 1982, the Cold War was reaching a climax, Prince foresaw the end of the world by 2000 at the latest – and commented on the apocalypse with an ecstatic “Oops!” His song “1999”, no, the whole album was an expression of a feverish now-or-never mood, translated into nervous rhythms, christened “Minneapolis Sound”: Prince played rockabilly guitar on the drum machine and preferred to use brass instruments where brass was expected Synthesizer, which gave the songs a cold, New Wave-inspired robotic aesthetic. Steam engines plucked during sex in “Little Red Corvette.” Prince was Elvis in Metropolis.
A song like “DMSR” proves that he knew no hierarchy of feelings: the order of the words “dance”, “music”, “sex” and “romance” he shouted seems to have no causal connection, more like a “Yes!” to the simultaneity of the most beautiful things. Anyone who heard all this for the first time in 1982 realized: This music will never be forgotten.
Now, three years after the master’s death, the Prince estate is getting serious and, for the first time, on ten LPs or five CDs plus DVD, is giving an idea of how much source material precedes a Prince album. Here alone 24 songs from the treasure trove “The Vault”. “Vagina” shows the later unthinkable Prince who left his sexual identity unclear and felt turned on by someone “half-boy, half-girl” in a “gay bar” because he was kissing a woman – “the best of both worlds! Many songs were so good that he continued to use them as album tracks (“Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got”), singles (“Bold Generation,” which became “New Power Generation”) until the beginning of the next decade. or could use or at least plan for side projects (the Camille song “Feel U Up”).
But especially with mega-projects like this “1999” set, an assessment of the failures is necessary. Some are understandable. One would love to see raw footage from Prince’s first unrealized film, The Second Coming, but it may not be presentable. And the search for the piano demo of “Raspberry Beret” drove the executors crazy – unfortunately it was unsuccessful.
Prince: from star to superstar
But like the otherwise rather poor “Purple Rain” reissue from 2017, this edition also contains several single versions. Waste of space! Prince singles are album versions with fade-outs from minute three onwards, and you can make them yourself: just turn the stereo down and down. This space should have been filled with the unknown. The omission of the available, important “Extraloveable” leaves you perplexed, while “Lust U Always” was perhaps left out for reasons of reputation because Prince threatens a woman with rape if she doesn’t allow himself to be charmed. Nothing should be kept quiet. Because that, too, could be Prince in 1982: an aggressor like in the “Dirty Mind” era, when the world turned away from him.
“1999” still made him a star, and “Purple Rain,” released two years later, made him a superstar. The interim phase was the most fascinating of his life. It is invaluable that live material from that era is finally appearing. “1999” was a late bloomer and took months to become a hit, but Prince was already establishing himself as the greatest artist of all time, as the concert in Houston documents.
Everything there looked like “Purple Rain”: He found the color purple, got the band in line, they had to dance according to strict choreography, the stage was two stories high, he swung down from an archway, worked on the image as the ultimate seducer, as in “International Lover.” His guitarist Dez Dickerson’s solo on “Little Red Corvette” would remain the only distinctive one by another musician that Prince allowed until his death.
Prince was so confident in his show that he shot all of the “1999” single videos on this stage. But “Purple Rain” was a well-planned attempt to be loved by everyone, including the white rock audience. Imagine if that had failed. “1999” would then not be seen as a precursor to global fame, but rather as what it really stands for and what this long-overdue re-release shows you: the vision of an artist who invented a style and exhibited it as a sensation.
The first spoke of genius.