The early 80s were a scary time to be alive. A gung-ho elderly president in the White House and the imminent threat of nuclear war at any moment - oh, wait, guess things haven’t changed all that much. Anyway, we all lived with dreams of purple skies and people running everywhere, so Prince’s song 1999 was a perfect encapsulation of the zeitgeist of partying in the face of Armageddon.
The follow up single Little Red Corvette similarly caught the spirit of the hedonistic materialism of the era, although there were some lines alluding to casual sex that might have raised a few eyebrows if you listened closely and knew what a packet of Trojans was.
Anyone who bought the album off the back of the singles without being previously aware of Prince’s oeuvre was in for an extremely rude awakening by the time they got to tracks like “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” which leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination.
The opening tracks aside, I don’t think that the rest of this album holds up particularly well, at least compared to his later work, with too much reliance on early drum machines and weedy 80s production. This was a double album and too many songs are stretched way too thin and even the remastered version fails to rescue them.
https://album.link/gb/i/1479564716
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