1999 (1982)
Deep within the cold, slow-beating heart of 1999 lurks a song so hypnotic that four minutes in, just after its natural finishing point, it mesmerises Prince himself. This causes him to start muttering barely-coherent, semi-conscious desires about pleasure and pain. With the composer now incapacitated there’s nobody around to draw the groove to a close. It continues. Six minutes in and its tentacles are embedded so deep they’re able to extract Prince’s innermost, darkest fantasies. We get a touch of International Lover pilot roleplay, a mention of torture, then a chorus of moans and screams from Marquis de Sade’s jail cell. You can see this S&M fantasy play out in the accompanying video where Lisa and Jill tie a submissive Prince to a golden bed and whip him under a harsh blue light. Sated by these extracted visions Automatic withdraws before the ten-minute mark and falls into a deep slumber. It will be 12 months before it feels the need to feast again.
They’re coming fast and furious now. Can’t wait to see the top 100…. Great song – was expecting this and I Feel for You to crack the top 80.
Both were in my top 80 until recently. They were edged out by new found appreciation for some of his more overlooked joints.
I would have expected this closer to top 10
To be honest I think every track in my top 100 have been in my top 10 at least at some point. It’s getting hard to choose between them now.
i hear you…the fun of the list is in the diversity of opinion and, for me, discovering new tunes. Regular reader here. I should have led with appreciation. 🙂 Yes the S&M theme hits you over the head, but the real show stopper here is the Gary Numan esque style. Cars meets bondage
This is also top tier purple material for me, possibly the undistilled pinnacle of the man and his music prior to the superstardom that changes every artist irreparably. I don’t have to be in a certain mood to love it, as I do with some of his masterpieces. I could listen to it all day, every day. Danceable but cerebral enough to avoid banality, repetitive but littered with random percussive twitches and spasms, harrowing guitar work, synths turned up to 11, economic brilliance with the LinnDrum. The video is one of his best (Lisa will never cease to crack me up with her lifelong healthy sarcastic disdain for the man). And a line like ‘Even when I’m right, I’ll be wrong,’ – though dishonest (this is Prince we’re talking about – is every bit as good as the oft quoted “Would you run to me…” bit from IIWYG. I love it. It’s automatic.
Hah, yes that’s a great line. The flip of Nikki Giovanni’s “I’m so hip even my errors are correct”.