1999

For all the hot-pink light bathing 30-years-on memories of the '80s, that decade was full of dread—bad guys lurked around corners, and the threat of nuclear war hovered over the world’s geopolitik. 1999, Prince’s fifth album, opens with reassurance: “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt U,” a mushily robotic voice announces. “I only want U to have some fun.” The song that follows is the record’s title track, and with its lyrical laser focus on the world possibly ending, if not imminently then eventually, it fulfills that promise. Prince realizes the power of saying “Fuck it, let’s party” in the face of near-assured annihilation, a gesture that foments an effervescent, uncontrollable glee. (Which, here, is depicted by mashed-on keyboards and a joyously wailed policy of ejecting anyone who might be in a less-than-celebratory mood.)

But we all die eventually, right? That’s the attitude that runs through much of 1999, which powers itself with machines like the Oberheim OB-SX and the Linn LM–1 while taking a slightly more sober view of the pleasures that dominated so much of Prince’s earlier work. Dangers—the bomb, “brand new laws,” sneering critics—get their airing, and time might be running out (Party over, oops!). Best, then, to get in all the good stuff while one still can, whether those feelings come from extended make-out sessions in the back of a slick car (the simmering “Little Red Corvette,” which emerges from a plume of smoke to become one of Prince’s most potent fusions of funk’s swing and rock’s swagger), late-night secrets about love and lust told among icy synthscapes (the stretched-out seduction “Automatic”), or Prince’s Holy Quadrality of Dance, Music, Sex, and Romance (the jittery “D.M.S.R.”).

1999 is a sprawling double album (“D.M.S.R.” was cut from initial CD pressings to make it fit on a single disc) on which Prince indulged his curiosity in new technology, but what’s remarkable about it is how tightly-wound it feels, even on the more far-flung jams. “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)” is claustrophobic and tense, Prince’s pleas to a lover who’s left him behind made even more frantic by the cacophony of digital sounds ricocheting around the mix. (It’s the song that probably brings Prince’s admitted influence of Blade Runner to mind the most.) “Lady Cab Driver” unfolds like a movie playing on fast-forward in Prince’s dirty mind, with a request for a “ride” turning into a bit of slap-and-tickle play before fading back to reality—as evidenced by scritching guitars and the reprise of the song’s feather-light hook.

Then there’s “Delirious,” one of Prince’s most unbridled offerings, its wheezing keyboards sounding like a mind left alone to whirl, propelled by a dizzyingly upbeat drum track and Prince’s half-sneeze vocals. The one-two punch of that track and the Erotic City staycation “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” is enough to drive even the most buttoned-up listener to their own personal brink—one that arrives even before Prince murmurs, “I’m not sayin’ this just 2 be nasty/I sincerely wanna fuck the taste out of your mouth/Can U relate?” Well. When U put it like that…

It’s not all fun and sex games, of course; even though “1999” makes the idea of impending apocalypse alluring, the planet still goes kablooey when all is said and done. The piano ballad “Free” presents Prince in tender mode, smearing the personal and political together as he sings “Be glad that u r free/Free 2 change your mind.” The music grows increasingly stirring, with militaristic drums and fiercely slapped bass fighting for supremacy as Prince sings of creeping clamp-downs. And “All the Critics Love U in New York” takes the self-regard exhibited by the city and its more pretentious inhabitants and mashes it into a ball. But those forays into the wider world only give the more pleasure-minded tracks on 1999 more urgency and lightness.

Prince played with different toys on 1999—new synths, new sexual frontiers, new paranoias. He bent them to his will, though, and this 11-song opus was the result. Balancing synth-funk explorations that would reverberate through radio playlists’ ensuing years, taut pop construction, genre-bending, and the proto-nuclear fallout of lust, 1999 still sounds like a landmark release in 2016; Prince’s singular vision and willingness to indulge his curiosities just enough created an apocalypse-anticipating album that, perhaps paradoxically, was built to last for decades and even centuries to come.