A great title track is par for the course when it comes to great albums. If the title track doesn’t cut it, what does that say about the album itself? This month, the Mental Jukebox will be playing some of my favorite title tracks – inspired by @NicolaB_73’s music Twitter challenge, #TopTitleTracks.
Prince is one of those artists that’s more impressive to me in retrospect. Looking back, it’s simply mindblowing how much ground he covered musically. He ruled in so many different genres, from synth pop to funk to rock to R&B. And, in many cases, he was a pioneer, being the genius behind many music firsts. “1999” is one such song, pushing the lyrical boundaries of pop and paving the way for the Minneapolis sound.
This was a song that I heard and viewed constantly on MTV. The video simply didn’t give it justice because it only reinforced the fact the musicians indeed wanted to “party like it’s 1999”. But the impressive thing about this early hit was that it was a protest against nuclear proliferation. It was a politically charged piece, but people saw it as a party song. On the entire 1999 album, Prince played almost all of the instrumental tracks — and his synth work on the title track was especially impressive on two fronts. First, it sounded like nothing else out there. Second, it helped create a divergent synth pop path away from new wave and into a new genre that bared Prince’s hometown name: the Minneapolis sound.
“War is all around us. My mind says prepare to fight. So if I gotta die I'm gonna listen to my body tonight.”