1999 Forever

1999 Forever

By: Erreh Svaia

“What's missing from pop music is danger.”

Prince

In the early 80s I was a big fan of music videos, it was a phenomenon born with MTV, I remember watching Michael Jackson, Madonna, Def Leppard, Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot and Prince, among others, I grew up like many others to hate 80s pop, but then I discovered 80s American underground and I freaked out, still, like many people my age, 80s pop is still present, hidden somewhere inside our minds, when I think about it, images of the 80s come exactly like those faded Betamax cassettes that lasted for very little time, is like memories slowly disappearing and turning into ghostly shadows.

But not all 80s pop was terrible, even Lou Reed got his chance at making videos and have his 15 minutes of fame, as his mentor Andy Warhol predicted, and besides the hard rock, heavy metal of the Leppards, the Twisted Sisters and Quiet Riots, there was also the ambitious and arty funk pop of Prince, an intrigue figure which looked like an alien in the plastic pop scene, part Jimi Hendrix, part James Brown, part George Clinton and part David Bowie, impossible to classify and with audacious musical ideas, Prince was able to turn pop music inside out, he brought the glossy funk of Parliament to the top of the charts, at a time when funk wasn't exactly familiar with white audience, he loved blues and performed long Hendrixian jams in his concerts, he was also pushing pop to the limits while performing risky songs that alienated some audiences, the legendary PMRC led by Tipper Gore in the 90s and that pushed the music industry to introduce the infamous "explicit lyrics" sticker on records, that rather than warn buyers, intrigued them more.

Prince made a movie also, and a great soundtrack for it, he elevated pop music into something wild, intellectual, sexy and dangerous, I remember watching the movie as a kid while my parents weren't at home, it was the first time I watched an adult movie, honestly, I thought it was just a musical performance by Prince, but it was really something else, Prince even made a soundtrack for a movie he didn't starred, he did it for the Batman movie, his craziness matched the crazed vision of Tim Burton, he made a perfect paranoid soundtrack for a death match between two great actors, Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton.

But the best thing about Prince is that he made timeless music, When Doves Cry could have been recorded yesterday, Let's Go Crazy still sounds crazy, Purple Rain still makes me want to cry, Raspberry Beret hasn't lost its sexy side and Darling Nikki is still my favorite Prince song, damn, he even made recently a hard rocking record and a crazed electronic one, he might have been a bit of an asshole when it came to copyright of his music, but he was a complete musical genius who knew how to transcend space and time, even if you liked pop, hard rock, metal, funk or dance music, you just couldn't escape Prince musical spell, a true unique character, now gone, but at the same time, now immortal.