Tag: 1984
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1999
What set Prince apart from his early-’80s peers was his insistence on greeting Judgment Day, not with solemn gravity or mordant gallows humor, but with a seemingly irony-free display of millenarian ecstasy.
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Onedayi’mgonnabesomebody
Recorded around the same time as “777-9311” in late Spring 1982, “Onedayi’mgonnabesomebody” was a slight, palate-cleansing trifle to fill out the first side of the album.
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Automatic
On “Automatic,” Prince distills the intricacies of romantic and sexual connection into a clean, simple cause-and-effect relationship: love and lust as a computer programmer’s conditional expressions.
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Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)
If “Something in the Water”’s music wasn’t so beautiful, the self-pity and solipsism of its lyrics would begin to feel ugly: an adolescent projection of self-loathing into a spitefully generic female tormenter.
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How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?
“How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” feels in many ways like Prince’s Ur-song: a pure expression of the carnal and emotional longing at his core, drawn from the deep well of the African American musical tradition.