1999

Prince said in a December 1999 interview that the song came from a 1982 television special about the year 1999 and what might happen then. The people he watched it with were dreading those days, he said, but he never felt it would be rough for him, and he wanted to write something that gave hope. Bobby Z. said in 2019 that the special was a documentary on Nostradamus, seen at a hotel stop on the Dirty Mind tour, and that by the next day Prince had already written the song. It was recorded on 7 August 1982 at his home studio in Chanhassen. Prince shares the lead vocal with Dez Dickerson, Lisa Coleman and Jill Jones, and scratching and explosion noises cover mistakes in a good take. Pitchfork heard it as the power of saying let's party in the face of near-certain annihilation.

The single, released on 24 September 1982, first peaked at number 44 on the Hot 100. A 1983 reissue took it to number 12, and a January 1985 double A-side with Little Red Corvette reached number two in the United Kingdom. Bruce Gowers directed the video, shot in the last week of rehearsals for the 1999 Tour, and MTV added it to rotation on 16 December 1982. Billboard said the apocalypse had never sounded so danceable. Phil Collins confirmed that his 1985 song Sussudio sounds very similar to it.

Later

It re-entered the Hot 100 at number 40 on 16 January 1999, the only song named after a year to chart in that year, and Prince re-recorded it that year as 1999 (The New Master). After his death it became the first song in Billboard history to reach the top 40 of the Hot 100 in three separate decades. Logged performances of it number 658, from 11 November 1982 at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga to 31 December 2015 on St. Barts.