Album · Prince
1999 by Prince
1999 is an album by Prince, released in 1982. 3 songs from it have charted on rock radio countdowns, with 60 countdown appearances in total. The biggest is “1999”, on 37 lists and voted number one once.
1999, Prince's fifth album, came out on Warner Bros. on October 27, 1982, a sprawling double album and the first he made with his band the Revolution. He produced it himself, with Sunset Sound among the studios in the credits, and the sound is pure Minneapolis: drum machines ticking like time bombs, synthesizers stabbing like a horn section, and funk so lean you can count its ribs.
The title track is a party record built on nuclear dread, "Little Red Corvette" cruises on a slow-burning groove and gave him his highest US single up to then, and "Delirious" is a jittery, hiccuping sprint. The videos for "1999" and "Little Red Corvette" were all over MTV, putting Prince among the first Black artists the channel played heavily. This was the breakthrough, the launch pad for the two white-hot years that followed, and fittingly it went quadruple platinum in 1999. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs from 1999 on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1999 | 37 | #1 | 1 | 1987–2026 | |
| 2 | Little Red Corvette | 21 | #12 | – | 1988–2026 | |
| 3 | Delirious | 2 | #791 | – | 2018–2021 |
Only songs that appear on at least one countdown are listed. Release data from MusicBrainz.