Jasun

I’ll take you back to 1982. I was in 8th grade and my love of music had become my escape from living in a tiny, remote shithole of a town in Atlantic Canada. The B-52’s told me not to worry because even if I was in outer space, there were thousands of others like me. The Missing Persons told me of a magical city called LA where nobody walked and Blondie created a universe of tribal warfare and interstellar spaceship races.
But all of this music was hard to find.  Radio wasn’t playing anything very cool, and the one TV show that did show New Wave and punk (called The New Music) was only 30 minutes long once per week. I had never heard of Prince before. But the review of his new double album 1999 sounded like something that I’d love. They raved about how it was a funky, futuristic, dark but still danceable world he created and based on that review alone, I went to the nearby city of Moncton and bought a copy of it. The first ever Prince recording I heard was his Darth Vader-ish vocoder, detuned voice saying “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you, I only want you to have some fun.”
And fun I had. I held onto that album like a secret viewport into a universe I could only dream of being real. I don’t recall talking about it at school… it was my secret love. That album was released around the same time as Michael Jackson’s Thriller and while that was a very fun pop record, 1999 was its dirty minded older brother.
The copy you see above is the copy I bought all those years ago… it still has the hype sticker on it and the record is in shockingly good shape considering just how many plays it’s had over the years.
Prince of course went on to become one of the biggest rock stars in history. He revolutionized music and the music industry and then sat back and watched as people reacted to it all.