I’ve been doing this series of “Thirty Years Ago Today” anniversary posts about great music of the eighties for quite a while now.

Here’s the thing I’ve discovered in writing this series; for many of the records I’ve covered – The RIver, Shoot Out The Lights – it hardly seems like it’s been thirty years, since the records seem (to me, anyway) so very timeless; they’re no less a soundtrack in my forties than they were in my teens and twenties.

With others, though?  They’re definitely archaeological artifacts; Boy, U2’s first album, hinted at greatness and timelessness to come, but it was very much a time capsule for an idealistic post-punk do it yourself world of music I craved being in at the time.  Zenyatta Mondatta and Blizzard of Ozz seem like museum exhibits showcasing one of those rare times in music when pretty much anything went.

 

• an inflection point in R&B between the funk of the seventies and the hip-hop-inflected R&B of the nineties, 1999 was a key turning point.  While there was no hip-hop on the album – the term was still on the fringe of pop music culture in 1982 – 1999 linked the big-funk-band ’70s with the technology-driven groove that has dominated R&B for the past twenty-odd years.  Listen to “DMSR”, and tell me that’s not made for sampling.
• an era driven by unprecedented change in music technology:  In spades.  There’d been synth-pop albums before 1999; there’d be many after.  But when it came to integrating bleeding-edge technology (synths, a top-of-the-line Linn drum machine) with tradition (Prince’s signature Hofner guitar, a cheapo knockoff of a Fender Telecaster), 1999 was the gold standard.  Listen to “Let’s Pretend We’re Married”, or the title cut, for two of the most glorious melanges of style…ever!
• a period of glorious intermingling between “black” and “white” music:  There’s a story – possibly apocryphal, although I remember it came from a decent source back (koff koff) years ago – that John Mellencamp, who was just starting to wiggle his way toward critical respectability, came out to do an encore at a show, carrying a boom box.  As the story goes, he said “This is a great rock and roll song”, held the boom box up to the mike, and played “Little Red Corvette” for the audience.   This was kind of a big deal for me; you didn’t get exposed to a lot of “black” music in rural North Dakota in those days.  And learning from Mellencamp (for whom I didn’t much care at the time) that there was  in fact a link between R&B and R&R kicked loose a brick in my mind that got me thinking, and sent me – thirty years ago this coming winter – into the back room at the radio station I was working at, to dig out some old Motwn records and start piecing together the great rock and roll tradition for myself.
• Minneapolis’ musical glory days:  this was the album that blasted the Twin Cities onto the musical map.

It’s all of that.  And it was anything but timeless; how many albums give themselves a shelf-date?   The world didn’t end in 2000; everyone had a bomb but we all didn’t die any day, not yet.   “Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999” is a statement of ironic nostalgia.

But as an artifact of a long-gone time?

What an artifact.

And what a time!