1999
by Prince
The 203rd greatest album of all time
1999 is a synth-forward album that blends funk, pop, dance-pop, rock, and new wave into tightly arranged, danceable songs marked by punchy drum-machine grooves, layered synthesizers, rhythmic guitar work, and Prince's versatile vocals. The music pairs upbeat, club-ready production with darker lyrical themes about urgency and impending crisis, creating a tense party-at-the-end-of-the-world vibe. Its eclectic, genre-blurring approach helped expand Prince's sound and influenced the direction of early 1980s pop and dance music.
Appears On These Lists
500 Greatest Albums of All Time: 2023 edition
Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (2023 update) is the latest edition of the magazi...
VH1’s Top 100 Albums
VH1’s Top 100 Albums (aired January 2001 as a five-part TV special) is a ranked, all-time list bu...
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2005)
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die is a long-running reference book series (first published...
Pitchfork’s The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s
Pitchfork’s The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s (Sept. 10, 2018) is a staff-curated, ranked retrospe...
Colin Larkin’s All Time Top 1000 Albums
A book series created by Encyclopedia of Popular Music editor Colin Larkin (1st ed. 1994; later p...
The Top 10 Albums of the 1980s
In a Los Angeles Times critics’ poll published December 24, 1989, the paper’s regular pop-music r...
The 100 Albums of the 80s
This is a ranked, end-of-decade canon that leans heavily toward the decade’s post-punk / new wave...
The 100 Best Albums of All Time
Sounds, the influential UK weekly music paper (1970–1991), published an All-Time Top 100 Albums c...
The 1000 Best Albums of All Time (Updated 2015)
This list is basically a personal canon of albums across the modern LP era (framed on-site as “si...
The Greatest Music