When Prince released the album 1999 in the final months of 1982, the world was edging ever closer to that apocalyptic year George Orwell had deemed to be 1984 (little did he know, that was to be quite a rosy time with the benefit and curse of hindsight). The dark conservative pall that had befallen the U.S. as Reaganism took hold of it was best evinced by the then recent attempt on Ronald’s (not Donald’s, alas) life by John Hinckley Jr. Just sixty-nine (har har) days after Reagan had assumed the presidency, it was already clear that even if Hinckley was driven to do it to impress a girl (Jodie Foster), there was enough sentiment in his actions as a representation of the collective not feeling anything for this “old geezer,” who needed to be wiped out for his antiquated mentality anyway.
The threat of nuclear war set against the backdrop of the still non-thawing Cold War heightened the sense of doom among the masses as they looked to the Doomsday Clock hitting 11:56 in 1981 and 11:57 in 1984. For a frame of reference, the clock was created in 1947 at the University of Chicago to effectively convey to the mongoloids of earth how their behavior affects the prevalence of “the end is nigh” signs, and it was initially set at 11:53 to infer how close humanity was to midnight a.k.a armageddon, the end of the world, etc.
With all of this being said, it’s no wonder Prince’s version of “1999” contained such ominous lyrics as, “But when I woke up this morning/I could have sworn it was Judgement Day” and “The sky was all purple/There were people runnin’ everywhere/Tryin’ to run from the destruction/And you know I didn’t even care.” Thus, looking to the future in some way for hope–or rather, hoping to remain arrested forever in 1999 so that the clock could never say, “2000 zero zero party over oops out of time”–Prince asserts, “Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.” The irony of this, of course, is that it was assumed things could only get better after such a dark period as the 80s, mirrored at their sinister best by After Hours and American Psycho. Luckily for him, Prince died before he could ever see just how much the pendulum could shift back to a spectrum even more rife with escalating Doomsday Clock potential than the early 80s, not making it to see the election of the Orange One.
Using this context regarding the time frame within which the first “1999” was constructed, we now come to the 2018 one, helping Troye Sivan to finally mask the fact that his music is bad (which he tried to do less successfully in his collaboration with Ariana Grande on “Dance To This”) in glomming onto Charli XCX’s talent with “1999.” Produced by Oscar Holter–a Swede, naturally (after all, the duo is for most of the duration paying homage to Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time”–written and produced by one of the most beloved of all Swedes in the pop music world, Max Martin [with some help from fellow Swede, Rami])–the song’s house organ-inspired backing even sounds like something directly out of the dance compilation section of the Tower Records of the 90s. This adroitness at re-creating the feeling and vibe is also present on the single’s album artwork, on which Charli and Sivan appear as Trinity and Neo since, as any millennial knows, The Matrix was released in the beloved year romanticized throughout the song (“those days, it was so much better”–which, yes, they really and truly and objectively were, per the Midnight in Paris plot conundrum post-2011).
Yearning for those simple times that were also craved in the 90s with reference to the 70s (see: Now and Then, Dazed and Confused), Charli and Sivan ruminate on a more carefree–and technology-free–time with the lyric, “Playin’ air guitar on the roof/In the kitchen, up on the table/Like we had a beautiful view/I wanna go/I just wanna go back, back to 1999.” The purity of an era where imagination through boredom was unmarred by full-fledged Fahrenheit 451 screen attachment is, indeed, nothing to balk at; no, it’s no wonder at all that they hunger for this final year in a period that we can genuinely reflect upon as the Golden Age of, if not humanity, well then, at least the “Western world”–economically, politically and pop culturally speaking. Where the latter is concerned Charli XCX and Sivan each get their moment to name check specific entities or people that they recall with fondness, like when Charli rattles off, “Nike Airs, All That, CD, old Mercedes/Drive ’round listening to Shady” or Sivan gets all erect thinking about, “JTT on MTV, and when I close my eyes/And I’m right there, right there.” But you’re not, Sivan. You’re not (kind of like the reverse of, “But ya are, Blanche. Ya are in the chair!“). And who knows if he meant JTT to double as Justin Timberlake and Jonathan Taylor Thomas (likely not, but one can dream).
This longing for a moment in time less fraught with depressing news headlines (or at least headlines that weren’t over saturating our minds at such a high turnover on the internet, the smartphone and the TV), is not new, even in Charli XCX’s work–but it’s definitely become more pronounced as we attempt unsuccessfully to move into the future. A common theme in XCX’s music of late has very much been that of wistfulness, using the exact same phrase (which isn’t quite the same as reverting to a rhyme already used) as she did in last year’s “1 Night” with Mura Masa: “I just wanna go back.” Alas, we’ve been propelled forward “like sands through the hourglass.” And the only way to go back, one supposes, is by getting drunk on nostalgia (Lana Del Rey knows all to well how to do that–or at least evoke that). The problem is, like most of what the present entails, it’s synthetic. As is the case when Charli XCX repackages “mo money mo problems” (from 1997, mind you) into “no money no problem” (another lie told by a pop song…apart from promising love everlasting with the rhymes “me” and “you”).
The dichotomy of Prince’s “1999” compared to Charli XCX’s is a strong indication of how short we as a society have fallen of our hopeful expectations for the future (even Back to the Future inferred much greater progress than where we’re at–like where the fuck is my flying car?). At the moment, we’re then fittingly, for the second time in history, the closest we’ve ever been to midnight on the Doomsday Clock. So yeah, don’t begrudge Charli XCX and Troye Sivan a little lust for the past–since millennials must always be condemned for their obsession with nostalgia for their Golden Age. The thing is, it wasn’t just theirs, it was everyone’s. 1991, after all, was the lowest the clock had ever gone, dipping to seventeen minutes away from irrevocable catastrophe.
