Prince entered the music industry during a time of overt segregation. As his former guitarist Dez Dickerson observed, there was white radio and black radio, white audiences and black audiences. So, while Prince enjoyed great success with black audiences from his debut album forward, systemic racism denied him access to the resources and wealth that accompanied “crossing over” to larger, white audiences. However, that changed with his fifth album. This presentation will explore how with 1999 Prince debuted the strategy he would deploy at different stages of his career to achieve crossover success.

Kamilah Cummings is a writer, editor, and visiting senior lecturer at DePaul University in Chicago. She has presented on Prince at Purple Reign, the first academic Prince conference (University of Salford, UK), and at Polished Solid Prince symposia at New York University, Spelman College, and online. She has also presented on Prince at The 2021 Pop Convergence (PopCon). Her work on Prince has been published in the Howard Journal of Communications special issue Prince in/as Blackness . . . and Prince and Popular Music: Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life (Bloomsbury). She has also created the course, Prince: A New Breed Leader. A House music researcher as well, she created the course The House Chicago Built, has presented on House music at Black Portraiture[s] IV (Harvard University), and appears in the documentary The Woodstock of House. She is passionate about exploring the intersections of race and identity in media and pop culture, with a particular focus on centering blackness in the narratives of black people.

This analysis reviews the 1999 Super Deluxe Edition box set released in 2019 in the context of the original 1982 double album release and in relation to established archival reissue norms. The presentation examines the visual representation and the audio compilation, reviewing several decisions related to the repetition, inclusion, or exclusion of Prince’s recorded work from this era.

Mike Alleyne, Ph.D, is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) and is also a visiting professor at the Pop  Akademie in Germany. He is the author of The Essential Hendrix (2020), The Encyclopedia of Reggae (2012), contributing editor of Rhythm Revolution (2015), co-editor of Prince and  Popular Music (2020), and co-editor of the award-nominated anthology Analyzing  Recorded Music (2023). 

He has lectured and presented conference papers internationally, publishing  numerous book chapters and articles. Journal and periodical publications include  Popular Music & Society, Rock Music Studies, the Journal on the Art of Record  Production, the award-winning Grove Dictionary of American Music, Popular Music  History, Ethnomusicology Forum, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean  Studies, Social and Economic Studies, Small Axe, Billboard magazine, and in the online SAGE Business Case Series in Music Marketing for which he also serves as an editor. 

Prof. Alleyne contributed liner notes to the groundbreaking 9-CD box set, the  Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap (2021), and was an advisor on the project. He also published the online case study “Unboxing the Box Set: Music  Archives and Physical Formats in the Streaming Era” with the Music Marketing  Series in SAGE Business Cases in January 2022. His involvement with popular music also includes roles as a writer and publisher member of ASCAP (American  Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers) and PRS (Performing Right Society).

This analysis reviews the 1999 Super Deluxe Edition box set released in 2019 in the context of the original 1982 double album release and in relation to established archival reissue norms. The presentation examines the visual representation and the audio compilation, reviewing several decisions related to the repetition, inclusion, or exclusion of Prince’s recorded work from this era.

Kirsty Fairclough, Ph.D., is a Reader in Screen Studies at the School of Digital Arts (SODA), Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, and Chair of the Board of Manchester Jazz Festival.

She has published widely on popular culture and is the co-editor of Prince and Popular Music (Bloomsbury), The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop (Routledge), The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment (Bloomsbury), and Music/Video: Forms, Aesthetics, Media. New York, (Bloomsbury) and author of the forthcoming Beyoncé: Celebrity Feminism and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury) and co-author of American Cinema: A Contemporary Introduction (Palgrave).

Kirsty lectures internationally on popular culture, feminism, and representations of women most notably at The Royal College of Music, Stockholm, The University of Copenhagen, Second City, Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, Middle Tennessee State University, Unisinos Brazil, and Bucknell University, Pennsylvania.

While we all know Jill Jones performs the role of the “Lady Cab Driver” in the song, I would like to reflect on this character—who she is, what else she might say—in order to get at the question of 1999 and its (if we can coin such a term) “working-class-ness.” Prince’s music spoke to, for, and about the Black working class from the very beginning, but 1999 advances the story by depicting an anxious struggle for liberation in a world where movement is restricted, and existence is under threat of annihilation. The industrial automation and the grind of capitalism evoked by the Linn LM-1 drum machine become the rhythms which turn discipline into pleasure on a computer-age dance floor; “movement” starts to take different forms: bodily, geographical (“carceral” vs. “abolition” geographies, scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore might argue), and political. In this presentation, we will “read” 1999 through the lenses of historical context, racial capitalism, and intersectionality in order to illuminate the album’s class dynamics.

Robert Loss is an associate professor in the Writing, Literature, and Philosophy department at the Columbus College of Art and Design. He is the author of Nothing Has Been Done Before: Seeking the New in 21st-Century American Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic), which includes a chapter on Prince’s later work. His essay “How the Exodus Began: Prince and the Black Working Class Imagination” appeared in a recent special Prince issue of Black Magnolias Literary Journal. He has presented on Prince at numerous conferences, including Prince From Minneapolis (2018), DM40GB30 (2020), 1plus1plus1is3 (2021), Prince: 78-88 (2021), and SexyMF30 (2022). His talk from 1plus1plus1is3, “Deconstruction: Work & Racial Capitalism in The Rainbow Children,” was published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and their pets.