Can you relate?” in hopes, she’s down with that. He even tries a little nasty talk, “I sincerely want to fuck the taste out of your mouth. “Marsha” is apparently one, if not the last, of the women he tries this request on, and Prince was not about to let her slip away. However, in Prince’s hands, the request to play make-believe is more of a desperate attempt of a player (the man in the song admits to having a girlfriend) trying to snag a one night stand at the end of a fruitless evening of buying drinks and chatting up the club’s single ladies. Still, Prince takes a more overt approach on “Married” by asking a woman to engage in a little role-play sexual adventure to “do it all night.” On the surface, this proclamation seems like something a teenage boy might request of his virginal girlfriend to suspend reality and pretend for a moment that the two of them are a married couple with the hidden agenda of getting laid. The album’s fourth track, as well as the fourth and final US single released in support of 1999, was “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” “Little Red Corvette” and “Delirious” included plenty of hidden sexual themes. It only took 5 years and 5 albums, but in the spring of 1983, Prince finally achieved a level of fame prophesized when he declared his position as “musician/star” for his all-access pass as the opening act during the 1980 Rick James tour. This exposure combination, as well as the song being one of Prince’s best, placed him on the pop culture radar (and allowed for Prince’s first Rolling Stone cover) as well as instant stardom. MTV, who were notoriously slow to add videos from black musicians in the station’s first couple of years on the air, also added the “Little Red Corvette” video to its rotation. This was the song that actually got airplay on most radio stations worldwide, not just urban ones. In the bigger picture, “Little Red Corvette” was his crossover introduction. For Prince, “Little Red Corvette” was his first top 10 hit, and for the first time in his career, one of his singles performed better on pop charts than R&B charts. Rock fans, many of them white, took notice in a way that they wouldn’t have for Prince’s early disco and R&B/funk singles. The epic guitar solo was performed not by Prince but by Revolution guitarist Dez Dickerson, and it was likely a huge reason for the song’s crossover success. Prince and Vanity on the Apcover of Rolling Stone magazine, his first He had been building a small but rabid fanbase around the modest R&B/Dance chart successes for songs like “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” “Uptown,” and “Controversy,” but when “1999” was released as the lead single from Prince’s 5th album in the fall of 1982, the same level of non-crossover niche success appeared to be a given. Despite its current ubiquity, the song and album of the same name were not an immediate success for Prince. Instead, the hedonistic party that is being thrown in “1999” is in celebration of the end of the world, and a more permanent rest that many feared was on the horizon. The word “party” is used often throughout the opening track and title song to Prince’s 5th album, 1999, but the sort of party Prince & the Revolution describe isn’t the kind where its conclusion simply means the end of the evening and a good night’s sleep. “Party like it’s 1999,” a term used to describe the act of partying and having fun as if there is no tomorrow, has become part of our lexicon, regardless of whether or not you listen to or enjoy Prince’s music.