FEATURE:
Adore
Prince’s Sign o' the Times at Thirty-Five
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EVEN though…
PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Katz/The Prince Estate
the Deluxe Edition of Sign o’ the Times is quite expensive, I think its expansive nature gives you an insight into one of the greatest albums ever. Prince’s opus was released on 30th March, 1987 in the U.K. (the following day in the U.S.). There is a great book that gives you a lot of information about a classic album that must rank as Prince’s greatest releases. This was part of a golden (or purple?) run of albums from Prince. After 1986’s Parade and before 1988’sLovesexy, he released this masterpiece. A double album that was his first albums since disbanding of The Revolution, there is not a weak spot across the entire thing! Sign o’ the Times is so eclectic and consistent. Containing pearls such as the title track, Housequake, The Ballad of Dorothy Parker, Starfish and Coffee, U Got the Look, If I Was Your Girlfriend, and I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man, there are different moods, approaches and sounds from Prince. Recorded across different studios between March 1986 and January 1987, Sign o’ the Times must have been a massive effort and labour of love! I am going to end with a review of the album. Others will write about the album in the run-up to its thirty-fifth anniversary at the end of the month. I am going to bring together a few features written about Prince’s ninth studio album. Classic Album Sundays discuss how a recently-solo Prince seemed motivated and at his most productive after adapting and getting used to this new state:
“Finding himself solo for the first time since 1978 Prince began to feel the pressure of releasing a hit album. Sales had been slowly fading, especially in the USA, and not wanting people to believe he had been relying on The Revolution to provide the hits, Prince embarked on another never-to-be-released album ‘Camille’. After stumbling into a recording technique of slowing tracks down, recording vocals in real time and then speeding the tracks back up again, Prince had figured out a way to record high pitched vocals and came up with the pseudonym ‘Camille’. An entire album of material was recorded in less than ten days with promos sent out to club DJs, but again the album was scrapped without any clear reason. Perhaps worried about the sales potential of the album and desperate to deliver a hit, Prince moved onto his most ambitious album to date, a triple LP magnus opus named ‘Crystal Ball’.
Twenty-two tracks were recorded in a matter of weeks and the album was ready to go. However Prince’s label Warner Music disagreed and refused to release the album. This would be one of the first major steps towards his huge public fallout with the label and his claim that he was under a slave contract; unable to release the music the way he wanted. Warner refused to budge, as Jason Draper noted in his book Prince: Choas, Disorder and Revolution, “It would be too costly to produce, and too costly for the average fan to want to buy. Already concerned by the rate at which Prince put out new albums – which confused casual buyers and made it virtually impossible to maximize their commercial potential – Warners refused to agree to release an album that seemed to be only aimed at critics and die-hard fans. Chief executive Mo Ostin insisted that Prince’s next album be no more than a double, forcing Prince to cut down his carefully constructed masterpiece.”
Although many would moan about the clipping of Prince’s wings, the artist himself quipped, “I don’t know if it’s their place to talk me into or out of things.” One thing that cannot be argued is the quality of the album that was delivered. Slimming the album down to a double resulted in the song ‘Sign O The Times’ being pushed to the front of the album as the title track with only one new track being recorded for the newly formed double LP, the would be classic ‘U Got The Look’.
Journalist Christopher Monk wrote, “Like all the best double albums, ‘Sign O’ The Times’ makes a virtue out of eclecticism. Listening to it, you feel that all human life is here. Throughout, the record flits expertly between full-blown excess and austere minimalism. Indeed, for a musician whose career has often been floored by his tendency to gild the lily, Prince is a master of minimalism. The title track is ascetic in its simplicity: for the most part, it consists of nothing more than Prince’s rapped voice and a drum machine; additional instruments only appear to illustrate lyrical points. The song also showcases a lyrical acuity that’s all too often neglected in favour of daft innuendo; the opening reference to AIDS (“a big disease with a little name”) is a particularly smart touch.”
The album was released to critical acclaim, Rolling Stone magazine proclaimed “Prince’s virtuoso eclecticism has seldom been so abundantly displayed” and Stephen Thomas Erlewine described the album, “Sign O The Times is the sound of the late ’80s — it’s the sound of the good times collapsing and how all that doubt and fear can be ignored if you just dance those problems away.” Whilst reviewing the album for it’s 25th anniversary Tom Brielhan noted, “It crystallised all the artistic experimentation of those previous two albums into something huge and tangible, displaying Prince as a musical adventurer without equal. Prince tries out a ton of different musical ideas on the album, and he nails almost all of them. It’s a thing to behold… Sign o the Times is probably Prince’s most complete piece of self-presentation, the best possible example of how he wanted the world to see him. It’s an absolute essential”.
I am stunned that Prince managed to follow on from Parade so soon with a double album! One of the most prolific and industrious artists of his time, it is no surprise special editions were released in 2020 packed with extras and new stuff. He seemed to be someone who recorded an album yet had all of this gold left behind! Sign o’ the Time is a double album, yet it feels so pure and faultless (most double albums have a few weak tracks). This is what Albusim said of Sign o’ the Times when marking its thirtieth anniversary in 2017:
“Sign O’ the Times is often regarded as Prince’s magnum opus by fans and critics alike for its high-heeled author’s willingness to examine his own life and engage the world around him like never before. The album cover—seemingly poking fun at the idea of his best years being behind him—signifies a new self-awareness and depth. With 16 songs clocking in at roughly 80 minutes, Sign O’ the Times is a masterclass on how pop music can matter when it needs to.
By the spring of 1986, Prince had been working on two separate projects only days before Parade entered the shops. One was what would have been the final Revolution album (Dream Factory), the other was a solo effort unveiling a female persona with high-pitched vocals (Camille). Prince consolidated material from both shelved projects, including some new songs, into a triple-disc set entitled Crystal Ball after disbanding the Revolution. Warner Bros. Records forced him to trim it down to a double-album since his last two projects failed to reach the commercial heights of Purple Rain. As a result, we’ve got Sign O’ the Times—an album that redefined the way we bond with music: melodically, psychologically, and emotionally.
By 1987, Prince already established himself as a master musical fusionist on his previous efforts, but Sign O’ the Times houses more genres than ever before, putting the listener in motion at both ends of the spinal column. “Play in the Sunshine” blends ‘60s pop, rock, and folk into a sun-up, windows-down delight, inviting anyone to “dance every dance like it’s gonna be the last time.” “Housequake” is a funk firebomb that, if released as a single, could’ve defined any artist’s career. The salacious “Hot Thing” waves its freak flag proudly with its sputtering bassline, frizzy synths, and devilish saxophone riffs courtesy of “Mr. Madhouse” Eric Leeds”
Some people overuse the term “genius,” but Sign O’ the Times alone provides indisputable evidence that Prince is worthy of the label. Largely produced, arranged, composed, and performed on his own, he encompasses all the emotions and struggles of his life into a diverse collection of sounds that continue to echo through many of our favorite albums. “I think what I appreciate most is the record’s sense of mystery,” says Prince biographer Matt Thorne. “You could listen to this album forever and still not make complete sense of it.” If you’ve never heard Sign O’ the Times before, firstly, shame on you. And secondly, play it and experience the delights you’ve missed out on for the past 30 years!”.
In 2020, GQ looked inside an album of death, sex and faith that, to many, remains Prince’s magnum opus. They remark how Prince’s virtuosic musicality and technical skill becomes apparent on 1987’s Sign o’ the Times:
“Sign O' The Times is really a record of two instruments. In an act of self-sufficiency and bravado, Prince turned to the defining technology of the period which, for lesser talents would – and did – scuttle their music at the bottom of the 1980s ocean. In his hands they created something more compelling, darker and stranger. Not content with mastering guitar, bass, keyboard and drums, Prince became a virtuoso on the Fairlight CMI sampler and the Linn LM-1 drum machine as well.
What Prince would do with them is clear from the title song that opens the album. He used the stock sounds of the Fairlight, rather than samples, and twisted and burnished them until they became his alone. The famous opening bassline of "Sign O' The Times" deserves its reputation as bleakly beautiful noise – jarring and plastic but full of foreboding. It is one of the only times in his career that he looked outward beyond his immediate kingdom. Prince is rarely talked about as a great lyricist – though he is an underrated one – but the words are as unsettling as his music. Like a dark reflection of "What's Going On" he sings, "A sister killed her baby 'cause she couldn't afford to feed it/ And yet we're sending people to the moon." Aids, heroin, gangs, natural disasters, the Space Shuttle Challenger accident – he is a pop Caravaggio fetishising the apocalypse, as he had before in "1999", "Let's Go Crazy" and "Crystal Ball" and introducing an album layered with the chiaroscuro of sex, death and faith. And it's an opening shot that must have put the fear of God into his rivals.
Of course, this is meant to be the latest album by a global pop star, so Prince brings things back with the upbeat "Play In The Sunshine" and the syncopated call-and-response of Camille in "Housequake". He follows that with the album's second masterpiece, "The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker". Amid the intoxicating, humid lyrics about a man meeting a waitress who tries to seduce him, it's the musical vision that really holds you. Prince manipulates the drum machine with an astonishing deftness and control, effectively playing a continuous drum machine solo. The gnarled keyboard sounds he ekes out of the Fairlight unnerve, while the voices of these characters narrate, whisper and tease their way around this most lugubrious scenario.
Like "Play In The Sunshine" it ends with a "Prince coda", an extra couple of bars in which he drops in some unconnected or unfinished musical line. It may not seem like a big deal, but it shows Prince's commitment to dazzle, attaching seemingly throwaway musical phrases that add layers of value and interest to everything.
On "It" he sings, "I think about it all the time." No shit, Prince. "It" seems little more than a chant to carnality, but he smartly allows space for the song to build without overloading the instrumentation (it contains the classic Fairlight "stab", one of the Eighties most ubiquitous effects). Prince is, as usual, insatiable and ashamed, a push and pull that dominated his work until he became a Jehovah's Witness around the turn of the century. However his feelings about sex evolved (sex as sin or life or both), he had always been a millennialist, a protagonist in a cosmic war between good and evil waiting for the end of days. It might be hokum, but for someone with his volcanic creativity it probably helped him make sense of the world.
"Starfish And Coffee" is a slice of McCartney-esque levity, a nursery rhyme written about a school classmate of Wendy and Susannah Melvoin (one story is that the girl used to sing "starfish and pee-pee"). The big band sound of "Slow Love" further mellows the mood before "Hot Thing", a pounding electro-groove held down by a Fairlight bass sound. This incidental detail shows Prince at his bravest - an entire song anchored by a single atonal note that never changes even when the chords do. It features some suitably filthy saxophone by Eric Leeds and a lot of screaming. Nobody screams like Prince and, even though it seems serious, you feel sure he knew how funny it sounded”.
There will be a tonne of features and new approaches to Sign o’ the Times closer to 30th March. I wanted to explore an album that is a staggering achievement from The Purple One. Here is Pitchfork’s review. They looked at the album in 2016 – not long after Prince’s death:
“In 1987, Prince Rogers Nelson was in transition. He’d disbanded the Revolution, the band that had backed him since Purple Rain. He’d toyed with doing a collaborative album with Revolution members Wendy & Lisa, but also abandoned that. He’d put a lot of time into crafting a record around an alter ego called Camille, whose tracks were recorded with his voice pitched to sound even more womanly than his trademark falsetto. But that too had stalled.
The album he released on March 31, 1987 was a Prince solo record that, like his 1980 artistic breakthrough Dirty Mind and his two earlier albums, was essentially a one-man-band recording which relied heavily on the LinnDrum, various samplers, and his remarkable aptitude on every instrument under the sun. Of the 16 songs on Sign o’ the Times, only three have co-writers, and save for one track (“It’s Going to Be a Beautiful Night”), outside musical accompaniment is slight. In a sense, Prince’s major musical collaborator at this point was his engineer Susan Rogers, who recorded him at different studios in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and even Paris.
But unlike his earlier solo efforts, Sign o’ the Times wasn’t a record by an ambitious kid trying to make impression. At 28, Prince had already made himself into a pop superstar (and movie star too), and he easily sold out arenas. In one sense, he had nothing to prove. Yet Sign o’ the Times is the most varied, accomplished record of his prime 1980s period, a testament to the range of his gifts and the bold artistic ambition that gave his music shape.
Part of Prince’s drive was that he was keenly aware that hip-hop was rising up and shifting the sound of music. Rap was entering its “golden age,” and its mix of gritty storytelling and dope beats had to be reckoned with. (Michael Jackson would release Bad, his own answer to hip-hop, six months later.) So the title cut, with Prince’s commentary on the issues of the day (“a big disease with a little name,” mentions of crack and gang violence) and minimalist Run-DMC-styled production, made clear that Prince had his ear to the street. The song functions as Prince’s version of “The Message,” and, as crazy as that sounds, it works.
Prince wasn’t just wrestling with fresh energy from the streets on Sign o’ the Times, but with the twin pillars of carnality and spirituality that had defined his career and that of black popular music for decades. For this Minneapolis native, it wasn’t so much a battle between sin and salvation, as it was how the warring desires could become one, synthesized through innovative arrangements, seductive yet fraught lyrics, and that remarkable voice.
“Forever in My Life,” for example, has the sincere melody of early Sly and the Family Stone. It sounds ready made for optimistic sing-a-longs. At first, you think it’s a simple love song, but there’s a devotional quality (“You are my savior/You are my life”) that makes it a chant of piety. At the same time, songs like “Hot Thing” and “It” are aggressively sexual, but in the context of the electronic, oddly-pitched sounds around the words, they seem more like the search for human connection and transcendence rather than a roll in the hay.
The album’s two ballads, “Slow Love” (co-written by singer-songwriter Carol Davis) and “Adore,” are both showcases for Prince’s vocal prowess. The man was an encyclopedia of vocal styles, able to croon like a 1950s pop star on the nostalgic “Slow Love” and do ’60s soul style on “Adore.” Though equally adept at showy vocal riffs and screaming in tune, Prince’s lower, cooler register seems to express his truest self.
Prince’s ability to move between genres made him a unique musical chameleon with Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney his only peers at the highest levels of pop. While he was often compared to Wonder, especially early in his career, it’s the ex-Beatle who seemed to have the most enduring influence. McCartney’s story-song sketches on The White Album helped define his career. For Prince, they were just one of many tools. His whimsical profiles of an odd elementary school classmate (“Starfish & Coffee”) and a quirky lover with the name of a celebrated New Yorker writer (“The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”) are lovely stories supported by surreal sounds and beats, suggesting you are on psychedelic journey through Prince’s memories.
Sign o’ the Times is difficult to grapple with because there’s so much going on in each track. The up-tempo “Play in the Sunshine” drops in jazz fusion riffs and choral voices just when you think its winding down. “The Cross” starts as a mournful song of devotion to Christ with acoustic guitar and sitar before exploding into a huge rock anthem with military drums and fuzz guitar. “Play in the Sunshine” opens with the sound of kids at play, becomes a rockabilly song, transitions midway into a guitar showcase, and then, with a marimba, a different drum pattern, and cleverly arranged backing voices, it ends a musical world away from where it began.
“Housequake” is, perhaps, the most obvious songs on the album, a funk jam that would have been a hit single if he’d allowed it to be released as such. But the care of the track’s construction belies any shallow analysis. It starts with a cartoony voice (maybe a Camille reference), a synthesized drum heavy with echo, then adds bass, keyboard stabs, and rhythm guitar. The synth drum and snare drum merge while there’s a double-beat on the kick. Live horns come it and the bass line moves as there’s both a synth bass keyboard and a live bass doing playing different lines. Various backing vocals float in and out with Prince doing his James Brown impersonation as singer/MC. Compared to the simple loops of your average club banger, “Housequake” is a symphony of syncopation. The beat moves even as it grooves.
Because Prince played and recorded the album using now-vintage late ’80s technology there are moments when certain sounds, particularly the drums, are clearly of their era. But these sonic distractions don’t last as the scope of the songs, the musicianship, and overall arrangements are just too glorious to nitpick. Sign o’ the Times is a double album made with a restlessness that never allows it to settle into complacency or formula. It’s a soundtrack to a highly charged and specific period, for both Prince and his listeners. I remember partying to “Housequake” in the summer of ’87, laughing along with “Starfish & Coffee,” and playing “Adore” for my girlfriend when it was time to get busy. All these years later, it’s still a vibrant thing, the product of a great artist at the height of his powers”.
A happy forthcoming thirty-fifth anniversary to the magnificent Sign o’ the Times. Even if Prince (arguably) never recorded an album as accomplished and fascinating as this again, he definitely had plenty of other great albums in him. A true genius who is very much missed, go and listen to Sign o’ the Times today. In 2022, the album sounds as staggering and spellbinding as…
THE day it was released.