Sign o' the times --- Prince --- 1987 (Paisley Park)
The album on which Prince came of age, and also the last really major success in terms of commerciality. Prince's “golden age” kind of kicked off with “1999” (actually released in 1982), through the phenomenal “Purple rain”, which brought him his greatest and most wide-ranging acclaim and made him a household name, on into “Around the world in a day”, which though not as successful as “Purple rain” did boast one of his biggest ever hits, “Raspberry beret”, skipping largely over 1986's largely-ignored “Parade” and on to this one. His next, “Lovesexy”, was something of a bomb, and although he has recorded a total of nineteen albums since this, and they've all sold well, his mass appeal has more or less drained away. People still recognise and acknowledge him as one of the most talented and controversial musicans of the last century, but ask the ordinary guy or girl in the street who isn't a fan to name one of his albums and the chances are they'll list some or all of the above. For many people, there
were no more Prince albums after “Lovesexy”.
But this is classic Prince. His second since dispensing with his backing band, the Revolution, it's entirely a solo project and it's a double album stuffed full of treasures. It opens with the title track, a sparse, funky track with drum machines and seedy bass, Prince almost rapping the lyric which depicts the wrongs in the world, and how bad things have got. Bon Jovi would tackle the same theme in their 1995 album “These days”. It's a sobering, stark song but with a funky beat behind it which almost disguises the desperation and frustration in Prince's voice as he snarls
”Sister killed her baby/ Cos she couldn't afford to feed it/ And we're sendin' people to the moon.”
“Play in the sunshine” is a much more upbeat, happy number, almost in defiant opposition to the opener, another of those “party like it's 1999” songs, with some crazy keyboard work and some good backing vocals. For a double album, this is perhaps a little short, at only sixteen tracks total, and none of them bar one particularly long, but then, there's a real surfeit of quality here: just about every track is good, and many are great. What would you rather? Sixteen tracks, all good, or twenty-four with half of those sub-par? “Housequake”, another party song, opens with the interesting line
”Shut up, already! Damn!” Its melody is a little redolent of the Art of Noise, with lots of short, stabbing synth chords, and a Janet Jackson-style rhythm, while “The ballad of Dorothy Parker” uses some deliberately warped guitar alongside some mid-tempo rolling drums, the skewed instrumentation a little hard on the ear sometimes: always had me checking the file wasn't corrupt --- or when I had the cassette originally, checking for dropouts on the tape (see “Trollheart's Handy Guide to Twentieth Century Technology”, page 9 of this journal). Everything racks back up then for “It”, with big hollow drum sounds, and a low synth which then becomes a bright one, the tempo a little boppier but still fairly low-key, with more of those AofN stabbing synths. No prizes for guessing what “it” is, as Prince sings
”I wanna do it baby/ All the time!” At a wild guess, I wouldn't say he's talking about creosoting the fence!
My only criticism about “It” is that it's a little too long and seems overstretched. The last two minutes of the five it runs for are essentially an extended mix, with instrumental noodling and messing about, and although it's a good song, it doesn't need this extra tacked on at the end. “Starfish and coffee”, on the other hand, is perfectly timed at two minutes fifty seconds. From the opening alarm clock sound to the cheerful whistle at the end, there's not a moment of the melody wasted, and it's close to perfect. Definitely one of the standouts on an album of standouts. The simple piano with the soul backing vocals and magical guitar runs just make this song something special. Prince kind of revisits the lyric and some of the melody from the title track for this, and it works beautifully: subtle but recognisable. Class.
Then we get it. The first real sexy smoocher that Prince is so adept at writing and performing. “Slow love” is a real motown-style swinging ballad, with nice brass touches, the kind of song you could hear George Benson or Smokey Robinson singing. And yet it's quintessentially Prince at his unfettered passionate best. “Hot thing” gets right back to the funk, with an element of Depeche Mode in the synth lines, and some really supercool funky jazz sax, then the first disc closes on the gospel/soul “Forever in my life”, fairly stripped-down with just drums and guitar keeping the melody while Prince, it seems, multi-tracks his vocals to add backing.
One of the big hits from the album kicks off the second disc, featuring the luscious Sheena Easton. “U got the look” continues Prince's penchant for shortening words to one or two letters (I'm pretty sure he started this craze, way before text pushed it to whole new levels), and it's of course very well known, a dancy funkster just smouldering with passion and sex. In the same way Michael Hutchence was instrumental in bringing the sex kitten out of the girl next door with Kylie, we must be eternally thankful to Prince for his efforts in “corrupting” Sheena, to the delight of all us guys! Great screeching guitar on this track, and there's little I can say about it that hasn't already been said.
“If I was your girlfriend” opens with church organ and preacher, then slips into a slow, Cameo-influenced barebones song with interesting lyric:
"Would you let me dress you/ Help you pick out your clothes/ Before we go out?” Again, Bon Jovi (who must listen to a lot of Prince) explored this theme in a slightly different way on 1992's “Keep the faith”, when they penned “If I was your mother” (prompting me grin, you'd be the ugliest mother in creation!). Prince's vocals seem strangely fast at some points, almost cartoon-like. Apparently this was an error, but Prince liked it so much he kept it as it was. There are a lot of handclap drums in the song, bass and really other than that and the warbling keyboards that's all the instrumentation I can hear. Minimalist? Yeah.
“Strange relationship” is another Janet Jackson-alike, while another well-known song and another standout, “I could never take the place of your man” is the kind of song the Bangles could have sung, with a little lyrical alteration. Very poppy, with a nice rumbling guitar there in the background. Again it's quite famous so I won't go into it any further, but it's followed by “The cross”, which opens on a piano line so quiet you don't really hear it until about forty seconds in. It seems to be a song glorifying God, with some nice eastern-style sounds like a guitar made to sound like a sitar, and the song builds from its almost silent and sparse beginnings to a pretty heavy rocker, easily the heaviest track on the album and the first to step away from the dance/funk vibe. Prince really stretches his vocal here, touching the levels he reached in “Purple rain”, especially on the title track.
The longest track on the album by a country mile, the nine-minute “It's gonna be a beautiful night” goes right back to funk and disco, with powerful horns reminiscent of Kid Creole and the Coconuts, funky guitar and sax, and either recorded in a live performance or made to sound like one. Prince reverts to his falsetto for this, sounding more like one of the Bee Gees, and it's essentially something of a jam, great fun but again it does feel like it's been dragged out about three minutes longer than it should have been. Of course, if it is actually live then I can forgive that, as I know songs that are normally three or four minutes can be stretched to at least twice that length by some artistes on stage.
The closer, “Adore”, finishes in fine style with a smoochy soul ballad reeking of the seventies. Prince racks up the falsetto to ten, and it's a powerful and emotional closer to what is, as I said at the introduction, really an album with few if any flaws.
Representing the pinnacle of Prince's creative period, “Sign o' the times” has been cited as his best album, also his most innovative, given that he plays, arranges and composes just about everything on the album himself, and maintained a tighter grip on the production than a bank manager on his bonus. In 1993, six years after the release of this album, Prince would become “The Artist formerly known as Prince” for another seven years, before reverting to his own name. Prince would also spearhead the idea of free music, by allowing his last album, “20Ten”, to be given away free with various newspapers in the UK and Europe, and he has consistently refused to allow iTunes or any other digital service stock his music for download. Try it: you can't find it.
Still as popular as ever, Prince is nevertheless more a controversial figure than a hitmaker these days, and although his glory days are far from over, the mass market appeal of his music did seem to end with the release of “Sign o' the times”. If that's true, then it was one hell of a high to go out on.
TRACKLISTING
Disc one
1. Sign o' the times
2. Play in the sunshine
3. Housequake
4. The ballad of Dorothy Parker
5. It
6. Starfish and coffee
7. Slow love
8. Hot thing
9. Forever in my life
Disc two
10. U got the look
11. If I was your girlfriend
12. Strange relationship
13. I could never take the place of your man
14. The cross
15. It's gonna be a beautiful night
16. Adore
Suggested further listening: “1999”, “Purple rain”, “Around the world in a day”