PRINCE
Produced, Arranged, Composed and Performed by Prince
All music and lyrics by Prince except...
"Starfish And Coffee" lyrics by Prince and Susannah Melvoin
"Slow Love" lyrics by Prince and Carol Davis
"It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night" music composed by Prince, Dr. Fink and Eric Leeds
All vocals and instruments by Prince except...
Orchestra Composed and Arranged by Claire Fischer
Eric Leeds: Saxophone
Atlanta Bliss: Trumpet
and additional contributions from Susannah Melvoin, Wendy Melvion, Lisa Coleman and The Revolution
Released March 31, 1987
While I know that I have expressed the following sentiment to you, please do not even allow the suggestion that the repetition has dulled its emphasis to enter into your mind. That being said, I now say (again) to you that I have long and often wondered what it would have been like to have experienced great works of art, be it movies, literature or, in this case, music, right at the point in which the works of art in question entered into the world.
What was it like to have been witness to The Beatles' evolution as it was happening? Or how about David Bowie's? I have often asked my Father about the musical evolution of Miles Davis as he has been a fan from nearly the very beginning of Davis' career and experienced all of the musical shifts and changes right as they happened. While I was either not a part of the world or just too young to begin to comprehend the music of The Beatles, David Bowie, Miles Davis and countless others of musicians I have long admired and loved, I am so thrilled and thankful that I can say that I was witness to seismic musical changes and transformations of one of our greatest and most idiosyncratic artists during a period which was absolutely perfect for me to experience them. The artist is Prince, the period occurred during my teenage years and the album I am so honored to celebrate at this time is his 1987 masterpiece, the double album "Sign O' The Times," a release that is just abut to reach its 27th Anniversary!! This is truly one of those pop cultural milestones that especially blows my mind apart as I distinctly remember the day that album entered my life and the experience of hearing it for the very first time so vividly and I can recall it instantly.
In March of 1987, I was 18 years old and in the final stretches of my Senior year of high school. I had already been accepted into the University Of Wisconsin-Madison for the fall and was truly just biding my time until graduation just a few short months later as many of my classes completed for the school year early to accommodate the plethora of my Senior classmates who opted to pursue a "Senior Project" of their choice to finish out the year, a project that I could not even think of one idea to pursue on my own. So, with most of my friends completely off campus and classes finished, I spent my time writing and editing on the school newspaper The Midway, playing drums for the annual school outdoor theater production (that year featured a rock version of Shakespeare's "As You Like It"), and wandering around the University of Chicago campus, soaking in collegiate life, mentally and spiritually preparing myself for the changes that were due to arrive. It was a time of transformation...
For Prince, that very same period was a time of transformation, although it seemed that he was constantly within some mode of shape shifting. While I had outright rejected him in my slightly younger years, throughout my high school years, I embraced the musical vision of Prince immediately upon seeing the film "Purple Rain" (1984) on its opening weekend and continued to follow it with a vengeance from that point afterwards. After seeing that film countless times and listening to its accompanying album over and again, I found myself immersed in his first double album masterpiece, the darkly synthetic "1999" (released October 27, 1982) even moreso. What essentially became as much of a teenage tradition/rite of passage for me as the annual release of each John Hughes film, each Spring after "Purple Rain" found a new Prince album revealed to the world, and my life in particular. When I was 16, it was "Around The World In A Day" (released April 22, 1985). When I was 17, it was "Parade" (released March 31, 1986). And in between, there were all of the b-side singles, side projects and pseudonym releases on which he wrote, produced and played most to all of the instruments upon including "The Family" (released August 19, 1985) and Shelia E.'s "Romance 1600" (released August 26, 1985).
This unbelievable mountain of music gave me a musical education of which I had not yet experienced as my rock and roll leanings were then severely pushed towards the funk and furthermore, Price often found left me scratching my head in confusion as his musical (and visual) changes arrived so quickly that by the time I had wrapped my head around one incarnation, the next one had just arrived, sending me reeling all over again. At some point during this period, I had realized that perhaps this experience between myself and the music of Prince was akin to what others experienced as they heard The Beatles grow, change and evolve so rapidly and completely in such a short space of time. And then, I realized that Prince was no mere pop idol with androgynous leanings and guitar heroics. He was a musician's musician. He was the consummate artist for all times. He was my Beatles!
By 1987, Prince was quite possibly at his most prolific, inventive and restlessly creative as well as transformative. His second motion picture, the black and white, 1940's inspired, directorial debut project "Under The Cherry Moon" (1986) was a critical and box office bomb. He had disbanded his backing group of musicians, famously known as The Revolution. And he had begun and ceased a series of new album projects including one double album entitled "The Dream Factory," which was to feature the writing/recording nucleus of himself, and his (then) closest musical compatriots Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman; "Roadhouse Garden," what would have presumably been the final album credited to The Revolution; "Camille," a collection of eight songs featuring his new titular androgynous character; and then, there was "Crystal Ball," a triple album that began as "The Dream Factory."
Since his second movie had failed to ignite the box office as "Purple Rain" had accomplished and his album sales had begun to dwindle, plus the added pressure of the African-American radio community's increasing confusion and frustration with his musical evolution, which had seemingly abandoned funk and soul (i.e. black elements) for more ornate, psychedelic (i.e. white elements), Prince truly had something to prove. And he was to do it on his own terms.
The first shot was the arrival of the album "8" (released January 21, 1987), a collection of eight jazz/fusion instrumentals attributed to the mysterious band Madhouse, and adorned with an album cover starring a busty model and no credits whatsoever (it would soon be revealed that the "band" consisted of saxophonist Eric Leeds and Prince on everything else). Then, arrived some promotional advertisements featuring the color scheme of peach and black and the increasingly bizarre, androgynous images of a bespectacled figure who looked almost exactly like Prince but clearly possessed a female figure. And then, in March, it finally arrived..."Sign O' The Times," a double album culled from all of the album projects Prince had been working on, almost entirely solo, and bursting at the seams with feverish creativity.
Returning to my Beatles comparisons, "Sign O' The Times," on my very first listen, made me think of The Beatles' self titled album, now forever known as "The White Album" (released November 27, 1968), as Prince's work is a kaleidoscopic hodge podge/patchwork quilt of an album, where essentially no two songs sound alike, giving you a listening experience where you cannot fathom what could possibly arrive next. I purchased the album on the Friday evening on the week the album was released with my pocket wages from my allowance and my paycheck from high school library duties and returned home, as soon as I was able, to listen. Now with all of the previous Prince albums, as I stated, I was typically hit with copious amounts of head scratching as I could not quite figure out where he was coming from or what he was doing. Yet, for some unbeknownst reason at that time, a reason that I now think had something to do with us both existing in some sort of stage of metamorphosis, the full four sided experience of "Sign O' The Times" connected with me instantly (he had me just with the gorgeous album cover--pictured above) and to a point of becoming and a near out of body event.
Side One begins with the title track that unlike the stadium rock and roll of "Purple Rain" or any of the magical mystery detours of "Around The World In A Day" and "Parade," is a sobering slice of skeletal deep purple funk that would not sound out of place on a Curtis Mayfield or Sly Stone album. With the albums very first lyrics, we already know that the fireworks and fantasy of previous albums have been distinctly replaced with dark, journalistic musings on the turbulence of the present and every day. "In France a skinny man died from a big disease with a little name/By chance his girlfriend came across a needle and soon she did the same," Prince begins and then continues his song with references to gang violence, drug addiction, poverty, the explosion of the Challenger from the previous year, natural disasters, nuclear nightmares and somehow, after all of this end times doom, Prince concludes with hopeful notions of falling in love, getting married and having a son called Nate. For a figure who had clearly presented himself as being otherworldly, this opening song gave us all an opportunity to see that he was indeed very much of the same world in which we existed and that he was indeed paying attention. The song seemed to signal to us that he was a figure who was possibly maturing and looking outward as much as he continued to look inwards. At this time, Prince was 29 years old, on the very cusp of ending a decade to just enter into a new one and the song "Sign O' The Times" seemed to represent that very door of life which he was just about to walk through.
The audible crowd sounds and European ambulance sirens in the distance phase "Sign O' The Times" into the album's second track, the buoyant and dizzyingly executed "Play In The Sunshine," which sounds as if it has merged a Chuck Berry beat with Frank Zappa's sonics down to the dancing percussion mallets on the vibes. And then, with the abrupt sound of the needle scratching against vinyl and a harshly shouted "SHUT UP, ALREADY! DAMN!!," the James Brown pastiche "Housequake," with brass section performed by Atlanta Bliss and the aforementioned Eric Leeds, and also the first to feature the "Camille" character on the album (Prince's voice sped up), is the latest curve ball in an album that has only unfolded for the duration of perhaps 10 minutes. What I remember so vividly at this precise moment is that I instinctively grabbed my nearby drum sticks as this song began to "play" along with everything that I was hearing and it then struck me as more than fitting that the album cover displays a gorgeous yellow drum set just waiting to be played.
For everything that has ever been written about Prince's skills as a guitarist, very little has ever been written about his skills as a drummer and Prince is indeed a spectacular drummer. As with the guitar, the bass and all manner of keyboards and synthesizers, Prince truly understand the instruments and functions of drums and percussion to a complete degree, so much so, that when he utilizes drum machines, he is able to program beats and patterns unlike anyone that I have ever heard before. Prince has the uncanny ability to truly make the synthetic sound so completely organic that you can almost hear sticks hitting the drum heads even when there are none. For his productions and especially throughout the entirety of "Sign O' The Times," Prince shifts back and forth from full drum programs to live drums to tracks where some drums are indeed live and then combined with some that are programmed, making the entire percussion tracks the very kind that can only ever exist within Prince songs--another inventive tool in creating his own musical language.
For "Housequake," it is if he has taken everything he ever learned from James Brown and how to manipulate rhythm and beats and then, he proceeded to essentially re-invent the wheel! Just listen to the bass drum beats of "Housequake," a song about a great new dance that Prince (or do I mean Camille) has devised and is only to happy to teach you but as he says, the rhythms and dance movements are so inverted that when he says "U can't follow it," you can only fall down laughing as you understand just how right and just how far ahead of the curve he is on every conceivable level as he has essentially prefigured all of the jaw dropping beats the hip hop genre would devise far into the future from this album...just as figures such as Madlib, DJ Shadow and the late, great J Dilla have accomplished. Just a sensational piece of work.
Even more sensational is the side's closing track "The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker," not the celebrated acerbic writer but a tall, fine night shift waitress on the Promenade with dish water blonde hair who receives a lot of tips for her services. In a strange way, the track is somewhat reminiscent of The Beatles' "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)," not in sound but in subject matter as both tracks deal with a clandestine affair in a seductively muted atmosphere. The song, to this day, just blows my mind as it feels as if it is a song that arrived fully formed from out of the ether, untouched by any influences whatsoever and Prince was blessed to be the conduit to bring it to life. While the influences of soul, funk and jazz (as well as a Joni Mitchell reference) are prevalent, it just possesses a quality that again demonstrates how Prince became one of those rare artists who eventually took everything that influenced them and transformed it in such a way to invent their own musical language and with "The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker," what we are hearing is nothing more or less than "Prince music."
Lyrically, the song carries a certain arcane poetry that does take some deciphering with its talk about a "violent room," "an affliction brought on by a witch's curse" and so on. But I do think that overall, the track was beginning to showcase Prince's growing maturity as a man, especially in regards to his relationships with women. Where in "Raspberry Beret," his lover was described as not being "too bright," Dorothy Parker quite represents the individual he has grown to find himself seeking as he wants "someone with a quicker wit" than his own. As the song continues, and our narrator has found himself in a space away from the aforementioned violent room and submerged in a bubble bath while still wearing his pants, he exits the tub to change in Dorothy's presence but "she didn't see the movie/cuz she hadn't read the book first," possibly a metaphor for not engaging in a sexual act without the presence of love and trust first.
The emotional evolution of Prince (or at least his persona) plays a major role throughout "Sign O' The Times," especially when compared to the albums prior to this one. Yes, we still have tracks that feel like updates of the dark carnal funk of the "1999" album like the brooding "IT," with its propulsive, churning, repetitive drums, percussive orchestral samples, moody keyboards and left field guitar sonics and also on the spectacular "Hot Thing," which features a blazing Maceo Parker-ish saxophone work by Eric Leeds, an instantly catchy synthesizer hook that sounds like a long night in a sinister Asian themed brothel and vocal harmonics that suggest something from The Beatles' "Revolver" album.
But then, we have his ballads, which are some of the finest he has ever written. This is an especially high-water mark of course, considering the countless ballads Prince has composed over the past 36 years but they are indeed some of his most endearing and enduring selections because, I feel, that these are not just "ballads," these are love songs expressed from the inside out in their full emotional complexity and honesty. To think, this was the man who wanted to do nothing more than "Jack U Off." But on "Sign O' The Times," he delivers a breathtaking standard entitled "Slow Love," splendidly presented and augmented with the late Claire Fischer's orchestra, on which he declares that the intimacy is "so much better when we take our time." And on the nearly seven minute guitar epic "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man," our narrator rejects a female suitor with the classic chorus, "Baby, don't waste your time/I know what's on your mind/I may be qualified 4 a one night stand/But I could never take the place of your man."
Also evolving from the past and even more powerful is the sparse, striking "Forever In My Life," on which Prince nakedly and so vulnerably sings a capella, accompanied only by a heartbeat paced drum machine, on which he proclaims that "I never imagined that love would rain on me/And make me want 2 settle down/Baby, it's true, I think I do/And I just wanna tell U that I wanna with U." And then, there's the album's closing track, the extraordinary, six minute-plus "Adore," which glides on Prince's peerless falsetto, a slow jam snap, flawless Duke Ellington flow courtesy of Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss' horns and again the sheer honest emotion that pours from your speakers and lifts your soul. "Without U, there is no me/There is no me without U," he sings in a tone that asserts that he actually means the words that he is singing. And the track concludes, before a choir of multi-tracked vocals spiraling into the air, "4 all time I am with U/And U are with me." And again, to think, this is from the man who once lasciviously sang, "Let's Pretend We're Married."
But it is not all hearts and flowers on "Sign O' The Times," especially when Prince's alter ego Camille "takes over" lead vocals. While "U Got The Look," a duet with Sheena Easton and powered by Shelia E.'s drums and percussion, and swaggers in from the same neighborhood as "IT" and "Hot Thing," the Middle eastern flavored "Strange Relationship" explores demonstrably messier emotional waters. "I guess U know me well, I don't like Winter/But I seem 2 get a kick out of doing U cold," our narrator confesses nonchalantly. Those messier emotional waters only grow deeper as the song continues, depicting the affairs we sometimes get ourselves entangled with against all better judgement to the degree that we may not even understand why we are involved in them in the first place. "I came and took your love, I took your body/I took all the self respect U had/I took U 4 a ride and baby, I'm sorry/The more U love me the more it makes me mad."
Yet, in an album that is bursting at the seams with audacious moments and songs, there was nothing more audacious than "If I Was Your Girlfriend," which on first listen could seem to be the most bizarre slab of psycho-sexual disorder but is actually quite profound and almost seems as if Prince showing a bit of himself behind the veil of personas and identities. The song begins with the sound of an orchestra warming up and the beginnings of an organ playing wedding music before it is all abruptly halted and transformed into a gloomy mood piece with subtle and slightly menacing bass guitar and churning drum beats that sound like a slowing, bruised and broken heartbeat, suggesting that the romantic bliss has all fallen apart and shattered completely. The androgyny of the song featuring Prince as Camille singing to a woman in a song with this title arrives immediately with the song's first line, which certainly confused the hell out of me when I first heard it: "If I was your girlfriend, would U remember 2 tell me all the things U forgot when I was your man?" Huh, what??
Soon, however, all becomes clear as the song becomes a plea for an intimacy that only seems to exist within the closeness of friends rather than romantic partners and where those lines are drawn are lines that constantly shift and blur leaving Camille (or is it Prince) completely dilapidated, especially as his vocal performance becomes more desperate. Just listen to how he stretches the word, "Pleee-eee-eeee-eee-eeese!!" at one point, almost sounding distorted. And the line, "If I was your one and only friend/Would U run 2 me if somebody hurt U/Even if that somebody was me?/Sometimes I trip on how happy we could be" is possibly one of the most devastating and truthfully painful lines he has ever composed. Just take a moment and allow those words to sink in. It's fine, I'll wait...Yeah. We've ALL been there haven't we?
"If I Was Your Girlfriend" is a dark song of love and loss and Prince just nails the desire of obtaining that ultimate sense of intimacy with the one you cherish the most but unfortunately, you are the one left unrequited with such a precise perceptiveness that the song feels tremendously lived in. The song's provocative ending sequence where Camille (or again, is it Prince) confronts the woman and spirals through a series of questions that are by turns pleading, pathetic, accusatory, seductive, and challenging and all the while we know he is on the losing end of the discussion.
"Is it really necessary 4 me 2 go out of the room
just because U wanna undress?
I mean, we don't have 2 make children 2 make love
And then, we don't have 2 make love 2 have an orgasm
Your body's what I'm all about
Can I see U?
I'll show U
Why not?
U can think it's because I'm your friend I'll do it 4 U
Of course I'll undress in front of U!
And when I'm naked, what shall I do?
How can I make U see that it's cool?
Can't U just trust me?
If I was your girlfriend U could
Oh, yeah, I think so..."
It is a sequence that is just...oh well...masturbatory and still filled with such anger, retribution, hopelessness, confusion and a supreme heartache that it almost feels too personal to even be listening to. It is a four minute and fifty four second masterpiece that will undoubtedly leave you wondering what exactly does silence look like.
And to think even after all of the above, "Sign O' The Times" also features the garage rock spiritual hymn "The Cross," the psychedelic children's song "Starfish And Coffee," which features a terrific backwards snare drum effect phased from one speaker to the other and finally, the nine minute "It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night," a track recorded live in Paris during the final performance by The Revolution.
From nearly the very beginning of the album all the way through sides two, three and four, I was completely hypnotized and existed transfixed during the entirety of listening to "Sign O' The Times" for the very first time. My drum sticks never stopped moving for the duration and I simply wanted nothing whatsoever to break the spell that Prince had weaved into my basement room to such a captivating degree. It was truly rare for me to have been so enraptured from the start as far as Prince albums were concerned as they did (and still do) tend to take some time for the music and myself to get to know each other. But this album...this album connected and carried me through the remainder of my high school days, the full summer and my transition to college with such comfort, security and I really think, the courage and ability to make my next life transition and face it on my own terms...just as Prince was accomplishing by taking his art back into himself again just for the purpose of moving forwards.
With the mountains of music that Prince has released over the years, I always return to this album as being my absolute favorite that he has ever made. It is an album of such daring, bravery, consistent surprises, and an unfiltered, unrepentant, and downright fearless creativity, the likes of which I feel that I have rarely experienced on quite this level right as it was happening. I truly feel blessed to have just been in the world with the very consciousness to appreciate and receive this one-of-a-kind musical message and triumphant artistic statement so fully and completely.
And if anyone younger than myself were to ask me what it was like to have heard "Sign O' The Times" for the first time, all I would have to do would be to point them right to this posting. Dear readers and listeners, it was so good, that I wish I could hear it for the first time all over again.
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