“Sign O’ the Times”: Prince’s Most Crucial Album, In Retrospect
Graphic by: Olivia Cofer
If the pop-rock classic “Purple Rain” has been your introduction to Prince, let “Sign O’ the Times” be how you really get to know him.
There was a word Prince just couldn’t get out of his head while recording what would become “Sign O’ the Times”:
“Crucial.”
Throughout the 16–track double album, the number of times Prince sings the word “crucial” is seemingly insignificant, but perhaps what underlies it, at least in my mind, is that each time it rears its head, it sounds like the release of the word – whether by way of yelp, sigh or squeal – in the contexts of love and lust.
I’m not sure why Prince sang this specific word to the point that it becomes a motif of its own – like the album’s pulsatory word – however, I can confidently assert that “Sign” is crucial to thoroughly understanding and appreciating his artistry. Itching with primal longing just as much as it is oozing with adoration. It's as sincere in its calls to prayer as its calls to party. Shocking for its bizarreness and its jaw-dropping beauty, it’s arguably his most thorough record, and– almost arguably– his best.
In a pre-Prince world, what would you make of a 5 '2,” light-skinned Black man who sang and composed glorious amalgamations of funk, soul, pop and rock one after the other. How could one pin down a – capital M – Man who wailed unprintable, lascivious desires while outdancing any pop it–girl in heels? “Am I Black or white?” “Am I straight or gay?” Prince teases on the title track of his 1981 album, “Controversy”. He knew he confounded people, and he didn’t care to answer the fanatical questions plaguing listeners —“I wish there were no rules. People call me rude, I wish we were all nude,” he offers instead. Surely, he put a lot of thought into his ornate wardrobe and overall image; he knew that dismissing all the rules concerning the embodiment of race, gender and sexuality was provocative—but at the end of the day, he was a musician first.
Clocking in at over 80 minutes long, “Sign” is a swathing patchwork of Prince at his Prince-iest. The meticulous control freak whose explosive creativity threatened to outpace his perfectionism and the sexed–up, diva–like man whose art would define the era. On “Sign, these personas tease each other, interlocking like the lips of lovers, blooming into a story of an artist doing whatever he wants, better than anyone else could.
A self–indulgent album, it might be.
If so, then thank God Prince indulged himself.
“Sign” awakens slowly with the sparse and somber title track. Musical merit aside, its historical significance is colossal: in just over five minutes, it immortalizes the perils of the late ’80s with a slew of timely references. From the AIDS crisis, to the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, to nuclear warfare dread. Listen to how Prince’s voice stretches out “tiiimes” at the end of each verse and the backbeat pings and pops. Time freezes and we witness a period suspended in the eyes of its most riveting pop star.
Prince is – of course – equally serious about having a good time; “Before my life is done, someway, somehow, I’ve just got to have fun!” he shrieks on “Play in the Sunshine,” the title track’s exuberant, psychedelic–tinged successor. There’s an urgency to his determination to enjoy life, and that’s something I think we all need to cling to in response to modernity’s pitfalls. “Housequake,” the endlessly quotable party anthem and introduction of sorts to Camille, also brims with a feverish joi de vivre: “C’mon, ya’ll, we gotta jam, before the police come!”
It’s hard to imagine Prince not having fun while recording these songs – they’re whimsical, wonderful, and, frankly, weird. Outros elongate and dilapidate, guitars sound like sitars, and lyrics – from an enthusiastic shout-out to “Green Eggs & Ham” to a “World Series of love” pitting boys against girls (it’s “the dream we all dream of,” according to Prince, but I doubt anyone else imagines that as their head hits the pillow)—conjure worlds of their own, worlds that maybe Prince alone could have strutted into.
The characters residing within “Sign” stick with you as much as the infectious vitality propelled by its songs’ walloping hooks and radiant riffs. If you ask Cynthia Rose, protagonist of Beatlesque “Starfish and Coffee,” what she had for breakfast, don’t expect a sensical answer, but do expect a smile to creep across your face—Prince’s voice is especially tender as he sketches this endearingly peculiar character. “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”—which chronicles not one, but two bubble baths with pants on—likewise shines for its idiosyncratic leading lady, a “tall and fine” Joni Mitchell devotee who happens to share a name with famed New Yorker writer Dorothy Parker.
While I can’t understate how intentional a songsmith Prince was, the immersiveness of “Ballad” can actually be credited to a happy accident. According to BBC, it was recorded before Rogers’ mixing desk was fully installed at his new Galpin Road studio, thus drenching it with a drunken, dreamlike quality. It truly is transportive—when you listen, you step directly into Prince’s fuzzy memories of a “violent room” and scuzzy restaurant, and you leave with a sense that those recollections are your own. The unusual harmonies on the glimmering ode “Forever In My Life” also have fate to thank—when Rogers played back Prince’s layered vocals with incorrect intervals, his backing harmonies preceded his lead vocals instead of supporting them. Prince liked what he heard and maintained it, and the resulting duet with himself seems a rare revelation of both heart and mind—he exhales some of his most devotional words before fully fleshing them out, calling upon the breadth of his range to animate the odes. “You are my savior, you are my life,” he proclaims, rendering infatuation a matter of spiritual surrender. Orgasmic R&B ballad “Slow Love” all-the-more revels in an innate communion between body and soul; Prince’s voice writhes and soars to its most ecstatic peaks as he urges a lover to savor and revel in one another. Evidently, on “Signs”, sex and spirituality don’t just live in the same neighborhood—they share a bed, luxuriate in each other, and are one. I initially planned to frame Prince’s explorations of sex and soulfulness as a merging of two contradictory forces, but the more I listen to these songs,—so absolute and impassioned—the more I doubt that love’s physicality and spirituality were contradictory in the first place. After all, the Prince behind titles such as “Soft and Wet” and “Wonderful Ass” was the same guy behind “The Cross”, “Signs’” rocking and rallying penultimate prayer.
Prince was, certainly, a complex figure as both an artist and a person. Particularly convoluted were his relationships with women, both in song and reality. On one hand, he championed women in the arts—his backing bands largely consisted of female musicians (notably, the Revolution’s Wendy Melovin and Lisa Coleman, and percussionist/singer Sheila E), wrote a number of memorable songs for women and woman-fronted acts (including Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and The Bangles’ “Manic Monday”), and shared the mic with powerhouse female vocalists on numerous occasions— “Sign’s” third single, “U Got the Look,” wouldn’t be the irresistible duet it is without Scottish songstress Sheena Easton’s vibrant performance. On the other hand, he could be as controlling of women as he was his own music—for instance, he once docked his first wife and backup dancer Mayte Garcia’s pay after finding cookies at her makeup station. When he sings, “I didn’t like the way you were, so I had to make you mine” on “Strange Relationship,” I think of how he often appeared to view women as beings to mold to his own creative visions and ideals of perfection. He seemed intent on playing God—that’s why his music is so singularly brilliant, but it probably also means that being one of his muses was far less glamorous than his odes suggest.
While it does not excuse the controlling, and in some cases abusive, behavior alleged by women he loved and worked with, the self-reflective moments within the carnal, divine, and absurd world of “Sign” are piercing and nuance-building. I can’t think of a truer-to-life depiction of the classic toxic relationship—the type you can’t imagine living with or without—than “Strange Relationship.” It’s one of the album’s finest tracks—beneath the sticky groove and vocal mask of Camille, there is, it seems, a love so staggering that losing it would be too terrible to bear. Earnest pain rips through Prince’s unpitched chorus harmonies; the frustration, sadness, and regret poured into each syllable are devastating and unexpectedly vulnerable. Incandescent pop-rock gem “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” likewise sees Prince acutely aware of his shortcomings. This time, he’s breaking things off before they begin with a single mother looking for more than an unsatisfying one-night stand: “She asked me if we could be friends, and I said, ‘Oh, honey baby, that’s a dead end. You know and I know that we wouldn’t be satisfied,’” he recounts, his high notes potent with bittersweet empathy and regret.
My favorite song on the album—and my favorite Prince song, period—is “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” the predecessor to “Strange Relationship.” Yearning for his beloved’s closeness, Prince asks her if she’d trust him if he were a platonic girlfriend under the vocal guise of Camille. “Girlfriend” is Prince’s uncanniest and most effective embodiment of the feminine alter-ego—against the warped, intoxicated funk music, every hiss and whine seems wholly possessed. The song is a bizarre, murky dreamstate from the start, but it only gets stranger as it swirls into a red-hot frenzy: the aspiration to pure intimacy uncoils into desperate sexual longing as the slinky backbeat distorts and disintegrates; masculinity and femininity (or, Prince and Camille) collide, becoming indiscernible from one another. Track-stopping lyrics—some, admittedly, comically ridiculous—are abundant, but the most riveting question Prince asks his lover is, “If I was your girlfriend, would you run to me if somebody hurt you, even if that somebody was me?” He has several suggestions as to what “being in love’s about”—picking out outfits, making breakfast, going to a movie and crying together—but I think this line gets closest to capturing it: when the person who hurts you most is the only one you want to be consoled by.
Recall, for a moment, that leftover recording, “Crucial.” “Sign” doesn’t lack anything without it (though it is a blissful tune in its own right), but the song’s chorus does, I think, clarify “Sign’s” convoluted, multiperspective portrayal of love: “Our love has got to be crucial—everything, from A to Z.” On “Sign”, love is everything: physical and spiritual, strange and simple, beautiful and ugly. All the knots within this one-syllable, four-letter word make “Sign’s” grand finale, “Adore,” that much sweeter. As the lyrics trail off Prince’s lips, they take turns tear-jerkingly gorgeous (“if God one day struck me blind, your beauty I’d still see”), erotic (“in a word, you were ‘sex’”), and hilarious (“you could burn up my clothes, smash up my ride—well, maybe not the ride”). They even circle back to that thesis word: “this condition I got”—the words hardly squeeze through Prince’s teeth; his tightly-wound voice feverishly escalates in pitch—“is crucial, crucialll”—and all that tension melts away. But the oath that “Adore” always returns to is this: “until the end of time, I’ll be there for you.” It’s satisfying that “Sign” begins with a snapshot of its era and ends with this luxuriation in eternality. Time flies by too quickly: in what feels like an instant, people come and go, dreams emerge and decay, and the world—a more bewildering place to live in each day—turns on its head without warning. Yet, if only we take a precious pause to realize, we can grasp what will never expire, and immersing ourselves in what is timeless, that’s what will keep us alive. Above all, love never dies. Neither does music as enlightening and transcendent as “Sign O’ the Times”.
It is a magnum opus that will remain stunning, astounding, and crucial, forever—until the end of time, and even after then.