Sign O the Times (Super Deluxe Edition)
1.
Rolling Stone magazine just published its most recent iteration of its 500 greatest albums list. It seems like a good time, not because we need to create any more canons, but we’re all stressed out and isolated enough to enjoy the experience of making fun of Rolling Stone magazine one more time—and to argue about rankings and lists, something that I have been doing my whole life to avoid depression and anxiety. The last version of the list came out in the early 2000s. The biggest change, and I don’t feel like going into the list in great detail at all, is that Sgt. Pepper’s was dethroned from the top and replaced by What’s Going On. It reminds me a little of when Citizen Kane was toppled by Vertigo on the AFI film list. You need to change things up, and just as the cinematic world feels more indebted to Vertigo in the last 60 or so years, the music world, and its relationship to the world world, feels better served by Marvin at #1 than the Beatles. These lists, if nothing else, are documents towards the continued relevance or irrelevance of rock criticism’s centrality in framing cultural narratives.
The very first Ur-version of this list was published in the August 27, 1987 issue of Rolling Stone. That list, explicitly commissioned by Jan Wenner to create a classic rock canon authorized by Rolling Stone, was different in that it was limited by a certain time period. The time period made sense—what SXM tells me is the first generation of “classic vinyl”—and it also set certain limitations for what could and could not be included. It also made sense that Sgt. Pepper’s would be #1 because the issue itself was a celebration of the “twenty years ago today” opening lines of the album. As an only child with neither older siblings nor older friends, the list became the cool older brother to a 14 year old with burgeoning musical taste. It has many flaws, but you certainly could do worse than it for a decent introduction to 100 excellent albums to which you should listen.
One of the fun anti-anxiety list-making games I like to play is the follow up list that never was. There was never a 1987-2007 twenty year list that would have, essentially, been the list my generation would have given to subsequent generations as to which albums one should listen. Instead, RS jumped right into the 500 of all time list, depriving readers of the perspective on the follow up 20 year period. I’ve played around with some bands and order: PE’s Nation of Millions… in the Sex Pistol’s second place finish seems right. Replacing Exile on Main Street at #3 with Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation also felt right. I also wanted to think like the magazine itself: Radiohead would take the Beatles position, and I had assumed either OK Computer or Kid A would be number one.
But to create a list with those substitutions would ignore the larger musical and cultural world that had changed since 1987. The dominance of R&B and hip hop in global music would have to be acknowledged, the way the 2020 list begins with What’s Going On as a call to social justice, rather than the Beatles psychedelic evocation of childhood and wonder. Hip hop would certainly be prominently featured in the list, for sure. So, though one would be tempted to put something like Radiohead at #1 in a nod to their own indebtedness to the Beatles as well as their creativity, it would seem like a conservative move to exert a certain narrative dominance over the next 20 years of popular music as well.
In one of the beautiful synchronous events that often take place in this reality, the new RS list happened to be published the same time as Prince’s 1987 masterpiece Sign O the Times was being reissued in a super deluxe thirteen LP box set. If there is one album that deserves to be at the head of that imaginary 1987-2007 list it would have to be Sign O the Times.
In the actual new list, Sign O the Times comes in at #45 in the greatest albums of all time. It’s a fools errand (but fun!) to gripe about the positions of albums on these lists. That said, I always think that placement in the 40s of 500 greatest albums lists seems like a backhanded complement. If anything, after 2016 I would have assumed that Prince would be more highly rated. In the original 1987 list, Dirty Mind ranked one position over The Velvet Underground and Nico, which is wild to me, but not undeserving. Purple Rain is #8, which of course is right, but it almost seems to turn Prince into the big pop artist that he was only for a short period of time. Instead, there’s a similarity to Prince’s celestial brother, David Bowie, in that I’m genuinely shocked to see the first album of his to place, Ziggy Stardust, at number 40 or so. In 1987 it was #6 which just seems right. Even in death and supposed immortality, both seems more like difficult album artists whose individual idiosyncrasies prevent them from being properly rated and ranked. This, of course, is only to both artists credit.
2.
The first time I remember hearing Prince’s music was sometime in 1983 driving in the car with my dad. He liked the song “Delirious” on 1999 and turned up the radio when it came on. He told me it reminded him of songs from the 1950s that would play on the radio late at night when he was a kid. The next time I heard Prince, I was buying the 7” of “When Doves Cry,” the unavoidable hit from 1984. As much as I loved the A side, I played the B-side, “17 Days” an equal amount. I cajoled my parents into letting me go see Purple Rain in the movie theater as long as my aunts agreed to chaperone and block my viewing of Apollonia’s boobs. Honestly, I didn’t care about that—I just wanted to see Prince perform the songs. And perform them he did. I was a Prince fan after that.
“Raspberry Beret” was a do not leave the room yet video whenever it came on MTV, the album it came from Around the World in A Day was off-putting and my enthusiasm waned. I didn’t bother seeing Under the Cherry Moon and, though I liked all the singles from the record, I didn’t listen to Parade much. In fact, I’m a little embarrassed to say it, I kind of missed Sign O the Times when it came out. I didn’t immediately buy it, and have a hazy recollection of its entire existence—peach and black smears of videos, again, on MTV—and didn’t own it at first. Before I could even go back and correct my negligence, there were already rumors of something called the Black Album and Lovesexy (which brought me back to my obsession).
So its an album that isn’t stuck at some point in time for me. My appreciation of the album has grown as I have grown. It’s one of those albums you can get lost in—like all good double albums—but also appreciate its singles as some of the best Prince has ever written. You can enjoy the way Prince masters old genres of soul, while also inventing new musical genres (I swear “the Cross” offers a blueprint for a lot of grunge songs). I think for me the greatest accomplishment of Sign O the Times is that, growing up and becoming a music fan, it represented a real personal example of an artist who seemed to be totally in control of his art. Prince seemed to be a popular music auteur the way Dylan or the Beatles or Hendrix or even Bowie had been for my parents’ and slightly younger aunts’ generation. Certainly, the auteurism of some of my parents favorite musicians, specifically Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, would have explicitly resonated with the way I consumed Prince. If there is any popular album that could most easily be compared with Sign O the Times its Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life.
But there’s also something that doesn’t quite work with that comparison: Wonder’s songs seem universal in that they speak to universal aspirations of equality, love, joy, memory, God and, by the final (other than the e.p.) suite of “As” into “Another Star,” literally the universe itself. Prince’s songs on SOTT seem universal as well, but in their insecurities and neuroses. “Play in the Sunshine” is joyous, but marked by the singer’s constant refrain of “No!” (Its own kind of joy) and refusal to engage in the titular activity. “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night” is a Prince’s first really open embrace of jazz on a record, but its joyous groove is undercut by the Wizard of Oz monotone chant of “all we own/we owe,” prefacing Prince’s own struggles with his label. Not to mention it feels like a release after the intensity of the “dark night of the soul” that is “the Cross.”
Throughout there are weird love songs: “Strange Relationship” is an infectious song about the joy of making your partner miserable; “If I Was Your Girlfriend” is a lamentation, correctly, regarding the impossibility of true intimacy between men and women as compared to the intimacy between two women. “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man”—from 1979 originally—is also a song about disavowal. There are also beautiful love songs: “Slow Love,” a warm blanket of an homage to 70s soul; and “Adore,” a song about how much a man loves a woman until, you know, she smashes up his ride.
Despite the unique and often oblique perspectives of the song’s narrators, SOTT, as it has been pointed out, is the rare double album that seems very efficient and well-edited. Honestly, it doesn’t feel like a double album, but it is. And this is where, with the release of the Sign O’ the Times (Deluxe Edition), the one failure of the original double album comes to light: in its efficiency, it trimmed off some of the more experimentally genius moments of the recording sessions (as well as, honestly, some of the fat) that could have made the album even better.
3.
In 1997 Prince released the four (or five—depending on how and when you bought it) collection of unreleased music Crystal Ball. The big selling point of the set was the title track, an unreleased 10+ song from the SOTT sessions. Sign o the Times was originally entitled Crystal Ball and had originally been planned as a triple record set. It was one of those Smile what ifs that had never materialized. Having broken free from his Warner Brother’s record contract, Prince could release whatever he wanted to from the vault. In the 1997 set he released a few tracks from the Crystal Ball sessions, but not much.
But it was worth it for “Crystal Ball,” by far the most psychedelic track that Prince had recorded up to that point—with sound effects, abrupt jumps in tempo and style and a kind of sexual/spiritual fusion to which Prince often lyrically returns. It sort of is the closest Prince got to progressive rock—minus the jazz fusion records he’d released in the early 2000s. And you get all the Crystal Ball tracks, all the Dream Factory tracks and all the Sign O the Times tracks in the box. Indeed, one of the more interesting games you can play, after downloading the album, is constructing the albums that never were.
I recommend listening to the multi-part podcast on this period. I won’t go into the details of each project, other than to say Dream Factory would have been the final Revolution record, Crystal Ball would have been a triple solo album and the album we got, Sign O the Times, is a combination of the two, but not advertised as such. I’m glad that the people at Warner Brothers prevented him from releasing Crystal Ball as it is by far the weakest of the three. Of all three openings, “Rebirth of the Flesh” is the most forgettable. It demonstrates some of Prince’s first “rapping,” which is never one of his talents. It’s not a bad track but also not a particularly memorable one. It then goes into the familiar “Play in the Sunshine” through to “Hot Thing” but adds “Crystal Ball,” obviously, and some of the more average tracks from later releases like “Rockhard In A Funky Place” from the Black Album, “Joy in Repetition” from Graffiti Bridge and “Good Love” from Bright Lights, Big City. “Shockadelica,” a good b-side and would have made sense in the aborted Camile project, just seems lost on this record. “Sign O’ the Times” shows up on the final side before the familiar ending of “the Cross” to “Adore.” The whole Crystal Ball project seems like a clearinghouse for every idea Prince had in this period without putting it into any kind of order. It also leans heavy on the more jammy elements of Prince’s music, something at which he and his collaborators excel no doubt, often sinks his instincts to innovate and be creative. Dream Factory is different altogether and, perhaps because it is new to me, has replaced Sign O the Times as my favorite Prince record. Not because it’s better than Sign O the Times, but because it might be worse insofar as it’s not particularly interested in compromising itself to the listener or market.
In the history of recorded music, double albums, at least from the late 1960s onward, generally have been seen as serious, to the point of self-indulgent, artistic statements. The prototype of all double albums is, of course, the Beatles, the Beatles filled with (depending on your aesthetics) “great” tracks like “Wild Honey Pie” and “Revolution #9”. No one would argue that such cuts aren’t self-indulgent (even if creative) and I suppose your enjoyment of such indulgences depends on your relationship to the artist in question. The high/low point of this (again evaluate along your own tastes) this tendency is, on one hand, the progressive rock nightmare that is Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans or, on the other, the nihilistic, minimalist, joke/composition that is Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (Reed, who certainly should hold the title of most well-known confrontational rock artist of all time would return to this fertile nihilistic self-indulgence for Lulu).
There are certainly double albums that don’t fit this mold but, if you’re going to name something like London Calling, you have to point out that they followed it up with the triple album Sandanista! Which is really indulgent and overlong (as if Prince released Crystal Ball after releasing Sign O the Times). My point being that there is something that always has to be indulgent and experimental about a double album. Something that shouldn’t be, but is. And Sign O the Times is the safe alternative where you learn that Prince is the best pop song writer of his generation and a great musician and bandleader as well. Occasionally something like “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” or “The Cross” will come at you from out of nowhere else in Prince’s vast catalogue up to that point, but knowing what was in the vault it seems we were robbed of something more.
I had already felt this with the Purple Rain (Deluxe Edition), the curation of which Prince oversaw before his untimely death in 2016. There was a double album’s worth of tracks in the vault that would have made a more experimental companion to Purple Rain’s pop perfection. I started wondering if Prince made one album for public consumption and one album for himself during each of his recording periods. 1999 seems to have it and now Sign O the Times has it as well. Dream Factory, appropriately titled, is that album.
It begins with “Visions,” a piano jazz piece that wouldn’t be out of place on a Herbie Hancock album. It has a “Maiden Voyage” feel to it. The piece immediately blends into “Nevaeh Ni Ecalp A,” the track “A Place in Heaven” played backwards—albeit with a ominous organ track replacing the original’s music box melody—and it isn’t until the third track “Dream Factory” that we are in the familiar terrain of Prince and the Revolution. Lest one think all the unreleased stuff on Dream Factory is all difficult and self-indulgent, “Train” is pure enjoyment, an unbelievably catchy song that will make you shake your head and wonder how one man, in one period of his life, could be so talented that he could not only leave this track unreleased, but not include it on any other iteration of the album.
From there we hear the familiar Sign O the Times tracks, again punctuated by a jazz instrumental, “Colors.” This iteration of the album is the only one to feature jazz instrumentals, leading one to conclude that in Dream Factory there’s the ghost of Prince’s father and his career as a jazz pianist. It’s not fruitful to turn albums, or any work of art for that matter, into an autobiography or case study. Yet, there does seem to be something of a self reaching a breaking point in Dream Factory an acknowledgment that he was not interested in being the big pop star (there’s a moving clip in the podcast of Prince mentioning that he, like all people, merely wanted love, water and a small town he could walk around in), however nor was he going to be a cult artist.
And just to prove that Dream Factory was going to be the flawed double album that SOTT was not, the end of the record is all over the place: “the Cross” is followed by the weak run of “Last Heart,” (think of this as Prince’s “Run For Your Life”) “Witness 4 The Prosecution” (WHY did he record TWO versions of this meh thing?) And “Movie Star.” Prince ultimately proved to be a better editor on the tail end, but doing so meant that the last track from Dream Factory was left off and that’s a real, real shame.
When production on Crystal Ball was held up in 1997, Prince decided to record an extra record to be included in the set. The Truth, as it was called, is Prince’s only all acoustic records. I kind of love it—it’s on streaming services now—but the highlight of the record (and one of Prince’s really great unknown songs) is “Dionne.” It’s great because it shows all the different styles of music in which Prince could write. It’s some kind of song from a Cole Porter musical pulled off absolutely convincingly. There’s the same quality initially to the Dream Factory closer: “All My Dreams.” It’s the end of the musical and Prince and the Revolution are sending you off. No purple nuclear apocalypse here. No snow in April. Instead, like Tom Waits on Frank’s Wild Years—also recorded around this time—Prince sings through a megaphone to sound like he’s straight out of the 1920s, singing: “I’ll see you tonight/ in all of my dreams” while Wendy and Lisa croon in the background. As the goes on darker elements creep in: Prince’s lowered voice intoning: “welcome, this is where I live/ This were I dream my dreams” and all of a sudden we’re in another terrain, the “candy colored clown” of Roy Orbison and David Lynch’s dreams as presented in Blue Velvet (released a year earlier). The music becomes discordant as well before the voice begins to describe a man and a woman making love. It reminds me of “We Can Fuck,” the early version of “We Can Funk” from Graffiti Bridge, where something that begins pornographically, ends up in the full redemption of love and light. Here the love and light the singers achieve isn’t romantic fulfillment, but artistic satisfaction and the ability to draw from the well-springs of creative unconscious, which is tantamount to the good here: “Goodness will guide us if love is inside us/ The colors are brighter, the bond is much tighter/ You know no child’s a failure / Until the blue sailboat sails him away from his dreams/ Don’t ever lose, don’t ever lose/ Don’t ever lose your dreams” Sign O the Times ends with “Adore,” a beautiful love song to be sure, but it’s final message rests on the fulfillment of romantic possession rather than creative imagination: “For all time I am with you/ You are with me/ You are with me.”
