{"id":615300,"date":"2026-09-29T12:02:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T12:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/615300\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T12:02:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T12:02:09","slug":"a-genre-defying-monument-how-sign-o-the-times-captured-prince-at-his-creative-peak-prince","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/615300\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A genre-defying monument\u2019: how Sign o\u2019 the Times captured Prince at his creative peak | Prince"},"content":{"rendered":"

By the early 1980s, Prince<\/a> had cemented his place as a pop heavyweight with the phenomenal success of his 1999 album, as well as becoming a movie star thanks to Purple Rain. Even when his second film, the old Hollywood throwback Under the Cherry Moon, bombed worldwide in 1986, he notched another massive hit off its soundtrack with Kiss. It didn\u2019t matter if audiences didn\u2019t understand; Prince kept moving forward.<\/p>\n

That restless spirit propelled Prince\u2019s final masterpiece, 1987\u2019s Sign o\u2019 the Times, as he dabbled with different directions. Anything seemed on the table: maybe he would drop another album with his backing band, The Revolution, or he would explore his feminine alter-ego Camille with a self-titled album. He even, at one point, wanted to put out a triple album, a reasonable response to the vast collection of music that Prince was creating. \u201cSometimes when people are in a place of transition, they\u2019re distracted,\u201d said John McKie, whose new book Prince: A Sign o\u2019 the Times<\/a> follows the pop legend\u2019s career through the lens of this classic. \u201cFor Prince, he focused on his music.\u201d<\/p>\n

His record label pushed back on the triple album, so instead Prince<\/a> put out the kaleidoscopic Sign o\u2019 the Times \u2013 which clocked in at 80 minutes across two LPs \u2013 and eventually decided against touring the album in the United States. The Purple One\u2019s imperial period can be difficult to nail down, as he rarely gave interviews or even kept collaborators up to date about what he had planned. Even as McKie interviewed over 100 people about the gestation behind Sign o\u2019 the Times, it wasn\u2019t always easy to understand the headspace Prince was in when he fired his band The Revolution and split up with his fianc\u00e9, Susannah Melvoin. \u201cPrince probably would have been a very good poker player because he didn\u2019t give that much away,\u201d said McKie. \u201cIf you listen to his music, there are lots of clues. He said it himself: \u2018If you want to know me, listen to my music.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Sign o\u2019 the Times, which turns 40 in March, remains a genre-defying monument in Prince\u2019s discography with a thick layer of funk at the center. It\u2019s the LP where Prince happily dipped into Christian rock with The Cross, built Starfish and Coffee around a jazz chord progression, and casually shared the best power pop song of all time with I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man. But it\u2019s also one of Prince\u2019s most thematically disparate projects: \u201cI want to do it baby all the time,\u201d he sings libidinously, only a few songs before heralding the return of Christ. Few people, it seemed, were as good at compartmentalizing as Prince. \u201cHe would be dating two very different women at the same time,\u201d McKie said. \u201cHe would record two very different songs on the same day.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first hit from Sign o\u2019 the Times was the title track, where Prince seems to be reciting from the newspaper, touching upon gang violence, the Hiv\/Aids epidemic, and the possibility of nuclear war, all over an uneasy groove built almost entirely with the Fairlight CMI sampler and synthesizer. He had heard Peter Gabriel<\/a> and Kate Bush<\/a> use the instrument and wanted in on the fun. Elsewhere, the Linn LM-1 drum machine dictated much of the album\u2019s blocky percussion \u2013 Prince reportedly described the party-starting Housequake as having the greatest sounding kick drum of all time \u2013 while he slipped into Camille territory with a zany, high-pitched delivery on a handful of songs. One of them, If I Was Your Girlfriend, McKie believes is in the running for the best song that Prince ever wrote. The dizzying textures seemed designed to confirm that Prince contained multitudes.<\/p>\n

\u201cKeith Richards<\/a> once said of Mike Jagger<\/a>, he once described him as a nice bunch of guys \u2013 I don\u2019t think it was entirely complimentary,\u201d said McKie. \u201cOne of the things that you take from Sign o\u2019 the Times is it\u2019s a nice bunch of Princes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prince in 1987\u2019s Sign o\u2019 the Times concert film. Photograph: Moviestore Collection Ltd\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Part of Prince wanted to settle down. Nowhere is that clearer than on the tender Forever in My Life. But he also dated voraciously, even before he broke things off with Melvoin, who also spent a brief spell as a vocalist in The Revolution. Their romance guided the omnivorous feelings of Sign o\u2019 the Times, especially on the all-timer slow jam Adore and the hot-and-cold Strange Relationship. \u201cI believe the phrase \u2018The one that got away\u2019 could apply here,\u201d said McKie. \u201cLots of people that loved Prince loved Susannah, and lots of people that loved Prince that I spoke to were quite explicit in saying they wished he\u2019d married her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prince had a reputation for being demanding \u2013 or difficult, if you are less charitable. Disputes over songwriting credits and payments for his backing band take up a chunk of McKie\u2019s book, while one tour manager describes him as \u201ca very autocratic ruler\u201d. And while his rivalry with Michael Jackson<\/a> has always received ample attention, it seemed that Prince didn\u2019t know how to deal with his contemporaries: his stock answer for meeting someone new was saying: \u201cI know who you are.\u201d At one point, Prince even bristled at collaborating with Miles Davis<\/a> because he couldn\u2019t control what the jazz giant played. (The trumpeter joined Prince onstage at Paisley Park on New Years Eve in 1987, only a few months after Sign o\u2019 the Times arrived in stores.) The penultimate track, It\u2019s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night, with its call-and-response grooves, made McKie think of \u201cPrince as a jazz band leader brought up to the modern age.\u201d<\/p>\n

On this double album, Prince applied a dash of Davis\u2019s spirit, especially when he faced issues in the studio. His hardworking but fast-moving attitude is clearest on a song like The Ballad of Dorothy Parker, where the song\u2019s high frequencies are muted because engineer Susan Rogers made a mistake with a new mixing console. It wasn\u2019t fixed, as Prince believed that many errors were meant to be. Those coincidences reminded McKie of how Davis worked with his bandmates: \u201cHe was looking for something different, and sometimes he was known to say \u2018play it again\u2019 if someone played a wrong note,\u201d McKie recalled. \u201cPrince was smart enough to acknowledge so-called mistakes and turn them into something.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By the early 1980s, Prince had cemented his place as a pop heavyweight with the phenomenal success of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":615301,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-615300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}