Prince – Sign O’ The Times
For me, this is the Prince album, the one where his inventive dancey funk energy met rock ’n’ roll and he just turned in maybe the best album of the ‘80s, period. There were others that I loved as much in 1987, and others that I’ve played more then and since, but the more I listen to it and think about it – and enjoy the incredible live recording – the more I’m impressed by the staying power of this album.
Apparently I’m no longer in the minority on this, but when it came out it seemed like people were generally disappointed it wasn’t more “Purple Rain” – but I wasn’t one of those people and over time critics have come around. In any event, I was excited when this came out in 1987.
That was a year of huge transition for me – the summer that I started going to grad school, after needing to defer it for a year. I was still working full-time as a typesetter. In order to manage the coursework, I took a vacation that let me attend the beginning course that summer during the daytime, and then settled into a very trying period of working at my job from 6 am until about 1 pm, then racing to the campus on my newly purchased Honda scooter (and wasn’t that fun in the winter in Syracuse!), because the only way to get parking close to my classes was with a motorcycle permit. (Riding a scooter never made me feel like Prince.) We were very budget constrained – I was working fewer hours and paying grad school tuition for that first year of the program – so there were not a lot of records or CDs bought from about 1987 through 1989. Most of what I bought in 1987 were just absolute essentials, from my point of view: k.d. lang’s “Angel With a Lariat,” The Silencers’ “A Letter From St. Paul,” Squeeze’s “Babylon and On,” a couple of Marc Almond releases because I would buy absolutely anything by Marc Almond then. So Prince, who was at most a casual interest for me at that point, would not have been considered a “must have,” but I’m sure “Sign O’ The Times” sparked me immediately and if it hadn’t, then “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man,” my favorite Prince song, would have. (Pretty sure the video for “U Got The Look” didn’t hurt my impression of the record.) And “if you ain’t hip to the real housequake . . . shut up, already. Damn!” is simply part of our vocabulary.
So overall, personally and musically, an absolute top 10 album.
Very distinct memories around this one’s release for me, too. I was in Athens, Georgia, at the time, and this one was a BIG part of the soundtrack of that year. It’s also the last great Prince album that I played to pieces and got to know deeply . . . somehow nothing that followed ever reached the heights (for me) of the truly incredible “Dirty Mind” to “Sign” run of records. (Also a factor: by the time his next album came out, I was in my own era of fraught finances with a new child, and albums had to be acquired judiciously . . . and based on what I saw/heard on MTV in the late ’80s/early ’90s, I didn’t feel like I needed to prioritize Prince’s further post-Revolution output).
I was about the same. I’d say I was a casual fan until this, THIS blew my mind, then as I’m about to say, Lovesexy didn’t, and I was kinda done. But I do have two live discoveries from just the last couple of years to talk about still!