Prince

Prince faced the watershed year of 1987 fully aware that, at just 29 years old, he was universally recognized as one of the defining artists of the decade. "Purple Rain" in 1984, two years after the double album "1999", had made him the only Black artist able to genuinely aspire to the golden throne of Michael Jackson. But unlike Jacko, Prince showed an incredible chameleon-like ability year after year, constantly shifting his stylistic axis, assigning each album its own well-defined chromatic identity, and putting together one of the most staggering runs in the history of music.

In 1985 he steered the Hendrix-like guitars of "Purple Rain" toward the vivid floral psychedelia of "Around The World In A Day"; the following year an elegant black and white look set off the jazzy atmospheres of "Parade", buoyed by the success of the single "Kiss"; and a soft apricot hue marked the double album "Sign O' The Times", a true sonic kaleidoscope in which Prince happily let all his musical selves coexist: R&B, funk, soul, rock, jazz, psych-pop, hip-hop and electronics.

Once the "Parade" promotional tour ended, Prince put a definitive end to the saga of the Revolution, the group of musicians who had backed him through his exploits in recent years and who were, among other things, credited on his most commercially successful records. At that point, with the Revolution, he was putting the finishing touches on a double album, provisionally titled "Dream Factory", bootlegs of which can still be found online today. In parallel, he also scrapped plans for a solo work under the name Camille, his female alter ego, featuring androgynous vocal lines and heavy use of falsetto and pitch control on the voice.

This wealth of material flowed into the triple album "Crystal Ball", which was itself soon shelved at the insistence of Warner Bros., who deemed it too demanding to be well received by the market. Everything was thus scaled down into a more marketable double album, "Sign O' The Times" as it turned out, which also made room for a few ideas that had been sitting in the drawer for years, such as "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man", of which a version dating back to the very earliest days of the Minneapolis genius's career is known to exist.

Prince was in an extraordinary state of bulimic creative grace: he kept churning out floods of songs, and, unlike what would happen in the years after "Lovesexy", the average quality remained consistently sky-high. He moved regularly between his beloved Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles and his new home studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota, at 7141 Galpin Boulevard, at the time living with his partner Susannah Melvoin, a backing singer in the Revolution and a member of the side project Family, for whom Prince wrote the famous "Nothing Compares 2 U" in 1985, later taken to the top of the charts by Sinead O'Connor. In the spring of 1986, right as "Kiss" was climbing the charts across half the world, Prince would typically spend day and night in the studio, or have magnetic tapes shipped back and forth across the country, living out an ideal existence built entirely on love and music.

For "Sign O' The Times" the main hurdle was finding a coherence across all the chosen material, avoiding the risk that it would be perceived as a best of lacking a solid thread. In reality, the true strength of the apricot-colored double album lies precisely in its unusual heterogeneity, held together by an emblematic cover, crowded with some of the symbols that make up its author's imagery: a glimpse of the city, a drum set mounted on top of a Cadillac, neon signs, an electric guitar abandoned on the ground, Prince's face caught almost in passing at the far right, and a dazzling golden-yellow hue pervading it all.

"Sign O' The Times", Prince's ninth studio album, ended up gathering sixteen tracks recorded at different times, in different places and with different line-ups, a molten crossroads of musical encounters, each lived through with intensity and focus. The guiding star lighting the way remained James Brown, the leader Rogers Nelson took as his model, flanked in spirit by Sly & The Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Little Richard and George Clinton with his collective Parliament–Funkadelic.

Opening the tracklist was one of the masterpieces of Prince's discography, a timeless song that still sounds strikingly contemporary today: "Sign O' The Times". The decision to make a video consisting solely of animated lettering of the song's lyrics, with no sign of the star-icon immortalized in the film "Purple Rain", was a shock to many.

At the time Prince was fascinated by hip-hop and tended to give maximum prominence to the expressive potential of an instrument fundamental to him: the voice. He experimented with drum machines, samplers, bass, blues guitar and voice to create his own take on minimal electro-funk/soul. Those were complicated times: the United States, in the middle of Reagan's second, conservative presidency, had watched its space program crumble after the Challenger explosion broadcast around the world, while the chill of the Cold War and the specter of nuclear conflict still blew strong. The world was grappling with natural disasters, new synthetic drugs and a terrible epidemic that would seriously affect the habits of the entire population. Legend has it that, on July 13, 1986, Prince opened a couple of newspapers, the L.A. Times and the StarTribune, and found front-page news about earthquakes, AIDS and murder trials: these were among the events that made him picture the apocalypse later expressed in "Sign O' The Times".

Sign o’ the times mess with your mind

Hurry before it's too late

Let’s fall in love, get married, have a baby

We'll call him Nate

If it's a boy

Time

Times

Within the album, however, these tensions are balanced by a recourse to themes of love, sex and private intimacy, tackled with surprising clarity across a myriad of styles, managing the feat of both honoring and rewriting them at the same time: from the infectious, Elvis-à-la Elvis rock 'n' roll of "Play In The Sunshine", to the enveloping (nu-)soul of "The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker", passing through rap, which turns ragged and lethal on "Housequake", where Prince sets an example for many rappers present and future, then robotic on "Hot Thing", built on synthetic backing vocals and set alight by a funk-jazz sax solo.

The obsessive "It" is the quintessence of Prince's pop-soul, caught between synthetic beats in the style of "When Doves Cry" and electric notes that suddenly pour down like rain in a lightning-fast solo, while "Forever In My Life" is an electro-gospel number that anticipates the ingredients of the future hit "Cream" (from "Diamonds And Pearls", 1991).

Some tracks are the distillation of (pleasantly) endless jam sessions, such as the instrumental coda of the title track, the vividly colorful pop-rock of "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man", with an instrumental bridge as long as the sung part, and the never-ending party of "It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night", recorded live in Paris a year earlier, a towering celebration of the wildest nightlife.

What a lovely walk we've taken

Let us dine on beans and bacon

So the ducky and the little browny (say it, y’all)

Mousey and the beetle dined

And danced upon their heads

Till they toddled to their beds (can’t nobody fuck with us)

Good God (Good God)

Revolution, baby way down low

Beautiful night, y'all say it

Beautiful night, y'all say it

Say what a beautiful night, y'all say it

Beautiful night, y'all say it

Come on

There's no shortage of pop gems with killer refrains, engineered to storm the charts, like the bouncy "Strange Relationship," the serene family portrait "Starfish & Coffee" — written together with his partner Susannah — and the glossy "U Got The Look," an irresistible duet shared with Sheena Easton. And then there are shape-shifting ballads, like the sensual soul of "Slow Love," where the saxophone at times recalls certain romantic passages from Clarence Clemons, the gospel that mutates into rock on the spiritual "The Cross," the ambiguous languor of "If I Was Your Girlfriend," and the vocal ups and downs that ennoble lust and redemption on the closing elegy "Adore," suspended between soul tradition and jazz futurism. What emerges, constant and strong, is the originality of the song-form's architecture, which takes on unique traits, transcending any stylistic boundary.

Right in the middle of the postmodern era, where cut-up, appropriation and the recycling of musical tropes become the conceptual foundation of entire genres — post-punk, pop, hip-hop — Prince builds an utterly personal language, introducing innovations in the treatment of vocals, in horn arrangements and in the use of guitars, especially on soul-rooted tracks. The recording studio, used as an additional instrument, allows him to experiment: for instance, to stretch his own voice — becoming Camille — and build it in polyphony, as if it were a single breath, exploring his entire vocal range and his own timbre in constant tension with his inner emotional universe.

Until the end of time

I'll be there for you

You own my heart and mind

I truly adore you

If God one day struck me blind

Your beauty I'll still see

Love is too weak to define

Just what you mean to me

Although nominated for a Grammy Award in the "Album of the Year" category, and regarded by many as his most representative record, "Sign O' The Times" is certainly not remembered as Prince's most commercially successful project, having sold "only" a million copies in the United States and around three million worldwide. It topped the charts only in Switzerland, while in the United States it peaked at number six and in the United Kingdom had to settle for fourth place — the same result it achieved here in Italy. On the year-end charts it ranked a mere 47th in the United States and as low as 79th in the United Kingdom, while on our peninsula it ended up ninth among the best-sellers of 1987. Nonetheless, its legacy is priceless.

In September 2020 it was honoured with a monumental super deluxe edition comprising no fewer than eight CDs (or 12 vinyl records) and a DVD: alongside the two remastered originals and a couple of full-length live shows from the era (the Utrecht concert of 20 June 1987 in audio format, plus the one filmed at Paisley Park on New Year's Eve 1988 on the DVD), it features remixes, B-sides, alternative takes and as many as 45 previously unreleased tracks (underscoring the creative excess we mentioned earlier). Among these, at least a few deserve a mention: the Miles Davis feature on "Can I Play With U?," the brief free-jazz divertissement "And That Says What?," the more than twelve minutes of funk intoxication "Soul Psychodelicide," and a pop gem of the highest order, "Love And Sex," which deserved far greater visibility.

I want to do it baby all the time, all right

Because when we do it girl, it's so divine, all right

Doing it, doing it

Doing it, doing it

While working on "Sign O' The Times," Prince stayed in his hometown, beginning construction of Paisley Park, a complex made up of several recording studios, an auditorium and a rehearsal stage equipped with audio-video recording facilities. Beyond its more immediate meanings, the album would also become a new chapter in an intensely political body of work — with no need for manifestos or factions — through which its author asserted an authentically African American artistic and cultural model. It was the same step being taken, at the time, by the then up-and-coming director Spike Lee. Prince presented himself with a flamboyant, androgynous look, surrounding himself with collaborators such as Sheila E and Wendy & Lisa, while Spike Lee brought to the screen, in his debut "She's Gotta Have It" (1986), the story of Lola, an icon of a new, independent and sexually uninhibited femininity.

Among the merits of these two artists is undoubtedly their ability to gather a global audience, one that cuts across age, sex, gender and ethnicity, presenting and giving voice to a unique, personal imagination rooted deeply in African-American culture. “Sign O' The Times”, for its part, helped indelibly define the artistic coordinates of one of the most significant composers and musicians in the entire history of popular music. One of the last true icons of global pop culture.

Note: in the album's credits, the letter “o” in the title is represented by the peace symbol: “☮︎”.

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27/09/2020