Prince Sign O' The Times by: Daniel Grimsey Tue:08-May-07 Label: Warner Year: 1987 WB rating 88 out of 100

It was a hot day in outback Australia.  I was sitting by the public pool, trying to get hip with the cool kids (a task not made any easier by me spouting such words as ‘hip’) when Amanda Shultz, skinny little thing, started talking about how much she liked the new Prince album, which at that time was Diamonds and Pearls, because let’s face it, who couldn’t like ‘Cream.’

Shane Fewster, blonde Catholic boy with a bowl hair cut, spoke up and said possibly the most insightful thing I have ever heard anybody say about the little guy. 

“Yeah, he’s written some good songs, but he still deserves to be shot.”

That says a lot for where I grew up.  It also says a lot about Prince.  Kids who now know Prince mainly for tacky 80’s tunes that tend to get covered by Guy Sebastian and that annoying kid in Romeo and Juliet, won’t understand, but for some of us back in the 1980s, Prince was the music that we used to rebel against the Cold Chisel dominated society.  It stood for everything that everyone we knew hated.  In a way, for us, Prince was our punk. 

The Sign O’ The Times album in particular opened up a whole new world for us.  In a town full of Iron Maiden t-shirts, all of the songs sounded like no other music I had ever heard. In retrospect, that may have been because at the time, it was the blackest music I had ever listened to.

In fact, given that I now identify myself as an ‘indie kid,’ it’s probably still the blackest music I have ever listened to.

To set the scene for the Sign O’ The Times album, it was 1987 and Prince was at his peak, writing more songs than he could handle. While he was able to off load some of the tackier one-off’s on The Bangles and any erotic dancers that happened to be hanging around, that still wasn’t enough. Even this, a double album wasn’t enough.

So Prince created a character called Camille, an annoying little guy, with an irritatingly high, uptight voice, who sounded like an oversexed Steve Urkel. Prince wanted to release a Camille album. The record company said no. So we get ‘Housequake,’ one of the funniest and funkiest tunes ever, but probably as much of an oversexed Steve Urkel as the world needs.  It’s not often that I take sides with the record company instead of Prince, but in this case, they got it right.

The fact that such a song can exist just two songs after the title track, a bleak the world-is-fucked kind of song (albeit with a funky baseline), is an indication of just how varied this album is.  Not just stylistically, but thematically. The title track sets the scene of a crappy world, like the opening music to a film, the hills are alive to the sound of the AIDS epidemic and Challenger disaster. ‘Housequake’ is for the house-party scene, because this is the eighties and every movie set in the eighties needs a house-party scene.

So Prince is at this party, but the world is going crazy and he can’t have fun, so he sits down by the bar, alone, staring into his glass, swivelling his straw (because let’s face it, Prince is a straw-drinking kinda guy), before getting picked up by the smooth talking waitress, in the ‘Ballad of Dorothy Parker’.  Dorothy is one of those sassy and world weary kinds of waitresses. She probably has a deep voice from smoking too many cigarettes. 

Cynthia then pops up. She seems like a crazy mixed-up kid.  She likes to eat ‘Starfish & Coffee,’ which explains a lot. Don’t her parents know it’s dangerous to give children too much coffee [let alone starfish]; it makes them all wired.  But those weird kids, they’re the smart ones you know. Dorothy and Cynthia – they’re the only ones who make any damn sense in this twisted world.

And God.  God makes sense. So insert ‘The Cross’ for a bit of pre-Jehovah Witness bible bashing.  I know that I for one rolled my eyes at the Prince concert a couple of years back, when he changed the lyrics of ‘I Feel For You’ from "it’s mainly a physical thing" to "it’s mainly a spiritual thing". Why, Prince, why?  Prince has always had a bit of the preacher in him, even back in 1987, when he was mostly singing about sex.  No contradiction there at all.

Now, if I ever make a getting-it-on mix tape, ‘It’ will certainly be on it.  In a sparse album where there’s often only a drum machine and a looping riff, the sexy songs – and every Prince album needs a good dose of sexy songs – are the simplest. The over sex song, ‘Hot Thing’ is almost Daft Punk’s ‘Da Funk’ with sexed up lyrics – and a sax solo.

It’s important to realise that even though this is something of a message album about the state of the world, Prince has ADD, and gets easily distracted by sex.  Even on ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ a song that freaked lots of people out at the time, because… well he’s trying to convince his girlfriend, that he should be HER girlfriend and that’s just twisted.  He wants to help her pick out her clothes, and cry on his shoulder, and it’s all very sensitive. But his name is Prince, and he is horny, and by the time the song is over he gets distracted and tries to give her head.

So maybe that’s the lesson to be learnt from Sign O’ The Times.  The world is screwed up, people’s relationships are all screwed up, there’s not a lot we can do about all that.  So let’s get busy.

Even now, when Iron Maiden t-shirts have been regulated to Dangerfield-style retro cool, there’s still a whole world in this album. Part of it is due to the language, specifically the by now familiar use of numbers and letters in place of words in the song titles and lyric sheet: ‘U Got The Look.’

Lots of Prince’s albums cross multiple genres, as he tries to keep both his white and black fans happy. It’s not easy to cater to both the Bruce Springsteen fans who loved ‘Little Red Corvette’ whilst also attempting to stay in touch with the hip-hop revolution. LoveSymbol even had a Bohemian Rhapsody style rock opera!  But it didn’t have these bi-polar mood swings; it didn’t have appearances by quirky school girls, or world-weary waitresses. These characters pop in and out of the album and create the sense that this isn’t just some album you’re listening to; this is a world where you’ve never been.