Usually when pop music creates the illusion of functionalism, it’s an effect of genre exercise — of inhabiting a preexisting form so fully that one’s artistic message, whatever that might be, becomes indistinguishable from utter mastery of formal convention, nothing less and nothing more, which produces a sense of tight, flawless craft, which in turn produces the sense that this is consumer-friendly product, music that’s deeply useful and reliable for pushing your buttons. Such music honors and apotheosizes its chosen tradition simultaneously, redefining the genre in its own image by setting it equal to its most dominant characteristics. This is where my attempted summary breaks down, because Sign o’ the Times arrives at this illusion via a radically different route. Above generalizations to the contrary, the album hardly inhabits just one single genre. Maybe deep, stark electrofunk is the unifying musical factor, but so many songs add so much more that one could hardly call it the album’s genre and leave it at that. Maybe sex is the most frequent theme, but if you examine the lyrics alone you’ll get nowhere. Maybe these are the rules, but to these rules every song is an exception. This is an album where virtually none of the songs sound alike. It laughs at coherence, thumbs its nose at the parsable sequence, and blows mocking kisses at the Statement Album tradition. Where even to begin?
Try “Housequake,” a goofy funk showpiece in which Prince, disguised as Bugs Bunny, exhorts us to jump up and down to the brand new groove going round, having artificially sped-up his voice to sound higher, dinkier, and more androgynous. (This voice belonged to his alter ego, and her name is Camille.) At the bottom, rocksolid bassline and supremely unflappable drums; up top, nervous staccato horns, eerie electronic ostinato, and a cheerfully dinky keyboard chime that mimics the way Prince chants the title. “Housequake!” he exclaims, whereupon the keyboard lets out a little squeal, and so on. What’s most wily about “Housequake” is the way the instruments shift and respond to Prince’s voice — the way he utters “Question: does anybody know about the quake?/bullshit!” and then the horns slide in, or the way the horns depart from the main riff and trigger that spooky ostinato siren to make room for cheers from a fake audience, or the way the keyboard hook gets trickier and jumpier as his chanting gets concomitantly wilder, or the way he announces a saxophone into being and suddenly that saxophone starts blurting out a melody. Gradually building to a pitch of irresistible rhythmic heat, riding a beat wigglier and more multifaceted than Prince’s norm (and a beat that still comes down hard on the third measure anyway, because he just can’t resist straightahead whomp), “Housequake” imitates the extended band grooves beloved of classic funksters starting with James Brown, but except for Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss in the horn section, it’s all Prince. You can hear how delighted he was to have replicated music founded on collaborative instrumental interplay with nothing but his own hand, voice, and imagination.
Try “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,” another extended groove session and the only song on the album to feature a full band, recorded live in Paris. Big metallic drums, a dynamic, rubbery rhythm guitar figure, and the full-bodied bounce of the horn section, all played by various members of the Revolution, combine to produce a slicker, more modern-sounding funk than the retronuevo style in “Housequake,” the kind of polished bubblegum funk that might conceivably have topped the charts if given a verse-chorus-verse structure, shorn of several horn solos, and trimmed to a respectable length rather than nine full minutes. Instead, after a falsetto verse or two, the band starts to improvise, the horns start aggressively honking over the beat, the drums start relentlessly thwacking down, the keyboards start spraying out ribbons of glitzy confetti, and Prince proceeds to holler, shriek, speak in tongues, improvise a whole array of inarticulate animal cries and repeat the Winkie chant from The Wizard of Oz. The heavy, sticky, hyperactive kick of the second horn solo could quack through steel; the warbly wail of the third sounds a piercing alarm call. As the album’s token live track, “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night” honors the funk jam from the showman’s end of the spectrum — the way Prince tells the musicians what to do (“Drop the horn!” “Just the drums!”) and gets the crowd to sing along, the snazzy flash ending where all the musicians convene to hit the same sudden note and then stop, triggering rapturous cries from the audience, and the improvisatory nature of the whole thing achieve a synthetic electricity dependent on the live performance context. You can hear how delighted he was to have proven himself a magisterial bandleader.
Try “Slow Love,” which so nails the crooner style I can’t even figure out who he’s trying to sound like — Johnny Mathis? Billy Eckstine? “Slow Love” fashions a replicated musical period piece complete with piano bedrock, restrained drums not so much driving as following the melody, and sappy strings swathing the whole thing in a cozy, syrupy blanket, then adds a historically anachronistic saxophone that, without turning the song into swing, after the first chorus continues to solo in the background for pretty much the rest of the song, swelling up with liquid joy at each subsequent chorus and sometimes commenting on Prince’s vocal line. “Let’s make it slow [babeedabuhh]/just like the wind blows [badadadadee],” and so on. Being a hot, loose, devilish R&B saxophone, not a meticulous, decorative big band saxophone, it adds modernist cognitive dissonance while imagining an alternate version of history that still sounds right, that fits the emotional tone of one’s memories and/or received ideas about ‘50s pop. Gee, why didn’t Billy Eckstine sound like this? “Slow Love” makes one imagine Prince as the singer in a dimly lit lounge, wearing a tuxedo plus bowtie or perhaps a very revealing black dress, standing in front of an orchestra larger than the one implied by the recording, cooing and sighing through the cigar smoke, stars, guitars, lips red as wine, chances are you think his heart’s your Valentine. Yet beyond the artifice he also sounds flushed, rapturous, in love. With the woman or the genre, I wonder?
Try “Adore”, a Philadelphia soul ballad and/or precisely crafted period piece so achingly tender it makes your late-’60s/early-’70s harmony group of choice sound pathetically insincere by comparison — Prince is that much sexier, that much schlockier, and even masterpieces like the Stylistics’ “You Are Everything” and the Delfonics’ “La-La Means I Love You” don’t quite melt into the stars with such stylized passion. Organ, strings, and electric sitar form a delicate bed of fluffy golden feathers on which Prince can recline and sing in his highest, creamiest, most angelic falsetto. First the gliding chorus, then the swooning verse, again the chorus, and suddenly it all explodes into the bridge, suddenly the horns are blasting and the sitar is moaning and a tinkly electric piano is playing these cascading arpeggios and Prince, his voice still smooth and feminine, is squealing howling sobbing in ecstasy, suddenly the music climaxes, spills over the edge, heavy breathing, pounding hearts. Then the song gradually relaxes, settling back into the glide, and rides it for the remaining three minutes until the high note at the end. The sitar jangles a bit, and the horns play rough sometimes, but the general affect is soft, lavish, velvety, exquisite, a ray of light, so intensely devotional it expresses not lust but a nearly religious rapture; when Prince sings he sees tears from heaven, pennies from heaven, blessings from heaven, and big wet sloppy kisses. Prince fans consider playing this song a surefire way to get your lover to jump in your arms and fuck you silly. You betcha transparent genre exercise is sexy.
Try “U Got the Look”, the album’s highest charting single. What with its heavy arena beat, roaring power chords, unnaturally high guitar solo, and subtler shades of synthesizer than usual, it outrocks anything else that hit the charts in 1987. Too precisely mechanical for the blues melody to sound much like blues, Prince’s LinnDrum beat slams down hard on the nonstop whomp that dominates the album, sparking a big punchy rock song that nonetheless fits the album’s unifying electrofunk. Prince sings the verse in his sped-up Camille voice, Scottish pop sensation Sheena Easton sings the chorus in her normal voice, and they sound almost identical (you mean, that isn’t Prince trying to seduce himself? are you sure?), playing two cartoon lovers whose cartoon eroticism gets them cartoon crooning and groaning and shrieking in all their cartoon glory; in their back-and-forth — “You walked in (I walked in!)/I woke up (you woke up!)” — the two voices are really the same person, two manifestations of Prince, Thing One and Thing Two. Moreover, Prince/Camille is no less external to Prince than Easton; both are projections dependent on the other for their antithetical parts in a calculated double performance. Here we are, ladies and gentlemen, the dream we all dream of, boy versus girl in the World Series of love.
Try “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” which gives arena-rock a great big hug where “U Got the Look” merely makes flirty eyes at the genre from across the room — drums galloping off into the sunset, distorted power chords blasting across the beat, a descending synthesizer hook whose twinkly cheer only makes the whole thing grander, overdubbed backing vocals I swear he nabbed from the Beatles, and a giant, rousing, fist-pumping, anthemic chorus in which Prince turns down the woman hitting on him: “Baby don’t waste your time/I know what’s on your mind/we wouldn’t be satisfied with a one night stand and I could never take the place of your man.” (What crazy world is Prince living in where adults actually speak to each other so directly and astutely?) It leads into a soaring guitar solo so magnificent and conventional it’s almost a joke about a guitar solo, and then the whole thing unravels as the bassline, synthesizer, and strummed guitar chords drop out, the drums get quieter, and Prince continues to solo on his own for two whole minutes more. Then, at the very end, the chords return, Prince yells a countoff, and the synthesizer hook plays again before going out on a high note. “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” honors Prince the rock guitar hero and evokes a massive group singalong, as rock anthems often do; one imagines Prince ripping out his solo in the middle of a giant sports field, spotlight on him, as thousands of fans in the audience chant the chorus in unison. Isn’t this the kind of romanticized expression he was specifically avoiding in the studio? Not when genre convention is the means of expression.
Try “It,” which crafts from blocky drum machine and glitzy keyboard a hook that repeats throughout the whole song, jumping an octave during the chorus but otherwise unaltered. Prince yelps and howls lyrics about sexual frenzy, not an uncommon theme with him, and in the middle there’s a guitar solo, but the hook is the focus, calmly and also ecstatically repeating over, and over, and over, working up a sticky sweat, savage lust just barely tempered by formal discipline in the heat of obsession. Then, starting around the first chorus, the drum machine starts going haywire. While the basic beat remains, other related notes spew out at random for the rest of the song, sometimes treated with weird harmonic effects and sometimes just reiterating the beat using different, harder, softer, crunchier, more electric percussive textures, getting particularly wild when the keyboard hook drops out for a few bars right at the end. Disregard the lyrics — “It” concerns sex only insofar as everything else in the world does too, especially since he never specifies what “it” is, just that he wants to do it all the time ‘cause when we do it girl it’s so divine. It could be sex, prayer, communion with the heavens, satanic ritual, human sacrifice, eating pancakes, brushing teeth, or making music. It could be a larger metaphor for the existential impulses satisfied by sex, or an abstract activity invested with fascinating power only by mutual agreement. It could be the song’s keyboard hook, which as the song builds keeps getting more intense and more sublime.
Try “Hot Thing,” a smashing funk-rock bomb. Fierce, slamming drums, elegant-fingered bass, irresistible saxophone blaze from Eric Leeds, and one great mother of a synthesizer hook knock you over with fabulous energy. Super dancefloor-targeted, the song’s beat — including Prince’s signature heavy third but a little more nuanced, speeding up every other measure to lend the music a sense of forward motion — aims to make you jump from your seat, move move move, shake your body til your neighbors stare at ya. Everything about this song is absurdly aggressive, from the synthesizer hook rubbing its own brilliance in your face to the saxophone solo that sounds like a billion others you’ve heard only tougher, bluesier, brighter and hotter and more alive; as often happens with Prince, he’s so delighted with his own confidence that the delight transfers over to the listener. Like “It,” “Hot Thing” concerns sex only in a metaphorical sense without canceling the option of taking the metaphor literally. The celebrated hot thing could easily be the song itself, a love letter to its own potency which, in turn, is enabled by the love letter in a symbolic, self-enclosed performance system. Yet the hot thing could just as easily be a person, an imagined object for Prince to project desire onto, present less for the hot thing’s own sake than to validate Prince as One Who Desires, which in fact would make the hot thing a metaphor still. None of this cuts into the song’s erotic charge; as freaky fucksongs go, “Hot Thing” is a doozy. If it doesn’t make you at least want to dance or something, perhaps sex is not for you.
Try “The Cross,” half-strummed acoustic gospel elegy, half-thundering rock anthem, with guitars more distorted than usual. Try “Strange Relationship,” tight, gleaming Anglodisco with a killer synthesizer hook. Try “Forever in My Life,” a classic-sounding soul ballad sung over spare drum machine. Try “Sign o’ the Times,” a concerned protest sung over ominous minimalist percussion-oriented electrofunk. Try “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” a tribute to the Muse over ominous minimalist bass-oriented electrofunk. Try “Starfish & Coffee,” a cute psychedelic folk ballad with a cute cryptic mystical message. Try “Play in the Sunshine,” a surrealist kiddie singalong that dives through the looking glass and emerges from the rabbit hole. Now a funk song and now a folk song and now a jazz song and now a rock song and now a protopunk song, I guess, and wait is that Motown? Now he’s a crooner, now he’s an R&B loverboy, now he’s an earnest folkie, now he’s a foxy glam-rocker, now he’s an excited gospel singer with his hand on his heart, now he’s an excited lounge lizard with his hand in his pants. Now he’s rocking tight, now he’s grooving sharp, now he’s strumming a guitar, now he’s shredding a guitar, now he’s stroking a keyboard, now he’s conducting a horn section, now he’s conducting an orchestra, now he’s dancing the night away. Behold the many faces of Prince. Try every song on the album. Try them all again.
While Prince had previously established himself as a genre-bender extraordinaire, before Sign o’ the Times he’d inhabited his chosen genres all at once, as with his original funk-rock amalgam that quickly developed into the famous Minneapolis sound, never from one song to the next on the same album — having fashioned striking sounds from mashing influences together, he dedicated each album to one synthesis and one only, as with Purple Rain’s arena-rock, Around the World in a Day’s nightmare psychedelia, and so on, ensuring that each album worked as a unified statement of style. Sign o’ the Times includes more genres than ever, yet declines to mix them. Each song picks a distinct and usually preexisting genre, provides an exemplary model for how that genre should or at least can be performed, moves on to the next radically different genre, and repeats the cycle.
Since genre is a perceived, externally imposed category rather than an intrinsic musical element, the job of assigning genre usually falls to the critic. Sign o’ the Times does the job for you — as with obsessive formalists whose whole albums define and/or apotheosize their chosen genres through a combination of received stylistic convention and the illusion of pop functionalism, each song on Prince’s album performs that trick for a different context. Some songs do this more clearly than others, some occupying existing genres while others stick to those Prince just made up (how would one classify “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”?). Whether sticking to or playing around with convention, each incorporates genre marks into its own musical substance. The falsetto vocals, devotional lyrics, and classic combination of strings, horn, organ, and sitar on “Adore” aren’t just elements that a ‘60s-style Philadelphia soul ballad might happen to include; they’re the very substance of a Philadelphia soul ballad (according to those who perform acts of genre assignment), the specific attributes that equal the genre. By consciously foregrounding and exaggerating these elements, “Adore” announces itself as the album’s Philadelphia Soul Ballad — just as “Housequake” announces itself as the album’s Old-School Funk Dance Track, “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” as the album’s Singalong Arena-Rock Anthem, and so on. Taken individually, not every song would categorize itself so clearly; but for each song here to occupy space on the same album categorizes the album as a genre exercise collection, and in that context even the least genre-specific songs become ipso facto genre exercises and their musical attributes ipso facto genre marks. Thus does every song on Sign o’ the Times perform an internal act of genre assignment independent of an external consumer, written into its own substance.
Sign o’ the Times also places its songs in chronological categories — not historical periods per se, but abstract moments in time evoked/portrayed/invented by the song’s respective genre. Genres, as we perceive them, are associated with historical periods, and genre assignment is a transitive action that occurs in real time. The album’s format as a collection of genre exercises almost by definition jumps from the past to the present (and the future, if you buy Michaelangelo Matos’s claim that “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” predicted trip-hop, but Prince couldn’t have known that, right?) in a metahistorical, metadimensional sweep. Just as some songs inhabit more specific genres than others, some can be dated more precisely; I’d guess 1969 for “Housequake” and 1956 for “Slow Love” and 1968 for “Adore” and maybe 1984 for “Strange Relationship” and 1981 for “U Got the Look,” imitating Prince’s own previous music. Some songs posit alternate versions of history, like “Forever in My Life” playing a replicated Motown ballad with nothing but bass and drum machine; some occupy two moments at once, like “The Cross” starting as an acoustic gospel song and turning into a wild protopunk rampage (perhaps occupying two places at once in 1971?), or “U Got the Look”, which in addition to representing the Minneapolis sound also represents the genre of the duet and dates back much earlier. On an album whose juxtapositional format so clarifies each song’s status as a historical reference, it hardly matters whether the genre exercises actually resemble their source material. The act of genre assignment creates for every song on Sign o’ the Times an imagined moment in imaginary time.
By situating each song in a different invented historical period, a different chronological box, Sign o’ the Times externalizes not only the source material but also the songs themselves. One might think all genre exercise does this, taking the desired genre as an object and explicit goal and hence setting it apart from the musical subject; actually the process of internalizing genre marks can make a genre’s status as a genre more explicit than it was when practiced less self-consciously, externalizing the source material while formalizing it into a genre and proclaiming itself, the musical subject, as the apotheosis of the genre it itself invented. Sign o’ the Times doesn’t perform that kind of exemplary genre summary — or rather, the album doesn’t as a whole, because it’s what each song taken individually, each genre taken individually, does. If every song on the album sounded like “Slow Love,” we’d have a great tribute to and/or summary of ‘50s pop, and a direct reference to a particular era; since the album includes references of that sort to many particular eras, it doesn’t vicariously inhabit just one. Placing its many imagined moments in succession, each of which already establishes distance, Sign o’ the Times further distances itself as an aesthetic whole, and Prince as an aesthetic agent, from each particular song and the time windows framing each song. The album’s unifying qualities exist outside its multiple timeframes, inhabiting an implied present no one song captures on its own.
If one has difficulty defining just when, exactly, that implied present is — answering 1987 is too easy, as the implied present is a construction and not a date — that’s intentional, a result of Prince’s slippery relationship with time and genre, and perhaps in historical terms the album’s implied present is not concrete. In categorizing its own songs, in performing its own internal act of genre assignment and time placement, Sign o’ the Times also categorizes itself as a categorizer, an active agent where most albums are passively categorized by external consumers. It takes on the critic’s role in performing acts of genre assignment, performs such acts on each particular song, and in doing so also assigns itself as a whole the genre of categorizer, the category of genre assigner. This, too, is a self-assigned genre, one implicit in the way the album collects genre marks and places them in succession, a genre transparently self-assigned based on the internal evidence, not one that I am presently assigning the album right now, although of course I am doing that too. Beyond the role of categorizer, already a self-referential metagenre, there’s hardly a larger context one can spring on the album, even as an external agent performing the act of genre assignment oneself; as far as assigning genre goes, the album includes all the internal genre marks necessary and leaves no category for the critic to impose. Admittedly, the acuity of these internal genre marks depends on their reference to external ideas about specific genre definitions, and the continual success of this strategy over time depends on said external genre definitions staying the same. Effectively, Sign o’ the Times performed the only relevant act of genre assignment on itself in 1987, an act whose consequent imposed parameters today still apply.
Sign o’ the Times sounds like nothing else released in 1987, and not just because no other musician could muster Prince’s multidimensional ambition. It lacks the genre marks to situate it in 1987, and even the album’s intermittently unifying electrofunk hardly matches the electrofunk that otherwise occupied the pop charts. Rather, the implied present occurs at the exact imagined moment at which the album performs its act of self-categorization. Historically, the album categorized itself in real time, and that happened in 1987. Yet the genre of categorizer is an abstract one where the genre of, say, kiddie psychedelia is a concrete one, and, crucially, the album declines to define its implied present. An undefined implied present could be any time at all, whenever one happened to imagine it, perhaps an imagined moment standing outside the linear progression of history, and one’s perception of such an implied present would likely change with time, according to which moment in real time one performs the act of listening and categorizing — in 1987, you bet people placed the album’s implied present in 1987, and today one could place the album’s implied present today, even if an equivalent achievement would sound different given modern recording technology and subsequent genre development. Maybe the great album exists and maybe it doesn’t. If Sign o’ the Times sounds like one, there’s a reason why.
This is a tricky achievement, more Revolver than the frequently compared White Album, and where the Beatles occupy that magical classic pop paradise due to influence, canonical centrality, and cultural saturation, Prince lives in the same world, the same joyful goofy surreal musical utopia, because he deliberately constructed it. Everything that keeps the Beatles sounding fresh and innovative after fifty years thanks to specificity of vision also applies to Prince after thirty years thanks to generality of vision; ignoring modern styles, which produce a contemporaneity that eventually dates, Prince instead targeted multiple past, present, and pseudo styles to produce a distance between musical subject (Prince) and object (the song, plus its genre, plus its timeframe) that remains permanently contemporary due to atemporality. As with genre assignment, albums are usually declared great by external agents, critics examining the album in retrospect. Prince coded the quality into his music directly, as if it were something a musician has control over, as if he could just snap his fingers and poof, a classic album.
This quality would be timelessness, I think, in the truest sense of the word. For an artist who actively pursued transcendence — sexual and spiritual and metaphysical — who aimed to blend and surpass and fuck with and celebrate and make irrelevant musical genres and, by extension, class, race, gender, and all those awful inescapable categories we assign to people, it is an apt achievement. Poof, a classic album.
Try “If I Was Your Girlfriend”, in which Prince longs for transcendence. Hollow drum machine, slapped bass, and pitch-corrected synthesizer mark a tragicomic soul ballad sung in Prince’s Camille voice plus artificially squeaky and artificially deep voices harmonizing in back. The hook fades in and out, usually recurring after the verse and triggering the bass; cold electronic ostinato pervades the song, mimicking its church organ intro and lending the song an aura of melancholy. What’s most striking about “Girlfriend” is the way Prince overdubs his multiple voices into a mock choir, dueting with himself where “U Got the Look” merely dueted with his externalized avatar in Sheena Easton — a thick body of high, low, pained, ecstatic voices shrieking and giggling and weeping at each other, intertwined so intricately it’s hard to note where one stops and another begins (“If I was your girlfriend would you let me dress you? I mean help you pick out your clothes BEFORE WE GO OUT/not that you’re helpless but sometimes sometimes those are the things that BEING IN LOVE’S ABOUT”), plus there’s always inarticulate wailing between the words. Before the spoken-word outro delivered in Camille’s chattering cadence letting loose with a frustrated pillow-talk rant, it’s all dizzy, hormonal inwardly-directed self-tinker, the bickering of his many voices continually sparking the conflicted, tortured argument raging in his head, and if the fever persists his head’s about to explode.
The lyrics fantasize about turning into the girlfriend’s platonic female friend and thus getting closer; Camille’s vocal mixture of vulnerability and artificiality, of soul and cartoon, of woman and man and something that you’ll never understand, goes further — the very existence of such a voice, the result of Prince speeding up his own voice to resemble some creepy entity whose vaguely womanly bleat could have belonged to your aunt or a child or the anthropomorphized Feminine Principle, articulates the urge to escape one’s own body, to escape all physical barriers and gender distinctions, to cross dividing lines between people and completely merge with the other (“I wanna be all the things you are to me”). Implicit in this weird, personal sex fantasy is the desire for love so radical it subsumes its participants, the desire for intimacy so absolute that subjectivity dissolves, the desire to totally discard identity and humanity and enter into a cosmic abstract all-encompassing swirl of faceless timeless divisionless essence — Prince intensifying the romantic relationship by sidestepping it altogether; Prince intensifying the romantic bond by becoming both Lover X and Lover Y; Prince staring sizzling holes in his own eyes. A plead: “If I was your one and only friend/would you run to me if somebody hurt you even if that somebody was me?” A tongue-lashing : “Sometimes I trip on how happy we could be.” A collapse: “Pleeeheeeheeeheeeese”.
Thirty years from now others will perform different acts of (genre/time/qualitative) assignment in different time moments and see things differently, and my perspective will seem dated, and Sign o’ the Times won’t.