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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Part '80s musical retrospective, part angry social document and all booty-thumping housequake, Prince's 1987 classic stands as pop's last great double album.
Mar 11, 2002 | Little in the world of music is more self-indulgent than the double album. To create one implies an artist has twice as much to say as the majority of performers, what they have to say must be said right then and there and little of it can be understood outside the context of a massive amount of other material. Most double albums -- at least the great ones -- are bound by nothing except their own far-reaching scopes. The subject matter, range of musical styles and grooves on the LP seem to fit together only because nearly everything else under the sun is there too. Such examples aren't hard to think of -- "The Beatles" (aka the White Album), "Exile on Main Street," "Songs in the Key of Life" (perhaps the most thematically consistent double album of them all).
And then came Prince, as grand and in love with his own talent as any performer in memory. His first double album, "1999," was a smashing success, a cultural landmark that showed how genius could turn vulgarity into erotica, weirdness into eccentricity, and synthesizers into orchestral weapons. Most striking is the fact that as brilliant as that album was, its most significant achievement was that it laid the groundwork for "Purple Rain." (Songs on that later album such as "I Would Die 4 U" and "Computer Blue" are simply refinements of the styles introduced on "1999.")
In typical purple fashion, the little man sped past us and made two albums for which the world was not fully prepared: "Around the World in a Day" and "Parade." Maybe, if he'd chosen to take us around the world in a week instead of a day, the dizzying psychedelic follow-up to "Purple Rain" could have been digested more easily. And maybe, if "Under the Cherry Moon" hadn't been such a bad movie, the world could have appreciated "Parade" beyond the hit song "Kiss." But when he gave the world time to breathe and catch up, there was a glorious reward for our hard work.
That reward was 1987's "Sign O' the Times," the last great double LP and Prince's artistic peak. Sure, "1999" and "Purple Rain" were pop-culture milestones that introduced the masses to the Wonderful World that was Minneapolis and started their own respective crazes, but "Sign O' the Times" was Jamie Starr at his creative and technical best. With this masterwork, Prince combined the styles that had confused casual listeners on "Around the World in a Day" and "Parade," bringing both works together in one deep but totally navigable sea of brilliance.
Many Prince-o-philes recognize "Sign O' the Times" as the beginning of the end for popular acceptance of his music, but to say that is to see the glass half-empty. "Sign O' the Times" was one of those albums that made people realize how much potential music had in the dreary artistic landscape of the '80s; all the more amazing was the fact that it was all written, performed and recorded by one man.
After three albums with his band, the Revolution, "Sign O' the Times" brought Prince back to the one-man shows that made him famous, but it was much different, in scheme and concept, from "Dirty Mind" and "1999." It was originally titled "The Crystal Ball," a title that would resurface on a collection of outtakes released a decade later, but no psychic could have predicted what was on this album. It has nothing as shocking as "Sister," as vulgar as "Jack U Off" or as explicit as "Head." This was a more mature and refined Prince than the one most had grown accustomed to. Those early albums had no songs as brilliantly crafted as "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker," as soulful as "Adore" or as intelligent as "If I Was Your Girlfriend."
The latter stumped the world with a question that may never be answerable: "If I was your one and only friend, would you run to me if somebody hurt you, even if that somebody was me?" To this day, I still can't tell you. I can see the psychosexual genius of the lyric, a juxtaposition of the roles of friend and lover (commonly misunderstood as homosexual) that comes to an electrifying crescendo that demonstrates the lyric "We don't need to make love to have an orgasm." Apparently not.
