100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Sign o’ the Times

02 Play in the Sunshine

03 Housequake

04 The Ballad of Dorothy Parker

05 It

06 Starfish and Coffee

07 Slow Love

08 Hot Thing

09 Forever in My Life

10 U Got the Look

11 If I Was Your Girlfriend

12 Strange Relationship

13 I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man

14 The Cross

15 It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night

16 Adore

Has there ever been a better start to a (double) album that was less indicative of what was to follow? On ‘Sign o’ the Times’, the title track from Prince’s devoutly varied ninth studio album, the Minneapolis polymath encompasses the world’s decay through blistering social commentary that has the cruel economy of reportage: a couple in France die from AIDS-related causes, 17-yearold boys smoke crack and arm themselves, a hurricane kills everyone inside a church, a marijuana user escalates to heroin within months. Backed by cold, apocalyptic funk, Prince declares that, ‘Some say a man ain’t happy, truly/Until a man truly dies’.

But if that’s the end of the world, then much of what follows is a resurrection delivered through the contemplation of sexual pleasure and personal freedom. Sign O’ the Times is an album of lean R&B rhythms and salacious pop jams – ‘Play in the Sunshine’ follows up the title track with an exuberant groove. ‘Some way, somehow, I’m gonna have fun,’ sings Prince as drums crack, keyboards flourish and guitars flare up in the background; it’s as if Little Richard got his hands on Paisley Park and went to town.

As with the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St, Sign ‘O’ the Times is Prince at his best, despite having few of his signature songs included. ‘Produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince,’ the credits coolly state, although the gestation wasn’t so clear cut. Some of the sessions had been intended for Dream Factory, a proposed final double album collaboration with his band the Revolution, while 1986 had also seen a side project involving Prince’s dream woman, Camille (i.e. Prince’s singing voice sped up to sound more feminine than he was already capable of). At one point it was going to be Crystal Ball, a triple album, but Warner Bros baulked, and the result was this 16-track double album that encapsulated his genius.

Prince had already worked his way through the popular music canon, anointing himself a successor to Jimi Hendix with ‘Purple Rain’ and mastering funk with ‘1999’, and on Sign O’ the Times he returned to the dancefloor, taking in soul deliverance and elusive disco escalations. When Prince wasn’t dancing with himself, Sheena Easton played Ginger Rogers to his libidinous Fred Astaire on ‘U Got the Look’ – ‘You’ve got the look, you’ve got the hook,’ they sang on a duet that was less a seduction than a union.

Sex is a promise across the two albums – ‘With you I swear, I’m a maniac,’ insists ‘It’ – but the vivid carnality of Prince’s early records is offset here by an appreciation of the strange places desire and love take you too. As on ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ and ‘I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man’, role-playing takes on a whole new dimension on Sign O’ the Times, with Prince wondering if he’s ready for what comes the next day. It’s no coincidence the final track is ‘Adore’, a slow burn of utter devotion with Prince yowling before he pledges himself.

Every excursion feels connected to the record’s psyche, even the truly eccentric ‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’, where a waitress asks Prince if he wants to join her in a bath and he agrees but keeps his pants on, ‘cuz I’m kinda going with someone’. Stylistic excursions, such as the proto-hip-hop party of ‘Housequake’ and the minimal swing of ‘Forever in My Life’, feel intrinsically part of the album that promises a second coming. ‘Don’t cry, he is coming,’ Prince gently sings on ‘The Cross’, a track that builds to a ragged reckoning, and amid the masterful Sign O’ the Times he could be foretelling his own triumph.