What's UP FAMS & FANS!

I just wanted 2 discuss a time, that land marked Prince in2 an area where he signed his signature on. This was a time I believe Prince was at his peak creativity and artistically. So much good material and flavor 2 his execution,

AS I say many times here...HE BROUGHT IT!

I would love 2 know your thoughts and feelings surrounding this special 'Peach & Black' time!?

What R some of your favorite moments and details that sets this time apart 4rm any other Period?

Feel free 2 comment & Share with me what U think!

i was lucky cos i was young and onsessed by pop stars as teenagers are

jusst that i lucked out obsessing over not only perhaps THE most talented cat on the planet but also one of historys finest works of arts

i do recall thinking the line"HOT THING..BARELY 21'

didnt make sense ..i mean BARELY 21??? Thats OLD!!

hahah i actually thought that(ahem..im 39 now!)

No Live Album but a studio Album will be available in the US 1st & Europe just after (somewhere between May & July)

No Live Album but a studio Album will be available in the US 1st & Europe just after (somewhere between May & July)

^

Were you looking for this thread? http://prince.org/msg/7/378749

I really think his 1999 period will go down as his own personal sound/creative peak but the following albums were just as good and better in many areas. First of all his vocals were ever, ever improving. His musical skills were getting better and better and his use of the studio was for creative purposes rather than polish (which people often accuse his later albums of). Sign o' the times was the culmination of his post-purple rain work in that he was getting bolder and bolder and challenging us, his fans, with constant, radical shifts. Lyrically, he was as poetic as he would ever be, would be as good a storyteller as he ever would be and seemed to be challenging all the great rock albums of the 60's for creativity, self-consciousness and psychedelia. He was still mish mashing genres unlike anyone ever, funk-psychedelia. The bassline to Dorothy parker is pure Sly Stone slowed down so much you can't even hear it's source. There were indeed a few weak songs for my money but more than made up for with the gems. I never thought much of Play in The Sunshine, Forever in My Life, The Cross or Hot Thing. Prince was a sick, brilliant, madman at his best, the things he did would never occur to any sane musician, the results were some of the best, and as far as one man stuff, no one can touch this body of work for what it is. It took four Beatles to create SGT. Pepper plus a great producer, Prince was more or less back to basics at this point (outside of some of the stuff lifted from W&L suppossedly.) all alone where his genius could have free reign.

Great job! SOTT is a classic and should be part of everyone's library

Very good review on Aquarium Drunkard

http://www.aquariumdrunka...the-times/

By 1987, Prince had created a body of work enviable by any musician. Starting with his third album, 1980′s Dirty Mind, he had slowly worked his way through almost every viable popular music genre of the era. He had even starred in two movies by this point, the latter of which, Under the Cherry Moon, was paired with a soundtrack in the form of his genre-splicing and hopping 1986 album Parade. He also had been working with a band, the Revolution, for the past three albums that resulted in some of the most forward thinking and focused music of his career. But something obviously told Prince to eschew the band and really let go with every thing he had at once, no matter how messy the results may be and the genre flexing of Parade would prove to be a blueprint for what was to come. Thus, in 1987, Prince, minus the Revolution, released the double-album Sign ‘O’ the Times.

Despite it opening with one of the more serious and topical songs on the record, Sign ‘O’ the Times is at its core, like most Prince albums, a party record. But the title track that starts things off is heavy, despite its catchiness. References to the escalating AIDS epidemic, drug addiction, gangs and even the then-recent Challenger explosion dot the landscape of the song. “It’s silly, no? / When a rocket ship explodes / and everyone still wants to fly,” Prince muses in the chorus. But while he laments the problems of society, signs of the time that they are, he also embraces the hope that humanity carries in themselves – that never-ending desire to fly, despite the potential consequences. Prince then spends the rest of the record providing the music for celebrating in the face of disaster. Like the Beastie Boys’ “Shadrach,” only over a double album length, he celebrates dancing in the fire.

The first half of Sign ‘O’ the Times is the more conventional. There are party rave-ups (“Play in the Sunshine,” “Housequake“), sultry grooves (“Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” “It,” “Forever in My Life”) and even the classic sing-along with nonsensical lyrics (“Starfish and Coffee“). As with a lot of music created in the 80s, it takes a bit of time to wade through the dated instruments and effects (hello, orchestra hits!), but you find Prince moving through rock, pop, r&b, funk and soul with relative ease. Prince isn’t so much a student of mixing genres within songs as he is a chameleon among styles from song to song. He also knows how to sequence a record – there’s rarely a dull moment on Sign ‘O’ the Times. The songs, even when working in a similar feel, incorporate rhythms and percussion that keep the pace from lagging.

Without question, the second half of the album is its most notorious and most challenging. It opens with the pulsing rock of “U Got the Look,” but is quickly overwhelmed with the psycho-sexual drama of “If I Was Your Girlfriend.” A song that takes advantage of sped-up recordings of Prince’s voice, in order to raise his natural voice even higher, the song plumbs the album’s darkest depths as its narrator hypothesizes whether he could get closer to his girlfriend if he were her female best friend rather than her boyfriend. “Strange Relationship” follows the mental games of its predecessor and the whole tone of the album has shifted. But it’s the joyous, strangely moral “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” that rescues the album from itself. And anticipating the religious turn of his later-career, “The Cross” is a powerfully affecting slow burn of a blues song that would seem out of place if this were anyone but Prince.

The 9 minute “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,” a live recording that is the only track on the album to actually feature the Revolution as his backing band, brings back the album’s party vibe, but also threatens to derail the entire proceeding with its length. Very little happens, but it does turn into one huge rave leading into the album’s end. Prince shouts out “confusion,” at the end of the song and leading into yet another smoking slow jam, “Adore,” that’s exactly what you get.

Much like Bob Dylan and the Clash – two artists who chose, at the height of their creative powers to embrace a double album and succeeded – Prince created a viable, passionate, diverse and convincing masterwork in Sign ‘O’ the Times. The record sets out so clearly to be both a documentary of the fractured, subversive nature of the broader culture in 1987 and a righteous party record and to do so by delving through some of the brightest and darkest parts of the human experience is both admirable and successful. Sign ‘O’ the Times is unlike almost any other record in the modern rock canon and it’s all the better for it. words/ j neas

[Edited 4/14/12 14:57pm]

I’ll be the dissenting voice: I have never liked this album. Individually most of the songs are great. But as an album it sounds like what it is—a bunch of stuff pared down from other projects because some suits at Warner Records didn’t have the balls to let Prince release what he wanted to. SoTT inanely seques from one song to another; it’s like listening to a series of conversations at a late night diner right after the crowds from AA, NA, and GA meetings all wandered in at once for coffee and waffles. People call Lovesexy incoherent, but Lovesexy is as carefully constructed as classic haiku next to SoTT. I can pick and choose from SoTT and be happy, but trying to listen to the whole thing drives me nuts.

jpnyc said:

I’ll be the dissenting voice: I have never liked this album. Individually most of the songs are great. But as an album it sounds like what it is—a bunch of stuff pared down from other projects because some suits at Warner Records didn’t have the balls to let Prince release what he wanted to. SoTT inanely seques from one song to another; it’s like listening to a series of conversations at a late night diner right after the crowds from AA, NA, and GA meetings all wandered in at once for coffee and waffles. People call Lovesexy incoherent, but Lovesexy is as carefully constructed as classic haiku next to SoTT. I can pick and choose from SoTT and be happy, but trying to listen to the whole thing drives me nuts.

Thanks for your review and perspective! I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts!! I can understand what you mean by saying as a whole there is a lot material that is just all over the place.

It's pretty amazing to see where you are coming from, and actually the songs are just traveling from topic to topic. I appreciate that about the piece. It's so many themes smashed into one pieces, and it just works for me.

YET!!! I like how you mentioned how the songs just go all over the place.

As incoherent as it is, there is a making of genius in the way it is. I think the somgs work as a whole, but when I first heard it, it took a long time to hear it in the exact order it was given. In fact now when I listen to it, I listen to it all over the place..Never in the way it was given.

jpnyc said:

I’ll be the dissenting voice: I have never liked this album. Individually most of the songs are great. But as an album it sounds like what it is—a bunch of stuff pared down from other projects because some suits at Warner Records didn’t have the balls to let Prince release what he wanted to. SoTT inanely seques from one song to another; it’s like listening to a series of conversations at a late night diner right after the crowds from AA, NA, and GA meetings all wandered in at once for coffee and waffles. People call Lovesexy incoherent, but Lovesexy is as carefully constructed as classic haiku next to SoTT. I can pick and choose from SoTT and be happy, but trying to listen to the whole thing drives me nuts.

Are you advocating that prince should have been allowed to release Crystal Ball as planned? I wonder what the original albums tracklist would have been. I'm not so sure that the results would have been much different or better. Prince was capable of putting together genius shit, but he also was handicapped by thinking everything he wrote was a gift from god. SOTT had some weak tracks, in fact, if he could have released his B sides on the album in the place of songs like Play In The Sunshine, hot thing etc.., then we (critics and fans) would shut the fuck up. The B sides in those days were usually better than a full third of his albums.