We've all seen the tributes, speeches and covers. But not one goddamn time have I've been able to trace any praise for Sign ☮ The Times. Everyone is raving about Purple Rain, 1999 (amazing as they are of course) and a little bit of D&P. But no one has even mentioned IIWYG ffs!!!!! Or The Cross, Hot Thing, Housequake or fucking ADORE (hello????!!!!!!!). Music journalists have placed this album as one of the most diverse and therefor maybe the best of the 80's. But outside this site, it's just referred as an amazing gem at best.

Nononononono. S☮TT should never be regarded as a "gem". It's transcendent.

Wolfie87 said:

OP, Did you happen to see Questlove's shirt during the BB tribute last night?

I get your frustration, kind of, but nobody who knows is forgetting the art. It's just what happened when someone famous passes - it's easy to go for the best-known work.

some of Elvis' best work is ignored to this day, with someone that prolific and that good, it's going to happen that some of their greatest stuff just doesn't hit the mainstream.

Steven Wilson covered SOTT as a tribute to Prince right after his death. Steven Wilson is one of the biggest names in modern prog rock (he fronted Porcupine Tree, has recently worked with Opeth and so on).

Oh yeah, and "Adore" was performed by Anthony Hamilton and his singers at the end of the Rolling Stone panel discussion that also had Guestlove, Spike Lee, Kimbra, Toure and Alan Light sharing their Prince stories. I also remember it being played at the end of the piece on his death on The View (or was it some other show?)

[Edited 5/23/16 13:29pm]

Muse also covered SOTT as a tribute, it's on their youtube channel.

PeteSilas said:

some of Elvis' best work is ignored to this day, with someone that prolific and that good, it's going to happen that some of their greatest stuff just doesn't hit the mainstream.

off topic but can you list everything that is you think off the top of your head so i can listen if I havent already

Dilan said:

PeteSilas said:

some of Elvis' best work is ignored to this day, with someone that prolific and that good, it's going to happen that some of their greatest stuff just doesn't hit the mainstream.

off topic but can you list everything that is you think off the top of your head so i can listen if I havent already

Of Elvis?

Stranger In my Own Hometown

Blue Moon

Way Down (this was his requiem, you can here him predict his death, and strangely, kind of like Way Back Home, there is glee in it)

Lonesome Cowboy

Hurt (a predeath song that shared the same title of Johnny Cash's predeath song)

many, many more like Prince, Elvis released upwards of 500 songs, but unlike Prince, he never gets credit for his great work ethic and his belief in it. Some of his gospel music is his best, the sun sessions is some of his best, the Memphis album is his best, most of it is ignored in favor of Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock. But every so often, I'll even find a new song I hadn't heard that I love, much like Prince.

most of my favorite prince songs are pretty obscure too.

What's the deal with all the overdramatic Prince fans?

Wolfie87 said:

We've all seen the tributes, speeches and covers. But not one goddamn time have I've been able to trace any praise for Sign ☮ The Times. Everyone is raving about Purple Rain, 1999 (amazing as they are of course) and a little bit of D&P. But no one has even mentioned IIWYG ffs!!!!! Or The Cross, Hot Thing, Housequake or fucking ADORE (hello????!!!!!!!). Music journalists have placed this album as one of the most diverse and therefor maybe the best of the 80's. But outside this site, it's just referred as an amazing gem at best.

Nononononono. S☮TT should never be regarded as a "gem". It's transcendent.

While I understand what you're saying in your post, I really don't think S☮TT was recorded in vain. A top 6 album on both sides of the Atlantic, three top 10 singles in the States, four top 30 singles in the U.K, a successful tour, huge critical acclaim (it sat at the top of several well respected magazines best albums of the 80's polls, and features prominently on Rolling Stone magazines Top 500 Albums of all time list.

I fully realise that you'll already know all that, but really, there are amazing albums out there that never charted, never had a hit, never even made it in to the collective consciousness of the public. There will be artists who poured their heart and soul in to creating great works of art that neither you or I have ever even heard of.

Prince was a rarity in that he was able to combine artistic greatness with commercial appeal/success. There are few artists who attain both. For many it is one at the expense of the other. Prince lived to see his art celebrated, hailed and consumed in huge amounts; something far more satisfying than whether or not a bunch of people talk about individual albums after his death.

No great work of art was ever made in vain. If one person recognises its greatness, then surely it was all worthwhile?

[Edited 5/23/16 14:06pm]

Yewdale said:

Wolfie87 said:

We've all seen the tributes, speeches and covers. But not one goddamn time have I've been able to trace any praise for Sign ☮ The Times. Everyone is raving about Purple Rain, 1999 (amazing as they are of course) and a little bit of D&P. But no one has even mentioned IIWYG ffs!!!!! Or The Cross, Hot Thing, Housequake or fucking ADORE (hello????!!!!!!!). Music journalists have placed this album as one of the most diverse and therefor maybe the best of the 80's. But outside this site, it's just referred as an amazing gem at best.

Nononononono. S☮TT should never be regarded as a "gem". It's transcendent.

While I understand what you're saying in your post, I really don't think S☮TT was recorded in vain. A top 6 album on both sides of the Atlantic, three top 10 singles in the States, four top 30 singles in the U.K, a successful tour, huge critical acclaim (it sat at the top of several well respected magazines best albums of the 80's polls, and features prominently on Rolling Stone magazines Top 500 Albums of all time list.

I fully realise that you'll already know all that, but really, there are amazing albums out there that never charted, never had a hit, never even made it in to the collective consciousness of the public. There will be artists who poured their heart and soul in to creating great works of art that neither you or I have ever even heard of.

Prince was a rarity in that he was able to combine artistic greatness with commercial appeal/success. There are few artists who attain both. For many it is one at the expense of the other. Prince lived to see his art celebrated, hailed and consumed in huge amounts; something far more satisfying than whether or not a bunch of people talk about individual albums after his death.

No great work of art was ever made in vain. If one person recognises its greatness, then surely it was all worthwhile?

[Edited 5/23/16 14:06pm]

Prince was already getting into the habit of oversaturating the market with great music. Often, music that was too challenging for the casual fans. WB was right in many ways, you can't just put out music because you have it and expect it to make business sense. Anyway, ATWIAD, Parade, and the SOTT all were put out a year apart and i still remember seeing ATWIAD and Parade in cut out bins not long after they came out. Prince also did himself no favors by picking singles and by choosing to abandon tours. Lovesexy was the first tour he had stateside since purple rain and even the brilliance of that show relied on the old hits more than the new stuff. Kurt Loder surmised in his SOTT review that prince just didn't care for megafame and did things to sabotage it happening again, he cut the PR tour short, he released an album which, depending on who you listen to, was either a worthy psychedelic work or complete garbage. He may have reigned in the psychedelia a bit on parade and sott but he was still challenging us, the hardcore. He lost lots of "fans" over the years for various reasons, some of the stuff with the We are the world and ATWIAD era, then the name change business, then the hip hop, then the religious phase. Many people turned on him in these various phases.

PeteSilas said:

Yewdale said:

While I understand what you're saying in your post, I really don't think S☮TT was recorded in vain. A top 6 album on both sides of the Atlantic, three top 10 singles in the States, four top 30 singles in the U.K, a successful tour, huge critical acclaim (it sat at the top of several well respected magazines best albums of the 80's polls, and features prominently on Rolling Stone magazines Top 500 Albums of all time list.

I fully realise that you'll already know all that, but really, there are amazing albums out there that never charted, never had a hit, never even made it in to the collective consciousness of the public. There will be artists who poured their heart and soul in to creating great works of art that neither you or I have ever even heard of.

Prince was a rarity in that he was able to combine artistic greatness with commercial appeal/success. There are few artists who attain both. For many it is one at the expense of the other. Prince lived to see his art celebrated, hailed and consumed in huge amounts; something far more satisfying than whether or not a bunch of people talk about individual albums after his death.

No great work of art was ever made in vain. If one person recognises its greatness, then surely it was all worthwhile?

[Edited 5/23/16 14:06pm]

Prince was already getting into the habit of oversaturating the market with great music. Often, music that was too challenging for the casual fans. WB was right in many ways, you can't just put out music because you have it and expect it to make business sense. Anyway, ATWIAD, Parade, and the SOTT all were put out a year apart and i still remember seeing ATWIAD and Parade in cut out bins not long after they came out. Prince also did himself no favors by picking singles and by choosing to abandon tours. Lovesexy was the first tour he had stateside since purple rain and even the brilliance of that show relied on the old hits more than the new stuff. Kurt Loder surmised in his SOTT review that prince just didn't care for megafame and did things to sabotage it happening again, he cut the PR tour short, he released an album which, depending on who you listen to, was either a worthy psychedelic work or complete garbage. He may have reigned in the psychedelia a bit on parade and sott but he was still challenging us, the hardcore. He lost lots of "fans" over the years for various reasons, some of the stuff with the We are the world and ATWIAD era, then the name change business, then the hip hop, then the religious phase. Many people turned on him in these various phases.

You make many excellent points there. I too remember the head spinning amount of product at that time, and I also agree and have argued many times that from a commercial point of view WB were right, if by business sense we are talking about a strategy that would have seen Prince retain say 40-50% of his Purple Rain audience, instead of losing 80-90% of it in less than four years. Of course it would have made so much more sense from a market position had Prince released a LOT less music and had played the promotion game better (listening to advice and letting the professionals do their thing).

I have always felt, right from that mid 80's period, that Prince was a success both because of and despite himself. And it's that very thing that I admire about him the most. The man marched to the beat of his own drum, and yes that sometimes meant that a classic album like S☮TT 'barey scraped' a million U.S Sales and found its way in to the cut out bins within months of release while The Joshua Tree, Bad and Whitney were all heading towards the 10 million U.S sales mark. But I have never really thought of Prince alongside those artists and judged his success/ failure in comparison to them. They all played the game, they all wanted to sell 10's of millions of records, and as you say, Prince often didn't care.

I think of Prince as the guy who released Dirty Mind off the back of the commercial breakthrough he had enjoyed with the Prince album. I know of fans who truly always wanted Prince to sell on the level of a MJ or Madonna, but at what price? Do we wait three or four years between Purple Rain and S☮TT and dispense with commercially non-viable material like IIWYG, Condition of the Heart & Life Can Be So Nice, and instead release one super multi platinum album that gave the world Raspberry Beret, Kiss, S☮TT, Pop Life & U Got The Look, seeing Prince rule the world like it was 1984 again? Probably more than any other commercially successful artist since John Lennon took to his bed with Yoko, put out Two Virgins, and became the world's clown while sitting in a bag, Prince dismantled his own myth created with PR and burned that mother to the ground. Most fly by night fans left and never came back (until the last few weeks when they bought The Very best of Prince to remind them of when Prince was 'good, like Michael Jackson').

Whatever anyone thinks of Prince.... out of all the millions of people over the decades who dreamt of making a living from music, and of all the hundreds of thousands of artists to have ever actually released a record, he stands up there in the top 1% of the world's most successful artists of all time. All but a couple of dozen acts in music history would kill to have Prince's worldwide sales record, never mind his longevity, and most of all, his unparallelled body of work. Despite all of the commercially poor, head scratching decisions he made in his lifetime, he died having sold over 100 million records, doing it his way, against much advise and almost every common sense rule in the music industry. That was Prince, and he'll do for me. And I still say no, S☮TT wasn't recorded in vain.

of course it wasn't, it's arguably his best record. Prince often insinuated that he would have fit in in the 60's better and it was true, the beatles and the stones etc.., released a lot of albums and didn't worry about each one being a blockbuster. With MJ's redefining what a superstar was, that all changed, after him, everything was measured by the millions of units sold. I've never really heard about sixties albums being bandied about as selling millions and millions, just a different time.

Aerogram said:

Aerogram said:

What's the deal with all the overdramatic Prince fans?

My thoughts exactly. I took a break from this site because of the hysteria and irrelevancies of some of the posters here following Prince's death. I think others need to take a break, too.