Sign o' the Times

Sixteen tracks in about eighty minutes, and the subtractive test bites more often than on a single album, as it might on a record assembled from three abandoned projects. But it bites on tracks, not on the scale. The subject is a whole society in one year, from the title song’s news to the sacred, and the four sides are compelled by it: take a side away and the record loses an order of its claim, not a stretch of its running time. Some parts are required. The title track must open, a bare report on the year that sets the public frame; If I Was Your Girlfriend is the record’s centre and could not go; The Cross and Adore are the compelled close, faith and then devotion. Housequake, Strange Relationship and I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man each say a thing the others do not. The test finds slack in three places and length in a fourth: Hot Thing is a groove more than a song, It holds one idea for five minutes, U Got the Look is a duet single the record tolerates more than needs, and Play in the Sunshine makes the turn from report to escape at greater length than the turn requires. The range is compelled; a few of the tracks within it are permitted.

Score: 8.3 / 10

What the record brings into the open can be stated. The title track sets an epidemic, the drug trade, gangs, the shuttle and the bomb beside one another in a flat voice over a near-empty drum machine, and the flatness is the disclosure: a public world so saturated with catastrophe that its report has no rise in it, and the singer’s answer is to start a family. The second disclosure is stronger and stranger. If I Was Your Girlfriend says that a man’s desire for intimacy can exceed what his sex permits him, that he wants the closeness a woman’s friend has, and says it in a voice that is no longer quite his. A third holds that the erotic and the sacred are one appetite, and the sequence states it, carrying the record from Hot Thing to The Cross. Much of the middle is mood and pleasure more than meaning, and the social disclosure is stated in one song and not developed; but three meanings stated and holding, the first in the title song itself, meet the bar, without room.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Height comes often and in different kinds. The Cross begins as a quiet drone and rises into a full rock arrangement, the guitar coloured like a sitar and the band crashing in, and it earns the rise. Adore is warm elevation sustained for six minutes, a falsetto and stacked harmonies held at height with horns. If I Was Your Girlfriend reaches a cold height, a disturbing intimacy, in its spoken close. It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night is collective ecstasy, nine minutes of a band in a hall. Forever in My Life, its lead voice staggered and answering itself, and Strange Relationship reach smaller heights. What holds the figure: the first two sides rise less than the last two, Play in the Sunshine, Hot Thing and It swing without lifting, grandeur is touched only in The Cross, and terror only glimpsed in the title track.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The record evokes much and builds some. Built: the androgyne. Camille, the pitched voice that is the singer and not the singer, is load-bearing in If I Was Your Girlfriend and Strange Relationship, where the old figure of the self crossing sex is not an allusion but the instrument of the song. The cross is built too: The Cross makes the passage from suffering to promised deliverance its whole form, rising as it promises. The two built myths stand at the record’s centre and its close, and that placing carries them near the bar. Evoked: the sign and the last days in the title track; the waitress and the bath in The Ballad of Dorothy Parker, a domestic myth of a stranger’s grace; the bride and the steady life in Forever in My Life. Held a tenth below the bar because the archetypes are not joined into one structure, and several are wit more than depth: Starfish and Coffee, with its child’s breakfast of “maple syrup and jam”, is charm.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The departure is real, and partly made before. The stake is plain. After the largest commercial success of his career and the dissolution of his band, Prince led with a sparse protest song on drum machine and bass, released a double album when his label had refused a triple, made it nearly alone, and sang part of it in a sped-up voice under another name. The turn from the polished arena pop of the mid-1980s toward a dry, home-made funk, and the habit of pitching the voice to cross sex, departed from the R&B and pop of the year. The charge stands: the eclecticism, the psychedelic colour and the drum-machine minimalism had been opened on his own earlier records, and the double album that sets every genre its maker commands on one record has precedents in rock and soul. But the axis scores the turn and the stake together, and the stake here was no proven path: one man, his band gone, wagering the standing his largest success had bought on four sides he played himself. The swerve is a synthesis carried further, and the cost of carrying it brings it to the bar.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The sequence, counted here once, carries an argument: side one opens on the public world and moves at once to escape and play; sides two and three turn inward to the couple, through flirtation, sex, settling, the crossing of sex and jealousy; side four turns to faith, then to the crowd, then to devotion. World, body, self, God, community, love: the double album’s range is the claim that one appetite runs through them all, and a single album could not make it. The pitched voice is form as knowledge, a song about wanting to be a woman’s friend sung in a voice moved toward a woman’s, and the live track set between The Cross and Adore makes the sacred communal before it becomes personal. Side two shows the record’s assembly, its order more a run of grooves than an argument, and some middle tracks are containers more than instruments; the fault is local, and across the four sides the form is the instrument of what the record knows. Held from the top by that side.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence over promise: thirty-nine years of return, and a reissue in 2020 that set the record beside its vault and was received as reopening it. The record yields on return in both senses. Formally the mixes reward the ear: the stacked percussion of Housequake, the reversed and doubled voices, the guitar in The Cross that is not where it seems, the dry close sound of the home-made tracks against the hall of the live one. Semantically, If I Was Your Girlfriend has been read as a song about gender, about jealousy, about the impossibility of male friendship and about control, and none of those readings exhausts it; The Ballad of Dorothy Parker is a puzzle of a song. Held from the top because Hot Thing, It and U Got the Look give up what they hold on the first hearing.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is the R&B, funk and rock of the mid-1980s and the pop album of its decade. The intrinsic force is real: one musician, largely alone in a studio after the dissolution of his band, holding funk, rock, gospel, psychedelic pop, soul ballad and live band funk at full command on one record, and making the drum machine and the treated voice instruments of feeling rather than sheen. That enlarged what one maker’s record could hold. Charged: much of the field’s redirection by Prince came from earlier records, the record’s public reach in its year was narrower than its predecessor’s, and the reorganisation it made is credited mainly among musicians, though musicians are those through whom a field is moved. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: later R&B and neo-soul, and the self-produced album of a single auteur in R&B and pop, learned from it, and the pitched alter-ego voice became a known device. Force and reach together clear the bar by a tenth.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival is weighed over about thirty-nine and a half years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, in print, remastered in 2020 and heard as an album. Presence is real and wide among musicians and critics, and the title track, U Got the Look and If I Was Your Girlfriend are known beyond the album; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The charge is that the album as a whole is heard less widely than the singles of its maker’s best-selling record. The fabric weighs for it more than against: the drum machine and some synthesiser tones bear their year, but the drum machine is used dry, as an instrument rather than a sheen, and the title track’s topical list has aged toward the present more than away from it. A surface that might have fixed the record to its moment has instead outlived the conditions that produced it, and the record clears the bar by two tenths.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing across most of the record. Prince arranges, plays most of the instruments, sings and produces, and the result keeps a distinct sound for each track: the empty space of the title track, the dense interlocking funk of Housequake, the slowed, pitched voice and close microphone of If I Was Your Girlfriend, the rhythm guitar and sharp arrangement of I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man and its long coda, and the stacked vocal choir of Adore, among the best-made vocal productions in its idiom. The guitar of The Cross and the live band’s control show range beyond the studio. The faults fall on a share: Hot Thing and It are thin, Play in the Sunshine is generically arranged, some home-made mixes are boxy, and the pitched processing at times sounds like its device.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the dry drum-machine report of the title track and the gospel fervour of The Cross, or the nursery whimsy of Starfish and Coffee and the jealousy of Strange Relationship. The range is very wide, and narrowness is not the case here. One physics holds most of it across funk, gospel, rock and ballad: one appetite, erotic, sacred and social, and one maker’s sound, the dry close drums and layered voices, govern the four sides, and the distant elements are joined by that appetite more than by contrast. The law strains where the record’s origin in three projects shows. U Got the Look and Play in the Sunshine obey the law of the pop single more than the album’s, and the live track’s acoustic differs in kind from the rest, though the sequence places it with intent. The strains are local, and the wider the range a law governs, the stronger the achievement; here the width carries the figure past the strains.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness and the self divided are held fully in the songs of the pitched voice. The couple is held from flirtation to settling and jealousy, across several songs, not in one image. The body is held as dance and sex. Society and the state enter in the title track, as epidemic, drugs, poverty, the bomb and the shuttle, and labour in “Dorothy was a waitress”; the sacred is held in The Cross and in Adore’s devotion, the crowd in the live track, and the family as the wish to settle. That is a wider span than most albums attempt, and the double album gives it room. What holds the figure lowest on the page: the social order is a list in one song, history and the natural order are absent, and the orders are joined by one appetite more than integrated in one structure.

Score: 7.8 / 10