By the early 1980s, Prince had cemented his place as a pop heavyweight with the phenomenal success of his 1999 album, as well as becoming a movie star thanks to Purple Rain. Even when his second film, the old Hollywood throwback Under the Cherry Moon, bombed worldwide in 1986, he notched another massive hit off its soundtrack with Kiss. It didn’t matter if audiences didn’t understand; Prince kept moving forward.
That restless spirit propelled Prince’s final masterpiece, 1987’s Sign o’ the Times, as he dabbled with different directions. Anything seemed on the table: maybe he would drop another album with his backing band, The Revolution, or he would explore his feminine alter-ego Camille with a self-titled album. He even, at one point, wanted to put out a triple album, a reasonable response to the vast collection of music that Prince was creating.
The Purple One’s imperial period can be difficult to nail down, as he rarely gave interviews or even kept collaborators up to date about what he had planned. Even as McKie interviewed more than 100 people about the gestation behind Sign o’ the Times, it wasn’t always easy to understand the headspace Prince was in when he fired his band the Revolution and split up with his fiancee, Susannah Melvoin. He said it himself: ‘If you want to know me, listen to my music.’” Sign o’ the Times, which turns 40 in March, remains a genre-defying monument in Prince’s discography with a thick layer of funk at the center.
It’s the LP where Prince happily dipped into Christian rock with The Cross, built Starfish and Coffee around a jazz chord progression, and casually shared the best power pop song of all time with I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man. But it’s also one of Prince’s most thematically disparate projects: “I want to do it baby all the time,” he sings libidinously, only a few songs before heralding the return of Christ. Few people, it seemed, were as good at compartmentalizing as Prince.
He had heard Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush use the instrument and wanted in on the fun. Elsewhere, the Linn LM-1 drum machine dictated much of the album’s blocky percussion – Prince reportedly described the party-starting Housequake as having the greatest-sounding kick drum of all time – while he slipped into Camille territory with a zany, high-pitched delivery on a handful of songs. One of them, If I Was Your Girlfriend, McKie believes is in the running for the best song that Prince ever wrote.
The dizzying textures seemed designed to confirm that Prince contained multitudes. Nowhere is that clearer than on the tender Forever in My Life. But he also dated voraciously, even before he broke things off with Melvoin, who also spent a brief spell as a vocalist in the Revolution.
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