Prince Rogers Nelson and his Impulses: Situating the Sign O’ the Times within Black Music & the Eighties
Black Americans created some of the most passionate, beautiful and endearing music the world has ever heard. Music scholar Craig Werner theorizes that the complex elements which brought forth music genres such as Soul, Funk, Rap and R&B are the: Jazz, Blues and Gospel Impulses. Although not necessarily having to sound like Jazz, Blues or Gospel — these Impulses are the philosophical underpinnings of Black musical creativity. In his 1987 album, Sign O’ the Times, Prince Rogers Nelson combines these elements to musically introduce listeners to the African American musical experience before the close of the 20th century.
In Werner’s Book, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America, he describes the bedrocks of the Jazz Impulse. Jazz, he says, is constant redefinition. It calls upon the musician and the listener to re-examine, probe and re-evaluate the self. According to Werner it queries the individual on its own, the individual as part of a group and the individual as it relates to being a ‘link in the chain of tradition’. After all those questions, it impudently asks – “What doesn’t fit?”.
Its improvisational sounds eschews the conventional which tells individuals to “know your place”. In this way, Jazz is the conduit for the liberating idea that norms placed upon people can and must be overcome. Black Americans who felt the Jazz Impulse pulsate through their body overcame Jim Crow, which told Black people to know their place and accept their oppression. With convention overcome, Jazz then asks us where we want to go and how we want to get there while using its blue notes and rhythms to remind us of where we came from.
The Blues Impulse is a three-step ‘no help’ process. First, it cuts us on the jagged edge of the human experience. Then, Blues compels us to emotionally vomit tragic or near-comic expressions of our wounding. Finally, it re-affirms one’s existence. It reminds you that you’re here and you’re stuck. And also that there’s evil in the world. Money. Sex. Drugs. Racism. We either succumb to it, or suffer by it. Alone. Perhaps making a bargain at the Crossroads will see us through…or just enough to keep us moving a little lighter with a lot less soul to burden us.
The Gospel Impulse also remind us of the horrors of the human experience. However, it wants to save us. It wants to take us to the river and washes away our sins. Following our salvation, it wants us to go tell it on the mountain and spread the Good News of the One who will redeem our souls. Gospel tells us to recount the burdens which afflicted us and made us sinful. After, the Good News compels us to bear witness to the power of God, the Almighty — who saved not but us, but the whole entire world. Then, and only then, can we find redemption.
Sign O’ the Times begins with the Blues Impulse. The title track reminds the listener of the terrors of Ronald Reagan’s America. An unchecked AIDS epidemic under an uncaring government who cracked jokes about it. A drug epidemic that was killing scores of youth. The chorus notes in a wry manner: Silly no?/ When a rocket ship explodes/ and everybody still wants to fly after mentioning that a sister killed her baby ‘cuz she couldn’t afford to feed it/ And we’re sending people to the Moon, reminiscent Gil Scott Heron’s Whitey on the Moon. The song brings us back to Earth when the chorus concludes with: Some say a man ain’t happy/ Unless man truly dies/ Oh why/ Time. The song tells us that the only way to escape being a victim in the 1980s was to succumb to death. A dark re-affirmation of existence, or that the lack thereof is escape.
Prince’s dabbling with the Blues Impulse continues on the third side of the double-album in the song Strange Relationship. It’s a familiar story of a lover who hates his lover, but can’t seem to live without her. It delivers the clever comedic lines of: I guess you know me well, I don’t like winter/But I seem to get a kick out of doing you cold. Above a thudding rhythm, Prince re-affirms his experiences with the Stevie Wonder-esque chorus: Baby I just can’t stand to see you happy/ More than that I hate to see you sad/ Honey if you left me I just might do something rash/ What’s this strange relationship? (ship, ship, ship). The song, like the Blues Impulse leaves us with no definite conclusion aside from the predicament the song’s narrative voice is in.
The Jazz Impulse of Sign O’ the Times is fully realized with the track, If I Was Your Girlfriend. The song is a curious one, which was especially curious in 1987 despite Prince being, well…Prince. Prince tried his best to physically embody the blurring of lines between gender. He did so with his clothing which revealed plenty of skin above high heeled shoes. Also, his gender blurring was seen with the female alter-ego, Camille, and the unreleased project surrounding that mysterious entity (though appearing on Sign O’ the Times). However, it was always his lyrics that shone the way.
In If I Was Your Girlfriend, Prince takes on the Jazz Impulse straight on by making the song consist of a series of questions which incinerates Prince’s masculinity, so that he could experience and express deeper levels of intimacy which were once restricted by his male-ness. The process is a self reflection upon what masculinity can do to one’s ability to express love. It also liberates the individual when Prince realizes that surpassing gender is possible in order to achieve a more fulfilling kind of love. The end of the song dizzies into improvisational textures as more and more possibilities are offered up by Prince and as more and more he severs the “links in the chain” to his masculine identity. A doorway to where the love between Prince and his/her/hir partner in the song is left open for us to imagine — and for Prince to know as he sings: But I, I said I want to be (sugar)/All of the things you are to me (sugar)/ Surely, surely you can see.
It’s not coincidental that some of the most powerful songs in Sign O’ the Times are Gospel Impulse tracks. These tracks being: The Cross, Forever In My Life and Adore. The Cross is a straight-up attempt to channel Gospel Impulse. It recalls black days and stormy nights while imploring us not to live or die without knowing The Cross. Prince becomes an apostle, bearing the Good News to the consumers of his record in hopes that they will be transformed –redeemed from being mere consumers to being the Saved who will carry with them his message.
Forever In My Life is a song reminiscent of other Gospel Impulse songs which can be mistakenly interpreted. For example, the Staples Singers song, I’ll Take You There, can easily be interpreted as a love song on the first listen or a song centered around sexual innuendo. Rather, that song describes us as being taken to a place where there - Ain’t no smilin’ faces/ Mmm, no no/ Lyin’ to the races. That place described by the Staples Singers is heaven. The degree of interpretation due to the lyrics of Forever In My Life is likely on purpose. Thus, allowing Prince to once more blur definitions as he did during If I Was Your Girlfriend. We don’t see Prince fully expand upon this philosophy of “God is sex, sex is God” until the Lovesexy album, although the seeds of that sermon had been planted in the fertile earth of Sign O’ the Times.
While Prince, towards the end of the song, affirms that the song is about love between a human and a human, the Gospel Impulse easily fabricates that confusion. The structure of the song tells us all we need to know. The burden was once loneliness and fooling around. He bears witness by declaring that his partner is his one and only desire. He tells it on the mountain by stating he wants her forever in his life. Adore is also a love song which takes the Gospel Impulse to heart. However, it is important to note how the album began. Prince introduced us to a world of despair and hopelessness. In which death was the true escape from it all. By Adore, he sings to us in falsetto as to why his love is strong and why it shall last until the end of time. In a way, Sign O’ the Times is a Gospel record. It begins with the burden of being subjected to the misfortune during the Reagan Years. By the end of the album, Prince is redeemed by love of God, his partner and love of love.
Sign O’ the Times is arguably the last great Black album before Rap began to influence all genres of Black popular music. Even in this album, you can hear some Hip Hop in songs such as Housequake (and a Chicago House influence too) and in the title track Sign O’ the Times as Prince adopts a signifyin’ cadence to deliver the song. Prince’s response to Rap music is fascinating. He first decided to insult Rap in the 1987 unreleased Black Album before he too was swept by the times.
The creeping Rap aspect of the album is telling. Perhaps rap music reached near ubiquity by the end of the 1980s because of the times it arose in. Nixon’s ‘Benign Neglect’, Reagan’s ‘welfare queens’ and his coded appeals to ‘States Rights’ 1980 shadowed the start of DJ Kool Herc’s first block parties in the ‘Boogie Down Bronx’ to the release of the first rap records. If Run DMC’s It’s Like That is anything to go by, evil in the world thrived during a particular decade. The Blues Impulse of Hip Hop cemented its place as the leading genre of Black music, as the 1980s brought Black America to its knees.
- Ganga Zumba
