How Prince’s Sign o’ the Times redefined pop artistry at its zenith

KUALA LUMPUR, 30 SEPTEMBER 2026 —

The release of a new book titled Prince: A Sign o’ the Times marks a significant moment in the ongoing scholarly and cultural examination of the late pop legend’s career, offering a detailed retrospective on his 1987 double album.

As the album approaches its 40th anniversary in March, the book serves as a critical lens through which to understand the complex dynamics of Prince’s final masterpiece, exploring how he navigated the pressures of his record label, the dissolution of his backing band, and his personal relationships to produce a work that remains a genre-defying monument in music history.

By the early 1980s, Prince had already cemented his status as a pop heavyweight, driven by the phenomenal success of his 1999 album and his emergence as a movie star through Purple Rain. His commercial dominance was such that even when his second film, the old Hollywood throwback Under the Cherry Moon, bombed worldwide in 1986, he managed to notch another massive hit from its soundtrack with the single Kiss.

This trajectory demonstrated a relentless forward momentum; it did not matter if audiences fully understood his artistic shifts, as Prince continued to move forward with a restless spirit. This drive propelled him into the creation of Sign o’ the Times, a project that emerged from a period of intense transition where anything seemed possible.

During the gestation of the album, Prince explored multiple creative directions simultaneously. He considered releasing another album with his backing band, The Revolution, or exploring his feminine alter-ego Camille with a self-titled record. At one point, he even proposed putting out a triple album, a response that McKie describes as reasonable given the vast collection of music Prince was creating. However, his record label pushed back against the triple album format.

Consequently, Prince released the kaleidoscopic Sign o’ the Times, which clocked in at 80 minutes across two LPs. He eventually decided against touring the album in the United States, a decision that reflected the elusive nature of his imperial period, during which he rarely gave interviews or kept collaborators up to date about his plans.

McKie’s research involved interviewing more than 100 people to understand the headspace Prince was in when he fired his band, The Revolution, and split up with his fiancée, Susannah Melvoin. Despite this extensive outreach, McKie noted that it was not always easy to decipher Prince’s intentions. “Prince probably would have been a very good poker player because he didn’t give that much away,” McKie said.

“If you listen to his music, there are lots of clues. He said it himself: ‘If you want to know me, listen to my music.’” This opacity was a defining characteristic of the era, making the album’s thematic and sonic diversity all the more striking to listeners and scholars alike.

Sign o’ the Times remains a genre-defying monument in Prince’s discography, with a thick layer of funk at its center. It is the LP where Prince happily dipped into Christian rock with the track The Cross, built Starfish and Coffee around a jazz chord progression, and casually shared what McKie calls the best power pop song of all time with I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.

The album is also one of Prince’s most thematically disparate projects, juxtaposing libidinous lyrics such as “I want to do it baby all the time” with songs heralding the return of Christ. Few people, it seemed, were as good at compartmentalizing as Prince. “He would be dating two very different women at the same time,” McKie said. “He would record two very different songs on the same day.”

The first hit from the album was the title track, in which Prince appears to be reciting from the newspaper, touching upon gang violence, the HIV/Aids epidemic, and the possibility of nuclear war. These serious themes are set against an uneasy groove built almost entirely with the Fairlight CMI sampler and synthesizer, an instrument Prince had heard Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush use and wanted to incorporate.

Elsewhere on the album, the Linn LM-1 drum machine dictated much of the blocky percussion. Prince reportedly described the party-starting track Housequake as having the greatest-sounding kick drum of all time. He also slipped into Camille territory with a zany, high-pitched delivery on a handful of songs, including If I Was Your Girlfriend, which McKie believes is in the running for the best song Prince ever wrote.

The dizzying textures of the album seemed designed to confirm that Prince contained multitudes. McKie drew a parallel to a comment Keith Richards once made about Mick Jagger, describing him as a “nice bunch of guys,” a phrase McKie noted was not entirely complimentary. “One of the things that you take from Sign o’ the Times is it’s a nice bunch of Princes,” McKie said.

This multiplicity was evident in Prince’s personal life as well, where part of him wanted to settle down, a desire nowhere clearer than on the tender track Forever in My Life. However, he also dated voraciously, even before breaking things off with Melvoin, who had also spent a brief spell as a vocalist in The Revolution.

Their romance guided the omnivorous feelings of Sign o’ the Times, especially on the all-timer slow jam Adore and the hot-and-cold track Strange Relationship. “I believe the phrase ‘The one that got away’ could apply here,” McKie said.

“Lots of people that loved Prince loved Susannah, and lots of people that loved Prince that I spoke to were quite explicit in saying they wished he’d married her.” This personal turmoil intersected with Prince’s professional reputation for being demanding, or difficult, as some critics noted. Disputes over songwriting credits and payments for his backing band take up a significant portion of McKie’s book, while one tour manager described him as “a very autocratic ruler.”

Prince’s interactions with his contemporaries were also marked by a certain friction. While his rivalry with Michael Jackson has always received ample attention, McKie suggests that Prince did not know how to deal with his peers. His stock answer for meeting someone new was saying, “I know who you are.” At one point, Prince even bristled at collaborating with Miles Davis because he couldn’t control what the jazz giant played.

The trumpeter joined Prince onstage at Paisley Park on New Year’s Eve in 1987, only a few months after Sign o’ the Times arrived in stores. Despite these interpersonal challenges, the penultimate track, It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night, with its call-and-response grooves, made McKie think of “Prince as a jazz band leader brought up to the modern age.”

On this double album, Prince applied a dash of Davis’s spirit, especially when he faced issues in the studio. His hardworking but fast-moving attitude is clearest on a song like The Ballad of Dorothy Parker, where the song’s high frequencies are muted because engineer Susan Rogers made a mistake with a new mixing console. The error was not fixed, as Prince believed that many errors were meant to be.

Those coincidences reminded McKie of how Davis worked with his bandmates. “He was looking for something different, and sometimes he was known to say ‘play it again’ if someone played a wrong note,” McKie recalled. “Prince was smart enough to acknowledge so-called mistakes and turn them into something.” This approach to imperfection became a hallmark of the album’s unique sonic identity.

The legacy of Sign o’ the Times continues to resonate as a testament to Prince’s ability to synthesize disparate influences into a cohesive, if complex, whole. The album’s 80-minute runtime and its exploration of funk, jazz, power pop, and Christian rock reflect a period of intense creative output that defied easy categorization. As the 40th anniversary approaches, the release of McKie’s book provides a deeper understanding of the circumstances that led to this masterpiece.

It highlights how Prince’s personal transitions, from firing his band to navigating his relationship with Susannah Melvoin, directly influenced the album’s thematic and musical diversity. The work stands as a definitive record of a time when Prince was at his most prolific and experimental, capturing a moment where the boundaries of genre were not just blurred but deliberately dismantled.

The book also sheds light on the technical and artistic decisions that shaped the album’s sound, from the use of the Fairlight CMI sampler to the retention of mixing errors. These details offer insight into Prince’s studio process, revealing a musician who was willing to embrace chance and imperfection as part of his creative toolkit.

The interviews with over 100 individuals provide a multifaceted view of Prince’s character, portraying him as both a demanding leader and a deeply private individual who communicated primarily through his music. As the cultural conversation around Prince’s legacy continues to evolve, Sign o’ the Times remains a central text, a work that encapsulates the full range of his artistic vision and his ability to navigate the complexities of fame, creativity, and personal life.

The album’s enduring relevance is a testament to its quality and the depth of the artist who created it.