A review by gengelcox
Sign o' the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

This is the first of the 33 1/3 series where I knew the album fairly well before listening to it for the book. While a latecomer to Prince—I don’t think I bought one of his albums until the Purple Rain movie—I did listen to most of his catalog and owned a number of the albums including 1999, Around the World in a Day, and this one, Sign ‘O’ the Times. However, for me, Prince was more of a singles artist and I rarely sat down to listen to a whole album, finding them mostly uneven. Individual songs, though, were so good that even today I find myself quoting some of them like “1999,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” and the title track of this album.

Michaelangelo does a nice job of bringing Prince, who achieved a form of sainthood in Minneapolis, down to Earth by showing what it meant to have a hometown boy make it good through his own experience growing up on welfare and knowing friends of friends of Prince’s. He also covers the album very well, showing where it emerged from, how every Prince song is ultimately about sex, but also how his upbringing, his musical knowledge and skills, and his religion infuses every song as well. 

While reading this, I was also watching Mark Ronson’s AppleTV series about drum programming. Prince was a master of making great beats, but I strongly believe part of that was because he could do so on a drum kit as well as through a computer. Just listen to songs like “Sign ‘O’ the Times” and “When Doves Cry” and focus on the drums. Although Prince was a genius guitar player, he wasn’t a half-bad drummer, either.