Category: Arts & Culture Key figures: Prince (artist, sole producer), Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman, Sheila E., Eric Leeds, Sheena Easton (featured vocalist)
Sign ‘O’ the Times is the ninth studio album by Prince, released as a double album on March 31, 1987, on Paisley Park Records and Warner Bros. Records. The 16-track, 80-minute record was Prince’s first major release after he disbanded his backing band The Revolution, and it marked a decisive shift toward solo composition, production, and introspection.
The album emerged from three abandoned recording projects. Between 1986 and early 1987 Prince assembled Dream Factory (a band collaboration), then a pseudonymous solo album called Camille built around pitch-shifted “Camille” vocals representing an androgynous alter ego, and finally Crystal Ball, a proposed triple album. When Warner Bros. rejected the triple-album format, Prince condensed the material into a double album, drawing on the best tracks from all three projects. The result features an unusually wide genre palette — funk, soul, psychedelic pop, electro, hip-hop, and rock — underpinned by extensive use of the Linn LM-1 drum machine and the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, both signature elements of Prince’s mid-1980s sound.
Three singles from the album reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100: the title track “Sign ‘O’ the Times” (no. 3), “U Got the Look” featuring Sheena Easton (no. 2), and “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” (no. 10). The title track was notably promoted without a music video, relying instead on radio to reach its chart position. The album peaked at no. 6 on the Billboard 200 and reached no. 1 in Switzerland, with top-ten showings in Austria, France, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
At the 30th Grammy Awards (1988), Sign ‘O’ the Times was nominated for Album of the Year, losing to U2’s The Joshua Tree. It won the 1987 Pazz & Jop critics’ poll — the annual survey of US rock critics — as the best album of the year. In 2017 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Sign ‘O’ the Times is widely considered Prince’s finest work and one of the most acclaimed albums in popular music history. Critic Robert Christgau called it the work of “the most gifted pop musician of his generation.” Rolling Stone placed it at no. 45 on its 2020 revision of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (up from no. 93 in 2003). It regularly appears on “greatest albums ever” lists across publications and eras, and in critical retrospectives it ranks above even Purple Rain (1984) as Prince’s artistic peak.
The album’s title track directly addressed the AIDS epidemic, gang violence, and drug abuse, demonstrating that mainstream pop music could engage with acute social crises without sacrificing commercial reach — the song reached no. 3 on the charts without a music video and while mainstream radio still largely avoided the word “AIDS.” In this respect the record anticipated the socially conscious strand of late-1980s and 1990s pop and R&B. Its genre-fusing ambition influenced a generation of artists and established Prince as a figure who defied genre classification entirely.