Forgotten Prince: Great Albums After Sign O' the Times

A couple of weeks ago some social media platform or another tossed me a video in which a person I didn’t know stated their unpopular opinions.

Granted, sometimes these kinds of things can be fun, since they amount to “this thing everyone likes I don’t” or “this thing no one likes I do,” both of which can be amusing to ponder, assuming they have a entertaining reasoning.

But one of his guy’s unpopular opinions hit a weird hot button with me – Prince didn’t release a great album after Sign O’ the Times.

Okay.

Right off, I gotta admit that I’ve had this weird… thing… with Prince that started with his death. When he passed, I made a massive blog that laid out how I’d spent years picking up every new release, often against my better judgement, and ending up at least somewhat disappointed in the results.

And yet…

Here’s the important thing – I don’t get hipster-y about many things, but I do get that way about Prince, and it relates back to those first moments after he died.

What I saw was a lot of people saying they loved him, when… they really loved Purple Rain. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it felt very limiting to me – the man released 39 albums, and you’re in love with the one that sold 10 million copies.

And then, there were the people who said they loved Prince for more than just Purple Rain… and then universally said they loved Around the World in a Day, which came out just after Purple Rain. And to be honest, a lot of people bought it because they loved Purple Rain, and a lot of people didn’t like it, but some people learned to…

And that’s cool, I suppose, but it still told me that they probably stopped listening to Prince after the year 1999 came and went.

(And mostly, they gave up after he left Warner Bros., which was 5 years before that.)

So.

I think what stuck in my craw about the Sign O’ the Times comment was the fact that after it came out, Prince had almost a decade of hits that pointed towards albums that ranged from good to great. It was only in about the mid-nineties that he fell off the radar, after The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, which somehow managed to be a huge hit and kind of disliked at the same time.

And I am willing to confess, after Prince left Warner Bros., the great albums get thinner. Freedom was great for Prince, in that he got to do whatever he wanted. It was also bad, in that he got to do whatever he wanted, which means that he was able to do things like release an album with 4 instrumental jams, each 14 minutes long.

But you know what? For some people, that’s their favorite record.

So maybe it was worth it.

As for me, I’m just going to rattle off the great albums that are straight up the middle – if you liked Purple Rain, and enjoy Prince in “hits” mode, these are great albums.

Although, first: A word on great albums. I’m going to define great here as “75% great songs and no bad songs.” Is that fair?

I say yes, based on:

Thriller is, most days, the biggest seller of all time. It also contains The Girl is Mine, a song many people loathe, and The Lady in My Life, a song many people can’t recall. (I suspect people stop listening after PYT.)

Even Sign O’ the Times contains It, a song that feels less like a song and more like a riff with some quickly improvised lyrics over the top of it.

So, with that mind, here are some great post Sign O’ the Times records:

Graffiti Bridge: Technically a soundtrack with a handful of songs performed by other artists, Prince still wrote all the songs, many of which are unheard gems. Still Would Stand All Time and The Question of U in particular are incredible.

Love Symbol: This one got lost in the whole “Prince changed his name!” controversy and a storyline that takes some of the focus off the music, but… the music is almost all fabulous, only 3 Chains O’ Gold taking up more time than it probably should.

Come: The opening track (and the closing one, which pairs with it in some ways) might keep some people who prefer a cleaner Prince away, but this is a fairly quiet, sometimes dark and occasionally experimental record that, honestly, doesn’t contain any bad songs.

The Gold Experience: This one deserved a harder push from label and, frankly, a better single. Instead, they chose Dolphin, which is lovely but doesn’t hold a candle to almost every other song on the record. There’s an alternate universe where Now or Endorphinemachine hit radio first and this one is remembered as an all-time great, and instead it’s forgotten. And unfortunately, after this, there are some much larger gaps between greatness.

3121: There’s a whole decade between The Gold Experience and 3121, and the truth is what’s in the middle isn’t all bad. Most of it is good, and some of it is great, but it isn’t great all the way through – of the hours of released material, there’s something like 90-120 minutes that would build an all-time-great Spotify playlist. But if you want a great record, 3121 is the next one on the list, and while critics seemed to love claiming that one record or another was a “return to form” – this one felt the closest.

Art Official Age: Prince released this album on the same day he released a totally different record with a brand-new band, but this one felt like he knew he wanted to keep pushing himself. A lot of artists get to a certain age and you can see them looking back. Johnny Cash, Elton John, and others get into their later years and decide to try to recreate what made them great. Prince kept trying to push forward.