Guest Listener - Stephanie Boland
Who’s Stephanie Boland when she’s at home?
A writer on twentieth century literature and various other things, as well as the woman who makes the iPad version of the New Statesman run every week.
Stephanie’s Top 3 albums ever?
Cruel question. Here’s three representatives:
Dirk Wears White Sox - Adam and the Ants
(always)
Corn - Arthur Russell (recently)
Ten Years of Tears - Arab Strap (after a drink or two)
What great album has she never heard before?
Sign of the Times by Prince
Released in 1987
Before we get to Stephanie, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Sign of the Times
Week 45, or as it will come to be known -“I sort of wish I liked Prince as much as everyone else does week”.
And I should stress here that I like him, that when he’s great he’s obviously as great as anyone. Yet, notwithstanding that, I definitely feel that I’ve missed out on an invitation to the party. I’ve never used the word “genius”, I’ve never clamoured for tickets when he plays live, and I’ve never accumulated a hard drive full of gifs that showcase his extremely strong side-eye game - I’ve only got about 7.
Resolved to rectify what seems to be an adoration gap, I’ve spent all week
immersed within the world of Prince, trying to discover the appeal I’ve
previously missed. At times it’s felt like one of those Louis Theroux
documentaries, where he visits a swingers retreat or something. He likes sex,
he likes the people, but he’s not quite sure why they swing and what they get
out of it. At some point he opens the door to the “sex room” and is
confronted by a sea of misshapen bums, wall to wall creases and folds, and the
occasional head that peaks out from the action like a flustered greengrocer.
So Louis Theroux watches on - his face a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and
outright horror.
And at times this week, it’s been a bit like that for me.
Let’s start with the potted biography.
At aged 5, the young Prince (yes, that’s his actual name) watches his dad perform in a Jazz trio and decides, there and then, that he wants to be a musician.
Five years later he then goes to a James Brown gig. Somehow he manages to sneak on stage, a kid up there with a legend, and dances for a bit before the stewards remove him - no doubt wondering what a 10 year old was doing there in the first place. The experience only heightens his desire though and, despite being a child, he’s in awe of the control that Brown has over his band, and the abundance of half-naked dancing girls on the stage.
It’s also around this point that his Mother decides that Prince should be educated on the “birds and the bees” so she gives him a load of Playboy magazines and tells him to get on with it. The poor kid - the very last person you’d ever want to receive pornography from is your mum.
Still, if the twin influences of James Brown and Playboy go at least some way
to explaining what came next, there’s one other factor you have to consider -
his height.
Without heels, Prince is walking at 5 ft. 2. That’s small. To give you an idea exactly how small, consider the following -
If Prince was a
Premiership footballer he would be the smallest player in the history of the
Premier League, beating the previous record holder (Aston Villa’s Alan Wright
since you asked) by a whole two inches. All those men, since 1990, lined up
from the tallest to the smallest - 6 ft. 8 Lacina Traore at one end and Prince
at the other. That’s how small he is - the smallest footballer ever.
Hopefully that comparison
has helped you as much as it helped me.
It’s
not even so much that he’s small, it’s that he’s small and his actual name is
Prince. The two together somehow don’t work in a pre-fame world and, to make
matters worse, it’s in stark contrast to his brother who is tall, athletic, and
called Duane.
Is his height a factor in his career? Did he feel he had to live up to the
stature of his name and work harder to compensate? I’ve no idea, but it seems
like something you can’t ignore. Also, it made me think about Prince being a
footballer, over complicating matters on the wing, with that weird symbol on
his back - a sort of disco Aaron Lennon. For that alone, it was probably worth
including.
Back to the story.
Prince learns to play the family piano, as well as practically every other instrument in the world, and decides to branch out on his own after deciding that “groups” are not really for him. Exercising complete control, efficiency in his own company, he records his first demo tape - sent in plain black packaging to a series of record companies and simply labelled “Prince”.
And it worked. A flurry of interest, coupled with lots of talk about “the new Stevie Wonder”, result in him signing a contract with Warners. He gets to work on his first album - For You.
Whilst not a huge hit, it contains the defining features of his subsequent career - complete artistic freedom, extreme perfectionism, and loads of songs about sex, most notably one called Soft and Wet. The album is released in 1978 with the inscription -“Produced, composed, arranged, and performed by Prince”, just in case anyone was in doubt as to who did what.
In 1979 he tours the album, making his live debut wearing tight spandex, leg warmers, and high heels - very much starting as he means to go on.
Prince follows his debut with a series of albums that simultaneously yield more hits whilst becoming progressively filthier. There’s a song on Prince called Bambi where he tries to convince a lesbian that she’d have better sex with him, a song on Dirty Mind called Head, about a bride giving him a blow job before her wedding, and, just to top it all off, a song called Sister which relays a fictional account of losing your virginity to, well, your sister.
Still, the music’s mostly great.
A young Timbaland heard I Wanna Be Your Lover and described it as the most innovative song he’d ever heard - the record that got him into music.
In 1982, Prince then releases 1999 - a total banger of a song that was even better before the actual 1999 happened. For 17 years it promised so much - the biggest party night of your life. Every time it came on you thought “I can’t wait. I can’t wait to party like it’s 1999”. And then 1999 came and I didn’t party - I ended up round Little Kev's flat where everyone smoked a load of weed and wondered whether all the planes would fall out of the sky and on to our heads because of that millennium bug thing.
The song’s never quite been the same since.
Back in 1982, Prince follows 1999 with Little Red Corvette - another great song, this time with an accompanying video that sees him become one of the first black artists to regularly appear on MTV.
And then it took off.
He releases Purple Rain, the album and, for good measure, the film too. Such is the success of both that, by the end of 1984, he’s the first artist since the Beatles to simultaneously top the U.S charts with a single, album, and film.
In fact he’s so prolific at this stage that, on top of his own projects, he’s also writing albums and masterminding the careers of artists such as The Time, Apollonia 6, and Sheila E. He even writes Manic Monday, a better song than most people will ever write, and just gives it to The Bangles. Incredible stuff.
“Here you go,
here’s Manic Monday. I can’t be
bothered to record it”
“Thanks Prince”
It’s not all plain sailing though.
Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, hears a song coming from her daughter’s bedroom called Darling Nikki - it’s from Purple Rain and it’s about a girl masturbating with a magazine. Of course it is. She’s so outraged that she forms the Parents Music Resource Centre and, as a result, loads of albums have those “Parental Advisory” stickers plastered all over them. They even come up with a list of the most offensive 15 songs of the time, which they dub The Filthy Fifteen. The top two are Prince songs - the aforementioned Darling Nikki and another one called Sugar Walls. Don’t ask.
On top of the controversy surrounding his lyrics, he increasingly finds any form of collaboration practically impossible and has to control everything by his own exacting standards. He refuses to appear on the We are the World charity single (although he does contribute a song to the album) and even turns down the opportunity to duet with Michael Jackson on the song Bad.
Legend has it that he heard the opening lyric, “Your butt is mine”, and said,
“Who’s singing that to whom cos you sure ain’t singing that to me!”
Jeez, he can be such a prude sometimes.
Anyway, he sticks to his own course and the hits keep coming - Raspberry Beret, Kiss, Girls and Boys, Sign of the Times and You got the Look to name a few. Honestly, the easiest job in music between 1982 and 1987 was picking the singles from Prince albums, which isn’t to say the album tracks are particularly bad, just that the singles are SO good. As I said at the start - when he’s great, he’s as great as anyone.
Talking of which - this week’s album. Considered by many to be his masterpiece, Sign of The Times is unfortunately the perfect example of why I’ve never quite transcended into one of those full scale Prince fanboy lunatic types. Trimmed from an original triple album concept to a double album, it’s still twice as long as it should be and way more indulgent than it needs to be. Frankly, and I know this isn’t an accusation often levelled at Prince, it’s a bit Games Workshop. It smacks of a man who has got himself a studio for a toy; a man who can make early Genesis sound like a Lo-fi band from the industrial Midwest. I know I’m supposed to shrug my shoulders and say “but hey, that’s Prince!” but I just can’t - it’s easier said than done when you’re actually listening to it.
And that’s always been my problem with him - I can never make the necessary allowances.
I’ve also no idea how he’s getting away with those guitar solos; no idea how he’s getting away with lyrical content that in the hands of anyone else would instigate a petition bukkake across the Internet.
I thought about Mick Jagger singing If I was your Girlfriend at one point this week - it didn’t end well.
After Sign of the Times, his commercial appeal started to fade, even if his output didn’t. He changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, withdrew himself from the Internet after declaring it was “over”, became a Jehovah’s Witness, changed his name back to Prince, and released a whole load of albums that only the most committed aficionado has surely bothered with. He’s released 15 albums since the year 2000 - the hardest job in music has been picking the singles from any of them.
Still, he remains the definition of entertainment for his fans.
Today he can be found living a Citizen Kane existence in Paisley Park where I like to think he toys with the idea of playing THE dream set list - the one that he could play every night for the rest of his life to a full house. THAT set list, you know exactly the one I mean - the one that would make me and everyone else clamour for tickets. Or maybe he just looks back fondly at his childhood, to Playboy magazines and dancing on stage with James Brown. Who knows?
In the end, like Louis Theroux in those documentaries, I walk away having failed to bottle the secret and fully understand the appeal once more. Everyone else seems to be having so much fun that I feel like I’m getting in the way, that it’s their thing and definitively not mine. So I say goodbye and walk down the path, a cheery “it’s just not for me” look plastered across on my face.
Meanwhile, a bunch of swingers watch a stranger leave from an upstairs window of a sex room, and they think to themselves - “Poor bloke, he just doesn’t get it does he?”
Martin (@RamAlbumClub)
The Critics on Sign of the Times
In 1989, Time Out ranked it the greatest album of all time.
NME ranked it the 16th best album of all time.
So, over to you Stephanie. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????
It just wasn’t in my musical DNA.
I was born in 1990 to two Haçienda-frequenting parents: my dad liked The Stone Roses and Nirvana and De La Soul, and my mum, driving me around in our first car — a beige Fiat Panda; 1990s, remember — liked Paul Simon, Adam and the Ants, Pulp and the soundtrack to Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat.
By the time I was six, I knew the lyrics to What’s The Story Morning Glory? on such a needlessly intimate level that one morning I burst into my parents’ bedroom and performed an original composition after “She’s Electric”, which included the line “we’re sisters / and we may have a blister / if underneath our hair we have a fox”.
Then when I was a teenager and getting into some very bad punk, my mum told me to listen to Dirk Wears White Sox instead, which lead to Iggy Pop, The Slits, X-Ray Spex, Stiff Little Fingers, Talking Heads, Manufactured Romance, right before me and my dad went to the Lowlands with only Technique in the CD changer. Then university — Belle and Sebastian, The Mountain Goats, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, The Magnetic Fields, Arab Strap, Orange Juice, Jawbreaker, Aesop Rock — and then the research council miraculously funded a second degree: Okkyung Lee, Tunnelvision, M.I.A, Einstürzende Neubaten, Salem, The Raincoats, East India Youth, and a renewed interest in The Durutti Column.
Henry Rollins calls this sort of patter “that High Fidelity list shit”. I call it having the same pair of drainpipes from age fifteen. Neither are particularly great looks, but life is short and you get the music you get.
Here is everything I know about Prince so far:
1.
“Raspberry Beret” played at a
wedding as me and my mother resolutely took over an empty dance floor
2.
There was an
interview where Madonna recounted that Prince smells of lavender and “it turned [her]
on, actually”
3.
The part in The
Time Traveller’s Wife where the
narrator liberates the girlfriend of a teenage, High Fidelity-list-shit
punk at a party by putting on “1999”
4. That the music video for “Cream” has two whole minutes of scripted narrative before the music starts, mostly focussed on how attracted various women are to Prince
5. Charlotte Church recently contrasted Prince’s output with Rihanna’s “lurid sexuality”, presumably because Charlotte Church has not seen the video for “Cream”
You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?
I love it. Of course I love it. How can you not love an album that rhymes “heck-a-slammin” with “get to rammin’?” I love its tackiness, I love the sweep of the thing: how it’s distinctly American and thematically about love but more about the joy of other people, of longing, of self-definition, all at top speed. Someone once told me Messiaen said that his Quartet for the End of Time should be played slower than the pace of your own heartbeat, and since then I’ve mentally measured every song against the heart. Prince’s drum machines make me feel trachycardic.
I work on literature, though, and I like a drum machine — it means songs tend to be rhythmically internally homogenous, which in turn means the lyrics have to do a lot of heavy lifting. Prince works it like a champ. By the end of the first round, I knew that “state of the nation” opening track is a feint: this album is entirely about desire. The sexy little tics cracked me up, from the orchestra tuning up at the start of “If I Was Your Girlfriend” (of course; it’s surely the sexiest sound in the world) to the B-movie flourishes on “It’, totally unsubtle nods to the dark side of sex and pop both.
And oh God, the women in this: encountering women is such a joy for the completely brilliant fool I found in this album, endlessly going on about his desire to be changed by them — even at school, in “Starfish and Coffee”, where the demand to “set your mind free” counterpoints with that regular 4/4 chord progression. It made me smile all the way through, those immutable drum machines with lyrics about women — mostly in the future tense because, like I said, this is all about desire — over the top. This album’s grammar and syntax are in opposition, so that all the songs make you feel like you’re on the brink of becoming something, their narrator always singing about wanting the next thing, just like a prince is one who stands to inherit, whose title is a statement of intent.
Were there things I didn’t like? Sure. Like
most believers in the transformative power of love, sometimes the things Prince
says are eyebrow-raisingly creepy. I couldn’t overlook how
annoyed I’d be to actually be the recipient of the monologue
in “If I was your girlfriend” (my notes say “overbearing cunnilingus alert”, so I won’t be sending this to
my mother). Some of the slower tracks sound a bit corked, too, and there were a
few I was tempted to skip. But every time I got bored it yanked me back in.“Forever in my life” probably takes more than three listens, and the way
the vocals tracked so close to my ear was a bit, for want of a better word,
keen — but then “U got the Look” started, precision-engineered to catch your
attention. Even when this album was objectively not my thing, it was very good
at doing what it does.
Which is the whole point, really. In fairytales, the princes can always get in places the king can’t. I’ve never been a big disco fan, but I was totally seduced by this hurricane in a bantam-sized man who, I learnt, inherited his father’s stage name, and then grew up to write this album about nightclubs, about taking women home, about desire without bonds; the sort of desire that transforms people permanently, like in Greek myth.
All of that is the case if you listen to Sign O’The Times sitting down, of course.
I did that the first listen. It was a mistake, one I caught as soon as I put on my headphones and stepped out into the city. It tripped up my intellectualising, thank god, because these are songs to move to.Take any of them and you can imagine it set to the opening titles of a film (or maybe it’s just that my 80s are filmic. Again: 1990). The cityscape worked perfectly, but I can picture them in a nightclub, although it’s not something I was alive to hear. There’s not a single song in this album I didn’t want to dance to, which is the other trick of the drum machine: that the most steady digital rhythms are what most make your limbs twitch. Prince makes you feel like your whole body is made of mathematics, and for that, you can sort of forgive this album anything.
Would you listen to it again?
It is bleeding out of my headphones as I write this.
A mark out of 10?
9.
RAM Rating – 6
Guest Rating – 9
Overall Rating – 7.5
So that was Week 45 and that was Stephanie Boland. Turns out she’d never listened to Sign of the Times before because it never made it into the beige Panda or any of her degree courses. So we made her listen to it and the English Literature student discovered her body was made out of mathematics – an interesting turn of events that I’m not sure anyone predicted.
Next week, the author Ian Rankin listens to something from 1983 for the first time.
Until then, here’s Manic Monday by The Bangles. I can’t show any Prince ones as he’s not on the internet. He said it’s “over” – even though it isn’t.
Enjoy
Ruth and Martin
xx