Prince's Sign O' The Times: An oral history | Hacker News Reader

Prince's Sign O' The Times: An oral history

bbc.com

61 pointstintinnabula16 comments

The song "Sign o' the Times" has always really captured the feeling of 1986/1987 for me. The AIDS crisis. The Challenger explosion. The Star Wars project (and the backdrop of the Cold War). And that year, on a beach in France, late one night, I stood on something sharp that left a puncture in my foot, and worried for a long time that it was a used needle.

In France, a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name

By chance his girlfriend came across a needle and soon she did the same

It's silly no?
When a rocket ship explodes

But everybody still wants to fly?

This lyric has always stuck in my head, because it doesn't make any sense. The approach that Prince is tacitly advocating here to safety standards in space exploration is far too conservative. You don't give up on the whole programme just because of one very bad accident. You investigate, fix, improve and move on.

Edit: I hope it was obvious that this was tongue in cheek, but thanks for the actually quite interesting responses

I think it has to be viewed in the context of these two lines:

My sister killed her baby 'cause she couldn't afford to feed it / And we're sending people to the moon

He also references the Star Wars program later in the song.

I think, like a lot of good writing, he's doing multiple things:

1. Implying that the government does not care about certain people: homosexuals, the poor, the addicted, etc. but is willing to spend money on space flight and weapons.

2. Despite that, people persist, people still want to fly, and they want to make the world better as in the final lines of the song: Hurry before it's too late / Let's fall in love, get married, have a baby

Even more context: in 1970 Gil Scott-Heron released Whitey's on the Moon which is a description of the struggles of black Americans interleaved with the chorus "but whitey's on the moon" (another classic The Revolution Will Not be Televised was on the other side of the record). He was hugely influential in the early years of rap and hip-hop, so I've little doubt that Prince was at least partially inspired by him.

It became a rather common expression of the contrasts in Amerca.

I think there's an argument for Prince as one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. But he may not be at the top of the engineering philosophy game. I guess we all have our weaknesses.

I always took it in a different way. Prince is speaking to that human thing in all of us that wants to experience something greater than what we currently are. Prince's music is very spiritual. Humans have always wanted to fly and have always gotten in trouble, the story of Icarus is how old at this point?

IMHO Prince is one of the biggest musical geniuses to ever live. His songs are very multi-layered and insightful.

> The approach that Prince is tacitly advocating here to safety standards in space exploration is far too conservative.

I think the first and most serious error here is the idea that, in these lines, Prince is advocating anything at all about safety standards in space exploration.

My local record shop has had my SOTT Super Deluxe on order for months and it's been in stock for three days now and I am on video calls ALL day and I cannot get there to pick it up! AUGH! And it's also too heavy and big to get by bicycle! DOUBLE AUGH!

Back on track: I don't know why articles keep focusing on the album as something that captured the zeitgeist when really it was only the title track that was overt about real-life. The rest of the album is timeless, and as we have recently discovered, some of the songs were at least seven years old by the time they were recorded.

An amazing album, I can still picture myself picking it up in the shop again and again until I could afford to buy it.

I absolutely love oral histories of music - and Prince was an especially _interesting_ guy and incredible musician. Prince absolutely tore it up in the George Harrison tribute song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SFNW5F8K9Y

Also Prince was apparently great at basketball too, just watch the Chappelle show sketch about it: https://news.avclub.com/the-real-story-behind-charlie-murphy...

favorite prince nugget I discovered by the interwebs is the piano and mic album

it's not mainstream but it's very high grade musical emotion

and in a more mainstream manner, consider that alicia keys hit was a prince b-side :)

it's bitter sweet to have had this dude in a lifetime (amongts others)

I thought this interview with his lead production engineer was fascinating ("Susan Rogers: From Prince to PhD"): https://tapeop.com/interviews/117/susan-rogers/

Neat stories/background on a music industry figure that not many people have heard of, but should.

Anyone who's interested in this might also enjoy the podcast about the album [1] from The Current, the Minneapolis rock format public radio station.

[1]: https://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2020/08/27/prince-the-sto...

Calling the station "rock format" is perhaps doing a disservice. They play the most eclectic mix of music I've ever heard.

I toyed with "not classical or talk", but that dragged on to long. Popular music would probably be the best descriptor. It's really not all that diverse if you think of the breadth of western music: classical, jazz, metal, musicals, and so on. There's probably a low power FM or college station in most larger towns in the US that's covering all of these in their weekly schedule.

This isn't to take anything away from The Current, which is a great station and in my regular rotation, but at the end of the day they are playing popular music and MPR has other stations to cover other genres.

I thought this was going to be about the teenagers Prince Andrew violated with his mouth.

Even if that's what you really thought, keeping it to yourself would have been better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com