Sign o’ the Times (1987)
Some songs, like The Ballad of Dorothy Parker from Sign o’ the Times are elevated by their lyrical poetry. Others, like the album’s next track, shine brighter when the lyrics step out of the way. It reminds me of Thomas Mann’s quote from Doctor Faustus: “a poem must not be too good to furnish a good lied. Music is at home in the task of gilding the mediocre”. Not that the lyics to It are mediocre – they’re laconically perfect. Metaphors and rhyming structures fall by the wayside when you’re hammering a relentless tattoo of monomaniacal lust. A repeated chorus of “doin’ it!” paints an intenser picture of obsession than any clever wordplay. Every line ending on the words “all right” drives the point home he’s anything but.
Prince sounds trapped in a deep abyss of torment and suffering, like a Greek titan undergoing eternal punishment for seducing Zeus’s concubine. Condemned to think about the act for eternity, without relief nor respite. A body, reduced to nothing more than a vehicle for his obsession, crawling over drums of jagged granite boulders. A guitar-solo wail wards off the encroaching shadows while orchestral string samples stab his sides repeatedly. His voice, a ruptured and ragged scream, rebounds off the cave walls and creates a distorted choir of horny Tantaluses, mocking his pain while multiplying it. I’m pretty sure Taylor Swift didn’t have this depiction of torture in mind when she reinterpolated It’s drumbeat for Tortured Poets Department.
The vocals give up long before the song ends. Two thirds of the way through, we twice hear Prince urge himself forward, each “come on!” knocked back by a dismissive gong-strike reply. Afterwards, his voice drops to a barely audible murmur. The psychic landscape cannot hold. Drum-fills start to cascade as cave walls tumble in. We’re on similar ground as other passion purgatories like When Doves Cry and Thieves in the Temple, both of which Prince used in live performances as a mount for It to ride in on.
On our temporal, terrestrial plain, a final gong-strike ends the song, breaks the curse of monomania and allows Prince to fill his mind with the childlike innocence of Starfish and Coffee. Down in Thirst-trap Tartarus though, it sends him back to the starting gong for another lap of divine retribution.