Power Dynamics and the Human Struggle for Equality and Justice
Song Lyric Sunday — Sign o’ the Times 💜
This week’s Song Lyric Sunday asks us to choose a song relating to civil rights, oppression, protest, revolution or social change.
There are so many songs I could have chosen.
And no, before anyone suggests it, I am not choosing Bob Dylan. 😂
Instead, I’m going back to an artist who has already appeared on my Song Lyric Sunday journey — and who also happened to be one of my very first artist crushes.
Prince. 💜
My choice this week is “Sign o’ the Times.”
A song I remember well
This takes me straight back to 1987.
I was sixteen years old, and I remember Sign o’ the Times being everywhere. It was one of those songs you didn’t simply hear once and forget.
And apparently my memory isn’t playing tricks on me.
The single was a major international hit, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in America and No. 10 in the UK Singles Chart. It also reached No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B chart.
Prince’s official discography notes that Sign o’ the Times, I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man and U Got the Look all reached the Billboard Top 10.
Not bad for a song whose subject matter was anything but light.
Prince looking at the world around him
Prince wrote the song himself — music and lyrics — and produced it himself too.
The sparse sound is striking even now. Prince used guitar, a Linn drum machine and the Fairlight CMI, one of the pioneering digital sampling instruments of the era.
But it’s the words that matter for this week’s prompt.
Rather than telling one story, Prince looks around at the world of the 1980s and gives us snapshots of what he sees: AIDS, poverty, drugs, violence, disaster and the fear of nuclear war.
There is something almost unsettling about the way he does it.
He doesn’t need a huge orchestra or an angry wall of sound. The music is relatively bare, leaving nowhere for the subject matter to hide.
Nearly forty years later, that’s perhaps what still makes the song so powerful.
The details belong to 1987, but the idea behind it is timeless: music can make us look at things we’d sometimes rather look away from.
And that, to me, is what protest and social-commentary music can do.
It doesn’t necessarily tell us what to think.
Sometimes it simply says:
Look.
And then there was THAT video… 👀
While watching the video again, something suddenly occurred to me.
Was Prince one of the first people to make what we’d now call a lyric video?
Turns out — yes!
Instead of Prince appearing in the video, the words move across the screen in colourful animated typography. It was directed by graphic designer Bill Konersman, and the Recording Academy describes it as widely considered the first lyric video of its kind.
In 1987!
Today every second song on YouTube seems to have an official lyric video. Back then, this was unusual and innovative.
Although…
There is one little historical complication.
Bob Dylan had famously used cue cards displaying selected words in Subterranean Homesick Blues back in 1965. But Prince’s video displayed the song’s complete lyrics, making it much closer to what we now recognise as a lyric video.
So despite specifically saying NO BOB DYLAN at the beginning of this post…
Somehow the man has managed to sneak into it anyway.
🤣🤣🤣
Typical.
From Cinnamon Girl to Sign o’ the Times
I’ve featured Prince before for Song Lyric Sunday, when I chose “Cinnamon Girl.”
But this is another side of him.
Prince could be sexy, outrageous, funny, romantic, experimental and completely unpredictable.
He could also look at uncomfortable things happening in society and put them into a pop song that millions of people would hear.
Perhaps that’s part of why his music has stayed with me for so many years.
I had a crush on him when I was young. 💜
But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate just how extraordinarily creative he was too.
And Sign o’ the Times is one of those records that immediately transports me back to being sixteen — while somehow still sounding relevant enough to make me stop and listen today.
That’s quite something for a song released almost forty years ago.
#SongLyricSunday #Prince #SignOTheTimes #ProtestSongs #SocialChange #MusicWithAMessage #1980sMusic #MusicMemories
With love, coffee, poetry, and stardust,
— Maggie The Afterlove Voice 💫
My new song “Silenced,But not broken ” is on all streaming platforms.
Lyrics video :
https://ditto.fm/silenced-but-not-broken
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