The 500 - #93 - Sign O' The Times - Prince

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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Album: #93

Album Title: Sign O' The Times

Artist: Prince

Genre: Funk, Soul, R&B, Rock, Avant-Pop

Recorded: Multiple Studios

Released: March, 1987

My age at release: 21

How familiar was I with it before this week: Several songs

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #45 - rising 48 spots

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Sign O' The Times

As an educator, I am always chasing the perfect school year. I suspect most teachers do the same. Perfection in the classroom, however, is not necessarily defined by the highest grades or the fewest challenges.

It is the year when everything seems to click. The curriculum feels alive, students are excited and engaged, relationships are strong and the classroom becomes imbued with creativity, laughter, curiosity and growth through learning.

In this ideal environment, students all get along, avoiding the social drama that often befalls adolescents; they collaborate respectfully and productively. The teacher leaves work exhausted, but it is the satisfying kind of exhaustion that comes from knowing he or she is doing exactly what they were meant to do.

Of course, teaching rarely unfolds according to plan. External factors can quickly alter the trajectory of a promising year. Contract disputes, difficult parent interactions, administrative changes, staffing reorganizations, or even a global pandemic can derail momentum.

Sometimes, the obstacles come from within. Lessons that looked brilliant on paper fail to connect. Classroom dynamics never quite develop as hoped. A teacher can spend months refining a series of engaging, creative lessons only to have them met with unimpressed, blank stares. Sometimes it takes months to connect with a group of students, and a few "Negative Nancys" can steer others away from success, torpedoing lessons and activities with their resistance, cynicism and disengagement.

Even so, most teachers can identify a few years that stand above the rest. For me, one of those years was 2004-05 with a Grade 8 class at Lorne Avenue Public School in London, Ontario. Another was 2016-17 at Eagle Heights Public School. That year actually began with considerable uncertainty. I started with a Grade 5/6 split class before a school reorganization in October forced everyone to start over.
In many ways, it felt like building a classroom community twice within the span of a few months. Yet the class that emerged from that upheaval was exceptional. The students were funny, adventurous, creative and eager to learn. Looking back, it remains one of the most enjoyable years of my career.

The challenge with a year like that is not surviving it but surmounting the obstacles. Once you have experienced a truly satisfactory year, it becomes the measuring stick for every year that follows. Whether admitting it or not, with the onset of the following school year, teachers hope lightning strikes twice. We are encouraged by memories of spontaneous moments of humour, class discussions that took on a life of their own, and the projects that exceeded every expectation. We become convinced that if we work hard enough, plan carefully enough, and bring enough energy to the classroom, we can recreate the experience. However, the bar is set quite high -- perhaps unfairly for the new group.

The reality, however, is that every class has its own personality. The conditions that made one year magical can never be perfectly duplicated. Different students bring different strengths, interests, and challenges. What worked beautifully with one group may leave another group completely unmoved. Teachers know this intellectually, but emotionally we often find ourselves comparing new experiences against our personal high-water marks.

I imagine entertainment legend Prince faced a similar challenge after 1984.

With the release of his sixth studio record, Purple Rain (#76 on The 500), Prince became one of the biggest stars on the planet. The album generated massive hits including When Doves Cry, Let's Go Crazy, and the explosive title track. The accompanying narrative concert film of the same name was a commercial success, and Prince found himself occupying a rare position in popular culture: He was not simply successful; he was defining the musical landscape of the mid-1980s. For many artists, a project of that magnitude would have represented the unquestioned peak of their careers.

His next two albums, Around the World in a Day and Parade, were also hits by any reasonable standard. They contained memorable songs, showcased Prince's expanding musical interests, and sold well. However, they existed in the enormous shadow cast by Purple Rain. Critics and fans inevitably compared them to the album that had turned Prince into a cultural phenomenon. Fairly or unfairly, there was a growing sense that Prince's greatest work might already be behind him.

Then came Sign O' the Times. Rather than attempting to recreate Purple Rain, Prince took a different approach. He broadened his creative scope, embraced experimentation, and produced an album that showcased every facet of his artistry. Across its 16 tracks, he moved effortlessly between funk, rock, soul, pop, psychedelia and gospel influences, infusing the whole with social commentary. The title track examined AIDS, gang violence, poverty, drug addiction and the threat of nuclear annihilation with a seriousness rarely found in mainstream pop music. Elsewhere, songs such as If I Was Your Girlfriend, U Got the Look, The Ballad of Dorothy Parker and I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man, demonstrated an artist operating at the height of his creativity and confidence.

Many Prince fans and music critics now consider Sign O' the Times to be his masterpiece. It lacks the commercial footprint of Purple Rain, but it offers a more complete portrait of the artist. It captures Prince at his most adventurous, ambitious and fearless. Instead of trying to repeat a previous triumph, he pushed himself into new territory and created something even more enduring.

There is probably a lesson there for teachers. The goal is not to recreate our perfect year. The conditions that produced it no longer exist, and the students who made it special have moved on. Our task is to bring the lessons we learned from those experiences into the present and remain open to fresh possibilities. If we spend all our energy chasing the past, we risk missing the unique opportunities sitting right in front of us. I thought about that a lot over the summer shutdown as I began preparing for the new Grade 7 students I will work with in the 2026/27 school year.

Sometimes, the years we remember most are our Purple Rain years. Sometimes, however, our greatest work arrives only after we stop trying to repeat old successes and face the challenge of creating something new. Sign O' the Times is the sound of Prince doing exactly that.

The 500 - #203 - Bad - Michael Jackson

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

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Album: #203
Album Title: Bad
Artist: Michael Jackson

Genre: Pop, Funk, Soul, Hard Rock, R&B
Recorded: Westlake Studios, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

Released: August, 1987
My age at release: 22
How familiar was I with it before this week: Very

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #194, moving up 10 spots
Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Man In The Mirror

Four years ago, as we navigated the unpredictable Coronavirus pandemic, my wife and I discovered the Disney+ program WandaVision. The nine-part mini-series was the first television program released in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and set after the events in the 2019 film Avengers: Endgame.

One might expect this to be typical superhero fare. After all, it featured Wanda Maximoff (aka: Scarlet Witch) and the android Vision, two characters well established in the MCU. However, it was the promotional trailer release that piqued our interest and convinced us to subscribe to the newly available Disney streaming service. This short video, shot in black and white, featured the song Twilight Time from 1950's vocal group The Platters. The vid depicted our former heroes in a situational comedy setting eerily reminiscent of I Love Lucy episodes (1951-1958).

Screen Capture for the Official Trailer to WandaVision.

Ten minutes into the first episode and we were hooked. The show was part sit-com, part mystery -- think I Love Lucy meets The Twilight Zone (1959 - 1964). We had so many questions:

• Why are these 2020 characters living and hiding their superpowers, in the idyllic world of 1950s Westview, New Jersey?
• Why is the show leaning on the campy and cliche television tropes from that era?
• Why was Vision alive? Thanos had killed him in Avengers: Endgame, right?
• Who is the mysterious person whose hand is shown in a television studio in the final credits, watching the final credits?

  

  Final Credit screen capture featuring a mysterious onlooker.

Our delightful bewilderment continued when the second episode featured the same characters appearing in a fictional world that had all the trappings of a ‘60s era sitcom -- clearly reminiscent of the Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1967),...including promotional material.

WandaVision shot (left) compared with the Dick Van Dyke Show promo.

It soon became evident that WandaVision was going to be a mysterious and nostalgic trip through the decades, depicted through the tropes and cliches from situation comedies in each. Wisely, the Disney channel released the episodes weekly rather than dropping the entire series for viewers to binge watch. Consequently, there was plenty of time for online speculation and for fan predictions and theories to percolate.

Wanda's changes through the episodes/decades.

At the same time, January to March, 2021, I was teaching remotely. I had started the year with a delightful group of Grade 7 students in person. However, as our province, Ontario, entered the second wave of the pandemic, we reluctantly returned to online learning. Always on the hunt to engage students and build community, I thought about ways the WandaVision premise could connect to our learning. Then, I was struck by a plan.

• What if each student was assigned a random decade and found a song that others might enjoy.... a "Bop"?
• The student could then, privately, send me a presentation slide which would feature the song as an embedded YouTube video.
• Included on the slide would be three bullet points of research -- about the song, the artist, the album or the themes in the lyrics.
• I would present the slide (in order to keep the student identity private) and would play the song throughout the week in our virtual learning environment.
• At the end of the week, we would use a Google Form to vote each song from the chosen decade as a Bop or Flop. The top two songs, or any song receiving 60 per cent Bop status, would remain in our class playlist.
• We would then reveal the students who chose each song and created the accompanying slide presentation.
• I began by sharing three songs from the ‘40s in order to provide an example to guide them.

  

  One of my example slides - Stardust by Artie Shaw -- it was voted a Bop.

The activity was a hit. My students were excited to have their songs shared and hear the music chosen by classmates from the ‘50s through to the 2000s. With six decades over six weeks, this turned out to be a wonderful way of bonding the class during a time of dreary isolation -- short, bleak winter days coupled with another pandemic lockdown. It also connected to multiple curriculum expectations -- visual literacy, writing, research and history.

The success of this collaborative WandaVision music project in 2021 prompted me to make it part of my regular program and, for the fourth year in a row, it has been received enthusiastically. The eclectic playlist we create throughout the unit never fails to delight me. Songs ranging from Mr. Sandman by The Chordettes (‘50s) to I'm A Believer from The Monkees (‘60s) to Earth, Wind and Fire's September (‘70s) bring diverse sounds to our work periods. With literally thousands of popular songs from which to choose, each year takes on a slightly different tone. One artist, however, has consistently made the cut every year -- The King of Pop , Michael Jackson.

The King of Pop - Michael Jackson.

One year, a student locked into ‘70s Michael, performing with his brothers, The Jackson Five, on the soft rock ballad I'll Be There. Another discovered the disco/funk audio splendor of Rock With You from 1979's Off the Wall (#68 on The 500). Another class found Jackson's work from the ‘80s with the hard rock dance track Beat It, and the title track from this week's record, Bad.

Cover for the single, Bad, from Michael Jackson

Bad, the single, exploded into the pop culture zeitgeist on August 31, 1987, when the 18-minute video premiered on a primetime CBS special called The Magic Returns: Michael Jackson. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the short film was, in part, inspired by scenes from the musical West Side Story. Shot in a Brooklyn subway station, the protagonist Darryl (portrayed by Jackson) is a young man returning to his old, tough neighbourhood after being away at a private school on a scholarship. Darryl is greeted by his former street gang, which included actor Wesley Snipes in one of his first roles. At first, the reunion is friendly, but becomes awkward when Darryl's street credibility is challenged. In an attempt to show the group that he is still "bad", Darryl considers robbing an elderly man before having second thoughts. The dance sequence that follows, featuring the song Bad, has become iconic, as has the leather outfit Jackson wore as Darryl.

A screen capture from the Scorsese directed short film, Bad.

It is, like many things from the ‘80s, a piece of pop culture history that has aged imperfectly. When we watched the video in class there were a few chuckles and a lot of questions. However, by week's end, the song was voted a Bop and became part of that year's playlist rotation.

That's the thing about Jackson, he fearlessly took risks. It was a message I deliver often in our Grade 7 classroom, "swing for the fences with your artistic endeavours".  If you are brave enough to push your creativity to new limits it is worthy of respect, even when it doesn't work out. This was not, I reminded them, dissimilar to the risk they took by picking a song during our WandaVision music challenge. They knew it might be a Flop -- and that's okay.

Admittedly, Jackson had more hits than misses in his career. In 1991, the album Bad became the second best-selling record of all time, eclipsed only by Jackson's previous record, 1982's Thriller (#20 on The 500). Bad had only had nine tracks on it, and seven of them were singles, with five songs hitting #1 on Billboard charts. The first single from the album, I Just Can't Stop Loving You, was a chart-topper in June, 1987. The final song released as a single, Liberian Girl, wasn't promoted until July, 1989 -- 25 months later. For anyone who lived through "Michaelmania", it felt like he was an constant artistic force.

Single cover for Liberian Girl - released in the U.K. in 1989.

I plan on sharing the WandaVision Music Experience with my students again in the next school year. Although pandemic lockdowns and virtual learning seem to be a strange thing of the past, the unit still builds community through the coldest and bleakest days of winter. I am always surprised by the interesting choices that students make and I am keen to see if Jackson's streak continues in 2025.

The 500 - #228 - Paid In Full - Eric B. & Rakim

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

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Album: #228
Album Title: Paid In Full
Artist: Eric B. & Rakim
Genre: Golden Age Hip Hop
Recorded: Three Marly Marl's Home Studio and Power Play Studios, New York. 

Released: July, 1987
My age at release: 21
How familiar was I with it before this week: A few songs

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #61, moving up 167 places since the 2012 list.
Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Paid In Full (Coldcut Remix)

The term "The Golden Age" comes to us from Greek Mythology. Specifically, it is mentioned in a poem written by Hesiod (c. 750 - 650 B.C.E.) in a didactic almanac of sorts entitled Works And Days. It described the decline of a state of people through a series of ages -- Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron. It was written when, according to Hesiod, human existence in its final stage would be a time of toil and misery. He described the Iron period as a time when "might makes right" and evil men use lies to be thought good. Humans no longer feel shame when committing sin, children dishonour parents and war is the norm. Sound familiar?

Conversely, the "Golden Age" is the period when peace and harmony prevailed, food was plentiful and death came peacefully, late in a vigorous and rewarding life. The term has, over time, morphed somewhat. Not only is it used to describe a time, sometimes imagined, full of peace, prosperity and harmony, it is also correlated with a time when a specific art, skill or practise was at its zenith.

As a kid, when I'd hear about "The Golden Age" of something, I would get the feeling that I'd missed out. Adults in my world and on television talked about The Golden Age of …Hollywood, Comic Books, Television, Radio or Science Fiction, and I couldn't help but wonder "what would that have been like...to be there...to exist in the thick of that miraculous time?”

The Golden Age of Comics (1938 - 1956) was a period I found particularly fascinating as a kid.

However, I've since realized that "The Golden Age" is not something one understands "living through" until well after it has departed. It is a construct developed in retrospect. Indeed, I have lived through, and feverishly participated in, “The Golden Age of Arcade Video Games" (1976-1984) and didn't recognize it as such until reflecting on it nostalgically in the late ‘90s. Indeed, I invested thousands of dollars into the fad...a quarter at a time.

An assortment of classic arcade video games from that 
Golden Age.

I also lived through The Golden Age of Hip Hop (1986-1993) and, in contrast with my financial and emotional commitment to arcade games, I actively railed against it. Like many twenty-somethings, I brimmed with a caustic cocktail of ignorance, intolerance and bombast. A quarter century later, not only have I softened my attitude, I’ve become a fan of this era in music. It was an emotional evolution that has been supercharged by my journey through The 500 list.

However, during The Golden Age of Hip Hop, there were a few songs and artists that managed to crack my armour of intolerance. Eric B. & Rakim was one such group, and the title track from this week's record, Paid In Full, was a song I quietly enjoyed.

Interestingly, it was not the original version of the song that made its way around my  youthful auditory disdain. It was a remix released in October, 1987, by English electronic duo Coldcut, comprising Matt Black and Jonathan More. The seven-minute version was dubbed Paid In Full (Seven Minutes of Madness-The Coldcut Remix). The extended name is not surprising, as Tony Harrington detailed in his 1998 book, Invisible* Jukebox. The landmark remix "laid the groundwork for hip hop's entry into the mainstream" and became Eric B. & Rakim's breakout hit outside the United States.

Paid In Full was the debut record from DJ Eric B. (Eric Banner) and rapper Rakim (William Michael Griffin Jr.) who met in Long Island, New York, in 1985 and were soon composing. The first song they wrote together, Eric B. Is President, was recorded in the home studio of  DJ and producer Marley Marl (Marlon Lu'Ree Williams). In my October, 2023, post I discussed the impact that song had on the evolution of hip hop. The lyrics were clever and Rakim was the first successful artist to incorporate multi-syllabic rhymes that crossed the musical bar line.

The song Paid In Full, is also clever lyrically and musically. The narrative eschewed the typical hip hop structure of the time -- hyper machismo, boastful and often rife with obscenities and references to a criminal world. Instead, Rakim eschews that approach and instead exposes his vulnerability as a struggling artist who hopes that his penchant for rhyme and hard work will lead to "righteous" (his word) financial redemption. The song is shrewdly built around beats and musical motifs from three Funk and R&B sources:

Ashley's Roachclip by The Soul Searchers (1974)

Don't Look Any Further by Dennis Edwards (1984)

Change The Beat (French Female Version) by Beside (1982) 

The Coldcut remix contains a staggering 25 samples from other audio sources including the haunting Im Nin'Alu from Israeli singer Ofra Haza who has been dubbed "The Madonna of the East".

There are some tracks on the debut Eric B. & Rakim album that are a bit dated -- Extended Beat and Chinese Arithmetic have not aged well. However, as evidenced by my classroom students' reaction to it, the song Paid In Full, stands-up. When a much younger colleague heard me playing it one morning before school, she asked who it was.

"This is Eric B. & Rakim", I answered, "mid-eighties hip hop".

"I like it," she replied.

"Yea," I said, "It holds up".

Quietly I thought, "it should", it is, after all, from "The Golden Age of Hip Hop." I can't say I lived through it, but I was grumpily adjacent.

The 500 - #363 - Substance - New Order

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

The 500 - #369 - Louder Than Bombs - The Smiths

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

The 500 - #410 - Time Out Of Mind - Bob Dylan

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

Album # 411

Album Title: Time Out Of Mind
Artist: Bob Dylan
Genre: Country, Blues, Rockabilly
Recorded: Criteria Studios, Miami, Florida
Released: September, 1997
My age at release: 32
How familiar was I with it before this week: Not at all
Song I am putting on my Spotify Mix: Not Dark Yet

Recently, I watched Beastie Boys Story, an unusual documentary in that it was filmed while being presented in front of a theatre audience. Surviving members of the band, Michael "Mike D" Diamond, and Adam "Ad Rock" Horovitz, were co-hosts on a stage with a coordinated multimedia presentation playing behind them. Together, the pair recounted their 40-year friendship and the history of their Hall of Fame hip-hop group. 

Near the end of the documentary, as they discussed the retirement of the band following the death of bandmate and friend Adam "MCA" Yauch, Horovitz shared the following quote: "I'd rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever."

For various reasons, I thought about this quote a great deal, particularly how it resonated in context with Time Out Of Mind, the 30th studio release by legendary musician and songwriter Bob Dylan. Dylan has 11 records on The 500 list, including two in the top ten. Consequently, I will be writing about him regularly over the next eight years. Frustratingly, I grew up an anti -fan. In my younger, less tolerant days, I regularly did a hacky impersonation of him to my friends to amplify my disdain. My dislike for Bob Dylan is well documented in my social circles.

Here's the thing. I understand his popularity and appreciate his mountainous talent. He is a multi-instrumentalist and phenomenal songwriter whose brilliant lyrics draw from a broad range of social, philosophical, political and literary influences. He is an important part of American entertainment and was an integral force in the counter-culture of the sixties that led to positive change through the civil rights movement and beyond. How could I not admire this living legend?

He has received ten Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe, an Oscar, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Nobel Prize for literature. He has a special citation from the Pulitzer Award and has been inducted into multiple Halls of Fame. He is a singular force in the world of art, literature and popular culture. 

Bob Dylan receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama (2016) 

I get all of that, but, I could never get "it" -- that special magic that Dylan's music seems to hold for his legions of die-hard fans. I've tried. My roommate Brendan from Teacher's College played Dylan records all the time in our townhouse. In fact, on a 14-hour road-trip from Thunder Bay to London, Ontario, he and I took turns picking cassettes from our respective collections. He tried his best to get me to see the light Dylan was shining -- It just failed to illuminate me and, as each cassette played, I sat transfixed to the road ahead...waiting disinterestedly for either it, or the journey, to end.

The 14-hour drive from Thunder Bay to London

Consequently, when the record became the next on my list, I played it with begrudging reticence. I thought to myself: "I'll give this the necessary two listens, get a quick post hammered out (probably about that Thunder Bay to London trip) and move on."

Several days later, I have played the record at least six times. I admit, it is fantastic and will certainly be part of my regular rotation for years to come. I was transfixed by the moody and atmospheric music on my first few listens. As I dug deeper, I immersed myself in Dylan's dark, rich poetry -- full of clever turns of phrase, literary connections and well-measured figures of speech. This record is an absolute delight and I suddenly find myself saying..."I finally get that elusive it".

Naturally, I wondered why it took me this long. Perhaps it was because Dylan wrote and recorded Time Out Of Mind when he was exactly my age? Maybe it was the introspective themes of love, loss and mortality (which haunt me daily) are at its core?

Who know?

Who cares really?

"I'd rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever". So, I willingly accept that my disdain for this artist was poorly placed.