Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Dream Factories: Prince, Sign o’ the Times, Box Sets and Cultural Artefacts, Sept 2022

This article compares specific studio takes and live performances from the super deluxe Sign o’ the Times box set to argue that the ways Prince and his band integrate multiple styles and genres into their performances participate in the creation and development of a post-civil rights era Black popular music aesthetic. In particular, I demonstrate how the intellectual and physical labour of musical performance and sonic interaction found throughout the box set expands conceptions of what Black popular music should and could sound like. This article analyses four performances. It begins by examining two versions of ‘Witness 4 the Prosecution’. In version 1, Prince utilizes a more guitar-based rock sound, while the second presents a more synth-based approach that incorporates the new sound possibilities of music technologies. Through this comparison, I demonstrate how the way Prince works through these performances represents the kind of sonic freedom and flexibility that was a hallmark of his work. I then turn to a comparison between the original release of ‘Forever in My Life’ and the live performance in Utrecht. While the original release emphasizes Prince’s vocals and the drum part, the live performance becomes a vehicle for improvisation and interaction. By analysing the distinctions between the studio and the live performance, I argue that by incorporating elements like improvisation and call and response, Prince and his band situate their approach to post-civil rights era Black popular music aesthetics within the trajectory of Black music history.

Hailed as one of the most versatile artists of his time, Prince is marked in history for his revolutionary music that rendered his appearance as a cultural icon across various music aficionados around the world. The posthumous evolution of Prince’s legacy is largely embedded in the reproduction and (re)release of material that not only presents him as a music artist but a commercial product for the market. This created a new cultural space where the reception of an exceptional creative artist found new dimensions, and the commercial value of his musical life became equally important as its cultural and artistic significance. The release of the Super Deluxe Sign o’ the Times 2020 box set is one of the recent evidence of such a situation in which material enacted as cultural artefacts preserves and transposes Prince to a new generation of musical reception. This article analyses the ideas of marketability and authenticity in the contemporary era reception of Prince and its ongoing attempts to appropriate cultural artefacts through commodification and commercialization. It argues that cultural artefacts do not replicate the authentic lived career of Prince but, on the contrary, they reflect the past legacy of an iconic star to maintain his marketability in a new era of music, performance and cultural activities.

How do we understand a concert video in the context of a cultural industry’s alternative product? The DVD included in the Super Deluxe box set of the Sign o’ the Times (SOTT) album, released in 2020, has a two-hour-and-fifteen-minute concert video known as Live at Paisley Park and three official music videos. The audio-visual aesthetic was one of the main weapons of a multi-artist who always tried to extrapolate the musical element, not only in his films or his music videos but also in live concerts. Many possible reasons can explain the presence of the New Year’s Eve concert in the package and not the official film directed by the artist himself. The most concrete explanation is that the rights of the film Sign o’ the Times currently belong to a company not involved in this project. It might not be an insurmountable hurdle, but a more accurate comparison between the two audio-visual products can help one understand that the Paisley Park video is more genuine in many senses, and the lighting is one of the most evident signs of it, building a veritable apotheosis of music and dance.

With 2020’s deluxe release of Prince’s magnum opus Sign o’ the Times, fans were reintroduced to the era’s distinct sartorial blueprint of peach and black, denim and fringe. Unexpectedly, the Sign o’ the Times signature look is largely regarded as the oversized customized denim jacket worn by Prince throughout the concert film and live performances. Not just your typical denim jacket, the garment is adorned with decorative safety pins, buttons, graphic appliqués, fringe and various glittering embellishments. Like Purple Rain’s studded trench coat, the denim jacket is now forever affiliated with Sign o’ the Times, active throughout our shared popular culture conscious. Within the expansive wardrobe of the musician, the denim jacket remains a unique cultural artefact, not only for the unexpected utilitarian fabric choice but also for the garment’s coded signifiers of the counterculture, liberation and community. An object study of the denim jacket will examine the strategies employed in Prince’s shared visual language, transmedia storytelling and fan-generated clothing. Through an interdisciplinary investigation informed by theoretical work in fashion, media, film and cultural studies, the article seeks to examine how Prince’s bespoke denim jacket both fuels consumption and facilitates placemaking and community building both in physical and digital contexts still to this day.