New Book Positions Prince's 'Sign o' the Times' as His Defining Peak

John McKie has published a new book on Prince, titled Prince: A Sign o' the Times, arguing that the artist's 1987 album stands as the ultimate showcase of his genius.

McKie frames the book around a decisive moment in Prince's career. By the early 1980s, Prince had cemented his place as a pop heavyweight with the success of his album 1999, and he became a movie star thanks to Purple Rain. Even when his second film, the old Hollywood throwback Under the Cherry Moon, bombed worldwide in 1986, he notched another massive hit off its soundtrack with "Kiss."

It didn't matter if audiences didn't understand. Prince kept moving forward.

That restless spirit propelled what McKie calls Prince's final masterpiece, 1987's Sign o' the Times. In the period the book examines, the musician dabbled with different directions, and anything seemed on the table. He might have dropped another album with his backing band, The Revolution, or explored his feminine alter-ego Camille on a self-titled album. At one point, he wanted to release a triple album — a response, McKie suggests, to the sheer volume of music Prince was creating at the time.

The author sees that fecund period as the key to understanding the record. "Sometimes when people are in a place of transition, they're distracted," McKie said. "For Prince, he focused on his music."

The book positions Sign o' the Times as what McKie describes as a genre-defying monument, capturing the Paisley Park polymath at his creative apex. The album followed a run in which Prince had already reshaped pop: 1999 broke him to a global audience, Purple Rain made him a film star, and "Kiss" — pulled from the soundtrack of a commercial failure — confirmed that his chart instincts operated independently of his fortunes in cinema.

McKie's account reconstructs the road to the 1987 release through the shelved projects that surrounded it. The Revolution, the band that backed him through his mid-1980s peak, remained a possible vehicle for a further album. The Camille project, built around a pitched-up feminine vocal persona, was another road not taken. The triple-album plan, eventually pared down, testifies to the archive of material Prince was generating during these years.

For readers of Arts & Voices, the book offers a case study in how a major artist metabolizes career turbulence. Prince entered 1987 off the back of a film flop and a shelved alter-ego project, yet produced what the author regards as his crowning recorded statement. The transition that might have distracted another artist, McKie argues, concentrated Prince's attention on the work itself.

Prince: A Sign o' the Times is out now, and its central claim is likely to fuel ongoing debate over where Sign o' the Times sits in the Prince catalogue — and whether any later record matches it.