This record was a boost for me. After many years of consuming music, I needed something really new, hard, exciting. And all that Public Enemy gave it to me.

Yes, "true" innovation would, I suppose, be something worth admiring, but my point was that there isn't very much "true" innovation. After hundreds of years of classical music, a hundred years of jazz, decades of avant-garde and experimental music, and 50 years of pop, I think most of what is thought of as "new" in music has actually been done before. What a lot of people regard as innovative in pop music has been done rhythmically, tonically, sonically or melodically in other forms of music already.

This subject arose because of a comment that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was innovative. One can love that album and think it is a masterpiece (I don't myself, but others do) without thinking it is innovative. The fact that something does not sound like 98% of mainstream music on the radio doesn't mean it is innovative. It just means that it is not mainstream.

Also, just because something is influential doesn't mean it is innovative. Something can be influential just because it does what it does extremely well and inspires people to try to do the same thing. Lots of very mainstream music can be hugely influential -- in a good or a bad way. Or non-mainstream music can be influential because people who were not formerly exposed to anything non-mainstream have their eyes opened. But the mere fact that something has a large influence says nothing at all about its level of innovation. Indeed, one could argue that, since the taste of most artists and most members of the public in most art forms is usually very conventional, the fact that something is influential is actually an indication that it was NOT actually innovative.

I don't find it dispiriting or depressing at all to have this attitude towards innovation in music. I still enjoy music, the greatest artistic passion in my life, every bit as much as I always have. What I find now is that instead of falling into the trap of thinking that innovation is somehow the litmus test for true musical greatness, I can enjoy the completely uninnovative pleasures of great songwriting, singing, personal expression, and so on. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road or If You're Feeling Sinister aren't innovative -- they simply function brilliantly and movingly within completely familiar musical and sonic categories.

Hope no one takes any of the above personally. Just fun to discuss this hoary old topic, like the old "is there, or is there not, objectively good art" question?

#53



Prince – Sign 'O' The Times - 1987

1919.7 points

AM 3000 rank : 26

Appeared on 27 ballots / 68

Fans: Romain # 2, Toni # 5, Moonbeam #5, Harold Wexler # 16, Rocky Racoon #18


Moderator:
Another album in this great funk/rap series, it is like the two others a little behind its AM rank, confirming a trend concerning Afro American music in this forum : it is still relatively underrated (nothing political here of course, it is just stats speaking, facts and not opinions), but things are getting better with every poll.


BillAdama:
A great album, not an album of great singles like Prince's other big albums, that suffers only from being a little too long.

Moonbeam:
Moreso than any other album, Sign o' the Times showcases the mind-boggling breadth of Prince's artistic palette. Its greatest achievement, however, is that in spite of its dizzying diversity and sprawling length, the album is still cohesive.

Honorio:
A succulent banquet of contemporary music, displaying a varied and wide amount of delicacies cooked with inventiveness, craft and inspiration. A celebration of music while having its feet on the ground, dealing with drugs, AIDS and social issues. There was at the time accusations of betraying his black roots. Unfairly. It was black music, it was white music, it was multi-coloured music.