Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| BBC Music | favorable |
| Blender | |
| Robert Christgau | A+ |
| Entertainment Weekly | A |
| Q | |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Slant Magazine | |
| Spin | favorable |
| Stylus Magazine | favorable |
The album yielded three top ten hits, the most from Prince since Purple Rain in 1984. Though its sales were modest, somewhat akin to those of Parade, Sign o' the Times was almost universally applauded by critics and has been cited as his greatest work. In 1989, Time Out magazine ranked it as the greatest album of all time. It was ranked #16 on the New Musical Express list of the All Time Top 100 Albums, 3rd in Hot Press magazine's list of the 100 Best Albums of All Time, and #35 on VH1's 100 Greatest Albums. The album was also placed 8th on Nieuwe Revu's Top 100 Albums of All Time. The Times listed Sign o' the Times as the 29th greatest album of all time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 93 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
In 2006, Q magazine placed the album at #12 in its list of "40 Best Albums of the '80s." In 2012, Slant Magazine listed the album at #11 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s" saying "Sign o' the Times is Prince's most varied album and his most self-consciously auteurish".
Read more about this topic: Sign O' The Times (album)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)