The Black Album At 30

Should have been 37, but...anyway

Before we begin: Ropeadope, a record label and much more, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. They’ve put a lot of great music into the world, most notably the work of trumpeter Chief Adjuah (fka Christian Scott) but also, more recently, their new AfricArise imprint, which has already given us killer albums by Aaron Rimbui, Thembi Dunjana, and others. Anyway, to celebrate, they’re running a sale on their webstore; use the code Rad25 to get a discount on CDs, clothing, and everything else.

And also this: I wrote an essay on the Black Artists Group (BAG) for Shfl, explaining the history of the St. Louis-based organization that introduced the world to Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett, Baikida Carroll, Charles “Bobo” Shaw, Joseph Bowie and others. No BAG, no World Saxophone Quartet, no Defunkt, no Dogon A.D. Read that here.

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By the end of 1987, Prince had been on a decade-long climb, with only a few minor stumbles. His debut album, For You, was released in 1977; the self-titled follow-up, which contained his first big hit, “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, came in 1979. The next year brought Dirty Mind, a pioneering post-disco/cyber-funk R&B record, and then things really started moving, with hit after hit (“Little Red Corvette”, “1999”, all the singles from Purple Rain, “Kiss”), a Grammy, an Oscar, more hits with side/related projects like Vanity 6, Sheila E. and the Time… the mid ’80s were Prince’s golden era. He was as famous as Michael Jackson or Madonna, but a more dominant presence within the context of pop music than either.

On March 30, 1987, he released his masterpiece, the double LP Sign “O” the Times. A 79-minute compilation of tracks recorded for several shelved projects, it ran the gamut from minimalist electro-funk to epic ballads to dancefloor-friendly rock (“I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” is the best song ever written about rebuffing the advances of a pregnant woman in a bar) to the live blowout “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night” and the gospel-rock ballad “The Cross”, so grandiose Laibach covered it a decade later.

A normal recording artist would have waited a year, maybe two, before putting out another record, but Prince planned to release the follow-up on December 8 of the same year. It was to be an untitled album (some sources claim The Funk Bible was proposed as a title, then rejected) in an all-black sleeve, with Prince’s name nowhere in the art. No pre-album singles were issued. But then, a week before its scheduled release, he called Mo Ostin, head of Warner Bros., asking that the album be scrapped. The label complied, and nearly a half million copies were destroyed.

Naturally, a few made it out into the world, and bootlegs were everywhere. I bought a cassette copy on Eighth Street in New York.

I liked the album as soon as I heard it. It was dark and funky and fun... well, some of the time, anyway. The first three songs, “Le Grind”, “Cindy C.” and “Dead On It”, functioned as a kind of lustful, braggadocious suite. Prince starts off instructing you in a new dance (“I have invented a dance, here is how you do it” is one of my favorite genres of pop song), transitions into ranting about his sexual obsession with model/actress Cindy Crawford, and then swerves into a song about how and why hip-hop sucks. A lot of people don’t like “Dead On It”, but I do. The line “I got a gold tooth/Cost more than your house” makes me laugh every time I hear it. The first side concludes with a soapy, candlelit ballad, “When 2 R in Love”, that he liked well enough to keep for the album he wound up releasing instead. More about that below.

The second side is weirder. A lot weirder.

If people know just one thing about The Black Album, it’s “Bob George”. A nearly six-minute track built atop an ultra-minimal programmed beat accented by digital handclaps, it features an extended monologue from Prince, his voice electronically lowered to a guttural rasp, speaking with barely contained violence to a female partner. He threatens her with death for fucking around with “Bob”, who manages rock stars, including “Prince…that skinny motherfucker with the high voice”. The narrator begins firing a machine gun before an extended guitar solo, which reminds me of the one running all the way through Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized”, begins. Eventually the police arrive and things devolve further. It’s a dark, ugly piece, closer to a Joe Frank late-night radio monologue than a Prince song.

The three tracks that finish out Side Two are hard-edged funk jams. “Superfunkycalifragisexy” is about as George Clinton-esque as Prince ever got on record; the bridge vocals are pure Parliament, but it’s still stripped down and minimal in the way he favored, with synth stabs occupying the spot the Horny Horns might have taken up, and the lyrics are dark, wallowing in drug use and debauchery that doesn’t even sound fun. Eventually, a whooshing synth sound drops us into an equally un-fun-sounding party, but when the dialogue ends the music (which, as with the rest of the album, is probably just Prince throwing down one instrumental track after another) kicks in even harder than before. It’s an almost jazz-like funk groove with multiple keyboards — organ, a piercing synth — crashing synth drums and a frantically popping bass solo.

The finale, “Rockhard in a Funky Place”, is the closest thing to an actual song on the second side, and takes us out with a fade… and a joke: the song fades out, there’s an ugly rising synth noise, and Prince says “What the fuck kind of ending was that?” Then the album’s over.

Having spiked an album (and kinda stepped on the press campaign for Sign “O” the Times and its accompanying concert film in the process), Prince was in a position of both financial and creative debt to his label. He went back into the studio and cranked out an entirely new album (except for “When 2 R in Love”) in two months. Lovesexy was released in May 1988, and it’s good. But he was apparently still in a mood for self-sabotage…

The songs on Lovesexy are more “rock” than those from The Black Album. “Glam Slam” in particular could have fit right in on Purple Rain or Around the World in a Day. It also sounds more like a band effort, though only two tracks — the opening “Eye No” and “Dance On” — feature his full live band. Sheila E. plays drums on about half the album, and there are live horns on three tracks, and multiple singers (many of them female) delivering background vocals and interjections.

Lovesexy is something of a concept album, taking the listener through a world of sexual and romantic trauma and eventually leading them to religion: specifically, Christianity. On “Anna Stesia”, a great song that ends the first side, he winds up singing “Love is God, God is love, girls and boys love God above.”

If it had been released like a standard album, it would probably have been a big hit. The first single, “Alphabet St.”, was good and not particularly challenging, by Prince standards. But… the cover was a photo of a naked Prince sitting among gigantic orchids, and the CD was programmed as a single 45-minute track. As a result of these two factors (some stores even refused to stock it), it was his first album since 1981’sControversy not to go Top 10. Which is a real shame. It’s the last Prince album I love unreservedly, and more people should hear it. The good news is, it’s on streaming services separated into its component tracks. Go listen to it.

Interesting footnote: Prince played a couple of Black Album songs on the Lovesexy tour. Watch this video from Dortmund and you’ll hear a short version of “Superfunkycalifragisexy” and, of all things, “Bob George”.

Oh, and why is this a 30th anniversary post? Because on November 22, 1994, a little shy of seven years after its original planned release date, The Black Album finally came out. Warner Bros. put it out as a limited edition, with a new catalog number and a 1994 copyright date (except for “When 2 R in Love”), and kept it on sale until late January 1995. At which point it vanished again, except for a brief period in 2016 when it was on the streaming service Tidal. (It’s not there now; I checked.) If you want to hear it, check YouTube, or go to Discogs, where you can get a CD copy for $30-40 including shipping from Europe.

That’s it for now. See you on Friday, when I will attempt to sell you some music!