Prince unveils lost masterpiece

Published: Tuesday, November 29, 1994

Warner Bros. releases legendary, funkadelic 'Black Album' after its six-year hiatus

By Michael Tatum

Daily Bruin Staff

On Nov. 22, 1994, Warner Bros. made available one of the most famous "lost" records of all time.

And after Jan. 27, 1995, it will be lost once more, perhaps forever.

The recording in question? Prince's The Black Album. Originally slated as his followup to his 1987 masterpiece Sign Of The Times, Prince withdrew the record from release at the last minute. According to the artist himself, the record put "sex before love," and was therefore "immoral." As a result, The Black Album joined the Beatles Get Back and the Beach Boys' Smile in the legendary pantheon of "lost" rock records.

The Black Album, however, has perhaps a greater aura of mystery surrounding it. While most of the material for Get Back and Smile eventually resurfaced on, respectively, Let It Be and Smiley Smile, only one of The Black Album's tracks found its way onto a subsequent Prince album ("When 2 R In Love," on Lovesexy).

Of course, a few copies of The Black Album escaped the Warner Bros. building before they could be destroyed, and those that did have been extensively bootlegged. But the package as it was originally intended has never been made available to the general public.

Until now. Prince has finally given Warner Bros. permission to release the record, but the catch is, it will only be available for a limited time, from Nov. 22 to Jan. 27. According to the Los Angeles Times, this unusual arrangement stems not from Prince's ambivalence toward the record itself, but rather from his well-publicized contract dispute.

The tremendous hype surrounding this record makes for interesting news copy, but it distracts from the most important aspect of The Black Album: the music. Put simply, this record ranks among Prince's finest, certainly his best music since Sign Of The Times. How he could have thought this record to be inferior in any way to Lovesexy (the album he released in lieu of The Black Album) is unfathomable. By the same token, it's nothing less than criminal that this record will only be available for a mere two months, while, say, the lackluster Diamonds And Pearls will be be around probably indefinitely.

The album comprises eight tracks of dense, bass-heavy, multilayered, avant-garde funk, similar to Parliament-Funkadelic's work in the late '70s. Unlike Purple Rain, the record doesn't aspire to crossing over to the white audience, and unlike Sign Of The Times, it doesn't incorporate elements from disparate styles of music. When Prince calls this record The Black Album, he's referring to more than just the color of the cover it's obvious that he primarily conceived this record for the African-American audience.

But regardless of "Cindy C.," his lust letter to a certain "actress-model," and "Rock Hard In A Funky Place" ("I just hate to see an erection go to waste") , this album is hardly as sexually explicit as legend has made it out to be. Especially compared to his 1980 record Dirty Mind (in which the young funk hero, among other things, screwed his sister in one song and his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend in another), the record seems chaste even by Prince standards. Though the word "fuck" appears in numerous songs, very rarely does Prince use it to mean "sexual intercourse" usually, it functions as an imperative or an interjection.

So what could have frightened Prince into withholding release of this record? An answer to that question might lie in "Bob George" and "Dead On It." In both of these Prince takes potshots at rap, and, one could argue, the rap audience. The former song broadly parodies a B-boy's braggadocio, while the latter declares that "The only good rapper is one that's dead ... on it," and suggests that problems of most rappers "stem from being tone-deaf."

Granted, Prince sings "Dead On It" in a nasal whine reminiscent of Eddie Murphy's "white boy" impersonation in Raw, so one could argue that song could have been intended ironically. Or, then again, maybe not. This ambiguity in meaning leads one to consider what might have been Prince's real fear about The Black Album: marketing. If he wanted to record an album of unwatered down funk a great idea, to be sure than why alienate his African-American fans (theoretically this record's target audience), by criticizing rap? And if Prince wanted to criticize the African-American audience, than why work in a musical idiom that might conceivably hold less interest for his white listeners? In contrast to Purple Rain, the quintessential crossover record of the decade (next to Michael Jackson's Thriller), The Black Album might have shut out any audience that Prince might have wanted to reach.

But great music shouldn't be about demographics. Regardless of the politics that might have informed it, The Black Album is flat-out brilliant, the last time Prince would experiment so audaciously, before he caved into the whims of the mainstream. And the western world has approximately 61 days to buy it.