Prince #1: The Black Album

So here’s what happened: Prince died, my wife mourned by listening only to Prince and Prince-related music (Vanity 6, The Time), and then I became a complete Prince fanatic. Over the last 9 months, I’ve managed to get my hands on every one of the 39 studio albums Prince released, plus the New Power Generation group albums, live releases, and a good number of bootlegs. On this blog, I will write about all of them. I will do this in random order. Why? To fool you. I don’t want you checking out the first five albums if you know I’m doing them in order and you don’t care about anything after 1999. I know this because it’s what I do when I know someone’s working in order.

Let’s go meet Mr. Prince, shall we?

The Black Album

The Black Album is one of my favorite Prince albums, and one of my favorite albums, period. It’s tempting to see it as a toss-off, something Prince did to clear the pipes after the vastness of his 1982-1987 output. After all, consider THIS five-year stretch:

• 1999 (double album, plus tour)
• Vanity 6 (all tracks written, performed, and produced by Prince)
• The Time (first three short albums: tracks written, produced, and mostly performed by Prince)
• The Family (tracks written, performed, and produced by Prince)
• Apollonia 6 (you get the idea)
• Purple Rain the album
• Purple Rain the movie
• Purple Rain the tour
• Around the World In A Day
• Under The Cherry Moon the movie, directed by Prince
• Parade (album plus world tour)
• the shelved Dream Factory project
• the shelved Crystal Ball triple album
• Sign O’ The Times
• Sign O’The Times the movie, directed by Prince

After all that, it’s no wonder he wanted to, for a little while, hang out with Ingrid Chavez, take Ecstasy (and possibly LSD), and play with his drum machine.

But The Black Album isn’t exactly a weekend lark. Yes, it’s starker and more demo-like than anything he’d done since Dirty Mind. But it’s also where I’d send a casual Prince listener to start if they wanted to go deeper. Every facet of Prince is here, on one album. You have Prince the dance-party impresario in “Le Grind,” following in the path cleared by the extended version of “Let’s Work.” With “Bob George,” you have Prince the voice-and-skit man (see also the Crystal Ball tracks “Movie Star” and “Cloreen Bacon Skin), creating a hilarious (and alarming) picture of a jealous, low-rent lover. “Superfunkycalifragisexy” is a dance-based pop song that, like all the best Prince songs, sounds so effortless you don’t notice how goddamn weird it is. (There are mentions of drinking blood, tying people up, and buckets filled up with “squirrel meat,” which was allegedly Prince’s code name for Ecstasy.)

Prince’s ’90s output would be filled with funk jams, all of them presaged by “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton.” You even have the insanely catchy “Cindy C.,” both an undisguised plea for Cindy Crawford to sleep with Prince, and a rueful acknowledgement that this will never happen. Then there’s “When 2 R In Love,” maybe the most beautiful ballad Prince wrote, and the only song to survive the shelving of The Black Album: it would resurface on Prince’s corrective release, 1988’s Lovesexy, where it’s arguably a better fit than it is here, sandwiched between “Bob George” and “Dead On It,” in which Prince doesn’t so much piss on rap — the common reading of the track — as pat it condescendingly on its head.

The Black Album features backup singers, horns, and some drumming by Sheila E., but it’s still 95% Prince doing and being everything, including seemingly dozens of wacky characters who weave in and out of multiple songs. In a career absolutely stuffed with ambition and willfulness, The Black Album still feels like something he had to do. And that’s what I so love about it: it’s messy, it’s childish, and it’s all him, even more nakedly on display than the Lovesexy cover.

Stray Thoughts:

• One of the best surprises about my near-year with Prince has been his sense of humor. Much was made of the “looser” Prince of the post-90s era — the Dave Chappelle cover art, the Leno appearance — but he was always funny. He kept this side of himself mostly relegated to his B-sides and outtakes — hence a lot of it does show up on Crystal Ball — but there’s plenty on display here on The Black Album. Besides the aforementioned “Bob George” — essentially a comic (and occasionally horrifying) monologue by Prince, using a disguised voice — witness the moment on “Le Grind” where backup singer Boni Boyer starts an incredible vocal run and Prince cuts her off with “Not yet, Boni.”
• “When 2 R In Love” is actually Prince’s second most beautiful ballad. The title is held by “The Breakdown,” from 2014’s Art Official Age, which is easily the most revealing song Prince ever wrote, and one of those songs that’s impossible to divorce from the context of what would come later.
• “For someone who can’t stand them TV dinners, you sure eat enough of them motherfuckers.”

Note: I’m publishing these without pictures, links, or videos. The Prince estate is likely to be just as litigious as the living Prince was, and I don’t want a bunch of busted links and missing pictures littering this thing. Plus, think of it like a paper magazine that you can’t click.