Prince unveils lost masterpiece

Prince unveils lost masterpiece

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.