In the wee hours of December 1, 1987, Prince had a spiritual reawakening. He later claimed he saw God, though he may have been tripping balls on ecstasy. And yes, there was a woman involved, but it’s not what you think. This was a night of intense soul-searching and deep conversation, and somewhere along the way, Prince decided he couldn’t possibly release the dark and depraved album he was planning to drop in seven days.
So in true Prince fashion, he called his bosses at Warner Bros. asked them to destroy all 500,000 copies of what would become known as The Black Album. The label complied, just like it had when Prince asked them months earlier to approve an album with no title or cover art—only a solid black sleeve with a catalog number printed in peach on the spine.
Into the landfill the record went, gone but not forgotten. More than 30 years later, the story of The Black Album remains one of the weirdest and most enduring mysteries of Prince’s career.
Originally titled The Funk Bible, a phrase that can still be heard on the opening track, “Le Grind,” The Black Album was supposed to be the follow-up to Prince’s 1987 masterpiece Sign O’ the Times. Far less ambitious than its predecessor, The Black Album was a grab bag of freaky funk tunes assembled with no rhyme or reason. Many fans and critics believe it was Prince’s attempt to reconnect with his black audience after years of mainstream pop hits. Prince himself seemed to confirm that theory in the fantastical poem he wrote for the 1988 Lovesexy Tour program.
The poem is the closest Prince ever came to explaining his rationale for scrapping The Black Album. Naturally, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Referring to himself as “Camille”—the mischievous, androgynous character he’d portray on record by pitching up his vocals—Prince tells the tale of how he’d “set out to silence his critics.” Dig, if you will, this parable:
“No longer daring,” his enemies laughed.
“No longer glam, his funk is half-assed…
one leg is much shorter
than the other one is weak.
His strokes are tepid,
his colors are meek.”
So Camille found a new color.
The color black: strongest hue of them all.
The poem goes on to say that in recording The Black Album, Prince/Camille had been corrupted by a wicked entity called “Spooky Electric” and “allowed the dark side of him 2 create something evil.” Prince references the dastardly Spooky Electric on “I No” and “Positivity,” the opening and closing tracks on 1988’s Lovesexy, the vibrant and uplifting album he promptly recorded after pulling the plug on The Black Album.
The poem also mentions “Blue Tuesday,” Prince’s term for December 1, 1987, though it only deepens the mystery of what happened that fateful day Prince begged Warner Bros. to bulldoze half a million records. Luckily, through the accounts of various Prince associates, as well as the man himself, we have some idea what went down that winter night in Minneapolis. As detailed in the book Prince: Behind the Music and the Masks, Prince had gone to the local club Rupert’s the preceding evening to test some of his new music. While the DJs spun his tunes, Prince mingled with the crowd and met a fascinating young poet and songwriter by the name of Ingrid Chavez.
Chavez would later help to inspire Lovesexy, earning the title of “Spirit Child” in the liner notes, but on this particular evening, she may have played the role of mind expander. According to legend, Prince took a hit of ecstasy, which in turn led to him to see the light about The Black Album. Another oft-repeated version of the story posted on the Prince.org messageboard by a super-fan called “NightGod” suggests it was dancer Cat Glover who supplied the MDMA. It gets better: Cat apparently got the pills from Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Regardless of who popped what and whose stash it came from, we know Prince eventually phoned his longtime engineer Susan Rogers and invited her to come hang with him and Chavez at Paisley Park. Rogers arrived to find a dark room lit by red candles, and after Chavez asked her, “Are you looking for Prince,” the Purple One seemed to materialize out of thin air. He asked Rogers if she still loved him, and she said she did. He asked her to stay, and she said no—something wasn’t right. “I’m certain he was high,” Rogers said, according to the book Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks. “His pupils were really dilated. He looked like he was tripping.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone shortly after Prince’s death, Chavez gave a drug-free account of the notorious evening. “I remember he left me alone in a room for quite some time,” Chavez said. “I had a notebook on me, so I did some writing. Later, I heard accounts of that evening that he’d gotten on the phone with producers and said, ‘I’ve met an angel,’ and stopped work on The Black Album.”
Prince himself spoke to Rolling Stone about the incident in 1990, remembering that “a lot of things happened all in a few hours.” He claimed he saw the word “God,” though not in any conventional sense. “When I talk about God, I don’t mean some dude in a cape and a beard coming down to Earth,” Prince said. “To me, he’s in everything if you look at it that way.”
He added that he was “very angry a lot of the time back then, and that was reflected in that album.” Believing “we could die at any moment”—an idea he’d famously expressed on his song “1999”—Prince suddenly feared leaving behind the “angry, bitter” Black Album as his final statement to the world.
Even in those pre-Internet days, it wasn’t really up to Prince whether people heard the music. Because DJ promos had already been mailed out prior to Prince cancelling the release, bootleg copies of The Black Album began fetching thousands of dollars. In 2016, a vinyl DJ promo went for $15,000 on Discogs, setting a new record for the online music marketplace. Not all of the copies floating around today are bootlegs, though. Prince finally allowed Warner Bros. to issue the album in 1994, but it was only available for two months, and it’s been out of print ever since. A press release suggested Prince remained “spiritually against” the 1994 release.
All that back-story tends to overshadow the music itself—especially since the album isn’t available on streaming services, and a lot of casual Prince fans have probably never heard it. Is The Black Album really as sick and twisted as Prince believed? Not really, though the lyrics do touch on murder, S&M, masturbation, and “squirrel meat,” which may be code for ecstasy.
And then there’s “Cindy C.,” six minutes of Prince trying to get in Cindy Crawford’s pants while Sheila E talks junk from the sidelines. Here’s Prince driving hard to the hoop:
Where’d you get that beauty mark?
Maybe you and I should be undressing
Don’t all girls look the same? They don’t?
Oh, what a shame
Cindy, Cindy. I’ll pay the usual fee What’s the matter, don’t you like me?
The aggressive come-ons seemingly left Cindy more amused than skeeved out. Following Prince’s death, the supermodel spoke to W about the time she met Prince at a dance club in NYC. “Now I know what was going through his mind,” Crawford says, adding that she still has her copy of The Black Album.
It’s a shame Cindy didn’t share her thoughts on “Bob George,” the funniest, creepiest, full-on craziest song on The Black Album. “Bob George” is something only Prince could’ve recorded, though he renders himself totally unrecognizable on the track. Using a pitched-down vocal effect similar to the one Kendrick Lamar often employs, Prince rants in character over a bare-bones LinnDrum beat. He plays a crazed old dude whose lady is cheating on him with a rock manager named Bob George. The name may have been inspired by Prince’s own manager Bob Cavallo and journalist Nelson George, who’d been critical of Prince around that time. That part makes sense—little else about the song does.
“Bob George” opens with Prince’s narrator calling his girlfriend a freeloader for eating up all his TV dinners. He then turns his venom to Bob and his showbiz clients, one of whom—get this—is Prince, “that skinny motherfucker with the high voice.” The meta joke barely has time to register before the narrator pulls a gun and orders the woman to put on his favorite wig, “the reddish brown one.” He later shoots her dead, scares away the cops (also played by Prince), and makes a threatening call to Bob: “I’ll kick your ass… twice!”
If Prince really wanted to win back the black community, it’s odd that he included “Dead On It,” a hip-hop diss track aimed at hip-hop itself. Atop a boilerplate ’80s rap beat, Prince complains about hearing a “silly rapper talking silly shit” on his radio. Rappers, he says, tend to be “tone deaf,” a common criticism in the days before hip-hop was the world’s predominant form of pop music. In Prince’s defense, the song’s key line, “The only good rapper is one that’s dead… on it” may be an indictment of lousy rappers, not all rappers. After all, Prince gives Cat an entire rap verse on “Cindy C.,” though he reportedly wasn’t too pleased when he found out she’d lifted the bars straight from JM Silk’s house fave “Music Is the Key.”
The only Black Album song to resurface on Lovesexy was “When 2 R In Love,” the filthiest slow jam you’d ever consider for the first dance at your wedding. The reason its explicit lyrics work on Lovesexy is that the song celebrates unbridled lust in the context of monogamy. This isn’t some weirdo tying you to a chair and trying to scare you by making funny faces, like in “Superfunkycalifragisexy.” This guy in “When 2 R In Love” wants to “kiss with one synonymous notion,” one of the sweetest phrases in the Prince canon.
In the end, the whole Black Album debacle worked out pretty well for everyone involved—except maybe Warner Bros. Prince got to ease his troubled conscience by withholding the project, and in doing so, he elevated a mid-tier album to mythic status. And because he created a situation where The Black Album never really reached a large audience, he may have lessened the impact of “Dead On It,” a song that puts him squarely on the wrong side of history where hip-hop is concerned. Not that many rappers and rap fans who know “Dead On It” hold it against him. Prince was a constantly evolving creature who eventually changed with the times and tried his hand at rapping on songs like “Sexy MF,” “My Name Is Prince,” and “P Control.” When he died, hip-hop mourned hard.
The public, meanwhile, got a better album in the form of Lovesexy, the title of which Prince explained in that 1988 poem: “Love, Life, Lovesexy—the feeling u get when u fall in love, not with a girl or boy but with the heavens above.” Whatever touched Prince’s heart that evening in December 1987 gave him a sense peace he wanted to share with everyone.
