Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very rare, very funky, very un-Princelike!!, 8 Dec 2001
After the fiasco of this album's original release and sudden, unexplained withdrawal from the sales lists, we are lucky to have it now. Rarest original copies sell at auctions for figures in excess of £80!
In typical self-indulgent style, Prince begins the first song with the words 'This is Prince,
cool of cools'! All songs are highly funky, and highlights include 'When 2R In Love'(also on the Lovesexy album), and 'Le Grind'. Musically, it is similar to Prince's other albums of the same era, but lyrically, it is worlds apart. The explicit lyrics of songs like 'Bob George' may shock first time Prince listeners, who think of him of as a high-voiced, lovesexy-d hippy. You should buy this album if you love Prince, and if you don't, well, what are you doing here?!
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9 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The legendary Black Album from 1988., 10 Sep 2003
This was eventually officially released in 1994, as part of Prince's contractual obligations with Warners- in the time from its pulled release in 1988 to its limited official release, it had gained mythic qualities. As an album its clearly nowhere close to the previous year's peak Sign'O'the Times- more of a funk-jam and extension on Prince's 'Camille'-persona. The album is less eclectic than Sign, but a lot better than the patchy Lovesexy (1988) which shared the gorgeous (if deranged) ballad When 2 R in Love. The Lovesexy tour (& the video released of it) has Prince performing several songs from this- which is odd when he had pulled it for being too dark! Superfunkycalifragisexy is a darker take on the sound of Dirty Mind, possibly the closest release to this (& what is that line about "buckets of squirrelmeat"??????)- while other dark-sexed-funk tracks like Le Grind (a dirtier Housequake) and the supermodel ode Cindy C. make this a great party album for those who like to grind! This is a refinement of Funkadelic and Sly from the 70s. Hip-hop inflections that would surface on later tracks like SexyMF, Gett Off & My Name is Prince appear here- though previous tracks like I-Bitch, Feel U Up & Head had been leading to this. Dead On It is probably the least interesting track here, though it has some divine funked out guitar; Bob George however is just right. Bob George remains one of Prince's finest tracks- a demented distortion of vocals that plays with the Prince-persona ("That skinny MF...") and has more in common with Butthole Surfers'Locust Abortion Technician than Wendy&Lisa! Prince depicts odd African-American attitudes regarding masculinity and the gangsta-life...it IS quite dark in terms of theme. A definite trip and one of Prince's undoubted works of genius. 2 Nigs United 4 Compton is a seven-minute funked out jam that opens like Housequake- the thought of a Prince funk-jam might not strike many as fun (how many have been inflected since?) bu this is a great one. & takes us to the greatest song here, Rockhard in a Funky Place, which advances on Shockadelica & Hot Thing and ranks up there with Prince's best funk-pop songs, e.g. Dirty Mind, Jack U Off, Head, Uptown etc. Great jazz-inflections of Bliss&Leeds recall the epic It's Gonna B a Beautiful Night & the 1988 live take on Escape/Erotic City that opened the Lovesexy Tour. The Black Album may not be beyond five stars, like Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain & Sign'O'The Times, but it's still a great album that sits easily next to Controversy, Around the World in a Day & Parade and another string to Prince's eclectic bow. After this he would become very patchy- each release litterred with a few great songs (Alphabet St, The Future, Sexy MF, Gold) but less satisfying. The Black Album marks the end of the golden Prince period heralded in by 1980's Dirty Mind, a kind of circular journey. It's well worth tracking down and remains for me one of the great messy funked out party classics of all time- not quite as wonderful as Superfly or There's a Riot Goin' On- but getting there. Almost as great as its reputation and a reminder of just what an alien pop genius Prince once was...
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not quite the great lost Prince album I'd hoped for..., 1 Aug 2008
Rating: 5.5/10
Best tracks: "Bob George", "When 2 R in Love", "Dead On It"
The mystique and the rumours surrounding Prince's notorious, sex-drenched and filthily funky Black Album were, like many examples of hype, more exciting than the music itself; destined to be Prince's official follow-up to Sign O' the Times and his first full-on foray into pure, unadulterated funk music, it was shelved at the last minute, with only a few copies making it to the outside world. Why? Did Prince really experience an ecstasy-induced vision that opened his eyes to the `wicked' nature of the album's content, in turn influencing the overtly religious content of the Lovesexy album? Or did he pull it because he thought it was crap? What was strange about the Black Album was it wasn't a case of recording the music and then storing it away safely, far away from the public's knowledge; with this album, the world came SO close to hearing it back in 1987. The Black Album was a highly anticipated release, and the mere days before it was due to come out, it was taken off the shelves. Almost immediately, the album became something of a Holy Grail for fans, and it became a frequently bootlegged album as a result. Meanwhile, Prince released Lovesexy the following year, with its affirmative, spiritual rejection of The Black Album's sleazy strut, though both albums share a song, the densely layered ballad "When 2 R in Love". By the time The Black Album finally got an official release for a limited period in 1994, Prince was just another funk-soul star and a shadow of the creative genius he used to be and the contents of this lost album didn't even sound very special, despite the solid quality of the songs. All in all, this is a fine album, but if it had been released as normal back in 1987, I wonder if it would have caused any kind of fuss at all.
The problem for me is that The Black Album is Prince's most ordinary record for who knows how long, and appears to be his manifesto for most of what he would create over the next twenty years; it really is just straight-up funk-music with the odd offbeat Prince embellishment. Now there`s nothing wrong with that, but such ordinariness is the reason I`m not going to love this as much as his preceding five albums; it can be argued that The Black Album is the point where Prince`s golden touch started to slip away. Prince was apparently trying to get back to basics on this album, but come on, when does that ever work? No one`s favourite Beatles album is "Let it Be", is it? Is it? Well, I don't know anybody who says it is. The more imagination and weirdness the better. For me, Prince was never just about funk; I loved the fact that he was impossible to pin down. What the hell was he? Pop, funk, rock, R&B, jazz, metal, ambient....he was everything. Here, he's just playing straight-up funk, and it makes for an irony that the album of his that's been given the most mysterious aura treatment actually contains his least mysterious and interesting music of all the eighties. Excepting the Batman soundtrack of course.
The cocky and confident "Le Grind" struts and steams (and at one point, pants) its way well enough though it lacks the kind of polymorphous, fascinating, playful magic of Prince`s best work. It's decent, but it does go on; it speaks volumes that the first three songs on Parade, when put together, don't even exceed the length of this track and are about 30,000 % more inventive, rewarding, funky and imaginative. The similarly overlong "Cindy C", written about model Cindy Crawford, is nevertheless quite fun on the chorus, especially in the way the vocals and the rhythms bounce off each other. The hip-hop-infused, tongue-in-cheek (?) rant about rappers that is "Dead On It" is pretty decent with a delicious funk-hook over a distinctly Run D-M-C-eqsue backing track, while "When 2 R in Love" sticks out by a mile; it's the only ballad for one thing, and I suppose it feels weird it being on here as it's also on Lovesexy. It's a sweetly playful, pretty bit of trademark filthy Prince boudoir-soul with some nice vocals. The best thing here, funnily enough, is the strangest - "Bob George" is a bizarrely vocalised (Prince with his voice s-l-o-w-e-d down) rant about a man wishing to exact revenge on the record producer who's been sleeping with his wife - it's actually quite a disturbing song in places, though the self-referential line about one of the record manager's clients being "that skinny mother****** with the high voice" is the album's funniest moment, and the album's easily got the weirdest, richest groove. This song more than anything else here has the air of the forbidden and controversial that I imagine many thought the whole album would be full of, but for better or worse, it wasn't to be.
The last three tracks don`t leave much of an impression - "Superfunkycalifragisexy" goes through the motions and is wholly unmemorable, the jazzy instrumental "2 Nigs United 4 West Compton" is simply Prince and his mates jamming in the studio for around seven long minutes and then most likely getting on with their lives and doing something much more interesting afterwards. The uninteresting groove of "Rockhard in a Funky Place" tails off the album and I'm thinking of whatever the reasons were for Prince had for shelving the majority of these songs, he was a smart cookie either way; this album would have been a huge disappointment after so many great albums, and even though in retrospect his classic era ended with Sign O the Times, at least the very good Lovesexy softens the blow before the sad decline.
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