{"id":1922,"date":"2017-01-05T18:16:03","date_gmt":"2017-01-05T23:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/?p=1922"},"modified":"2017-01-23T09:49:44","modified_gmt":"2017-01-23T14:49:44","slug":"prince-1-the-black-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/prince-1-the-black-album\/","title":{"rendered":"Prince #1: The Black Album"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1922\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fprince-1-the-black-album%2F&amp;text=Prince%20%231%3A%20The%20Black%20Album&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fprince-1-the-black-album%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><div id=\"fb_share_1\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 10px;\"><a name=\"fb_share\" type=\"box_count\" share_url=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/prince-1-the-black-album\/\" href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php\">Share<\/a><\/div><div><script src=\"http:\/\/static.ak.fbcdn.net\/connect.php\/js\/FB.Share\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/div><p>So here&#8217;s what happened:\u00a0Prince 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&#8217;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&#8217;t want you checking out the first five albums if you know I&#8217;m doing them in order and you don&#8217;t care about anything after\u00a0<em>1999<\/em>. I know this because it&#8217;s what I do when I know someone&#8217;s working in order.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s go meet Mr. Prince, shall we?<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>The Black Album<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>The Black Album<\/em> is one of my favorite Prince albums, and one of my favorite albums, period. It&#8217;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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>1999<\/em> (double album, plus tour)<\/li>\n<li>Vanity 6 (all tracks written, performed, and produced by Prince)<\/li>\n<li>The Time (first three short albums: tracks\u00a0written, produced, and mostly performed by Prince)<\/li>\n<li>The Family (tracks written, performed, and produced by Prince)<\/li>\n<li>Apollonia 6 (you get the idea)<\/li>\n<li><em>Purple Rain<\/em> the album<\/li>\n<li><em>Purple Rain<\/em> the movie<\/li>\n<li><em>Purple Rain<\/em> the tour<\/li>\n<li><em>Around the World In A Day<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Under The Cherry Moon <\/em>the movie, directed by Prince<\/li>\n<li><em>Parade <\/em>(album plus world tour)<\/li>\n<li>the shelved\u00a0<em>Dream Factory<\/em> project<\/li>\n<li>the shelved\u00a0<em>Crystal Ball<\/em> triple album<\/li>\n<li><em>Sign O&#8217; The Times<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Sign O&#8217;The Times <\/em>the movie, directed by Prince<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>After all that, it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>But <em>The Black Album<\/em> isn&#8217;t exactly a weekend lark. Yes, it&#8217;s starker and more demo-like than anything he&#8217;d done since <em>Dirty Mind<\/em>. But it&#8217;s also where I&#8217;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 &#8220;Le Grind,&#8221; following in the path cleared by the extended version of &#8220;Let&#8217;s Work.&#8221; With &#8220;Bob George,&#8221; you have Prince the voice-and-skit man (see also the <em>Crystal Ball<\/em> tracks &#8220;Movie Star&#8221; and &#8220;Cloreen Bacon Skin), creating a hilarious (and alarming) picture of a jealous, low-rent lover. &#8220;Superfunkycalifragisexy&#8221; is a dance-based pop song that, like all the best Prince songs, sounds so\u00a0effortless you don&#8217;t notice how goddamn weird it is. (There are mentions of drinking blood, tying people up, and buckets filled up with &#8220;squirrel meat,&#8221; which was allegedly Prince&#8217;s code name for Ecstasy.)<\/p>\n<p>Prince&#8217;s &#8217;90s output would be filled with funk jams, all of them presaged by &#8220;2 Nigs United 4 West Compton.&#8221; You even have the insanely catchy &#8220;Cindy C.,&#8221; both an undisguised plea for Cindy Crawford to sleep with Prince, and a rueful acknowledgement that this will never happen. Then there&#8217;s &#8220;When 2 R In Love,&#8221; maybe the most beautiful ballad Prince wrote, and the only song to survive the shelving of <em>The Black Album:<\/em>\u00a0it would resurface on Prince&#8217;s corrective release, 1988&#8217;s <em>Lovesexy<\/em>, where it&#8217;s arguably a better fit than it is here, sandwiched between &#8220;Bob George&#8221; and &#8220;Dead On It,&#8221; in which Prince doesn&#8217;t so much piss on rap &#8212; the common reading of the track &#8212; as pat it condescendingly on its head.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Black Album<\/em> features backup singers, horns, and some drumming by Sheila E.,\u00a0but it&#8217;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, <em>The Black Album<\/em>\u00a0still feels like something he <em>had<\/em> to do. And that&#8217;s what I so love about it: it&#8217;s messy, it&#8217;s childish, and it&#8217;s all him, even more nakedly on display than the <em>Lovesexy<\/em> cover.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Stray Thoughts:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One of the best surprises about my near-year with Prince has been his sense of humor. Much was made of the &#8220;looser&#8221; Prince of the post-90s era &#8212; the Dave Chappelle cover art, the Leno appearance &#8212;\u00a0but he was <em>always<\/em> funny. He kept this side of himself mostly relegated to his B-sides and outtakes &#8212; hence a lot of it does show up on <em>Crystal Ball<\/em> &#8212; but there&#8217;s plenty on display here on <em>The Black Album<\/em>. Besides the aforementioned &#8220;Bob George&#8221; &#8212; essentially a comic (and occasionally horrifying) monologue by Prince, using a disguised voice &#8212; witness the moment on &#8220;Le Grind&#8221; where backup singer Boni Boyer starts an incredible vocal run and Prince cuts her off with &#8220;Not yet, Boni.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;When 2 R In Love&#8221; is actually Prince&#8217;s second most beautiful ballad. The title is held by &#8220;The Breakdown,&#8221; from 2014&#8217;s <em>Art Official Age<\/em>, which is easily the most revealing song Prince ever wrote, and one of those songs that&#8217;s impossible to divorce from the context of what would come later.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;For someone who can&#8217;t <em>stand<\/em> them TV dinners, you sure eat enough of them motherfuckers.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Note: I&#8217;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&#8217;t want a bunch of busted links and missing pictures littering this thing. Plus, think of it like a paper magazine that you can&#8217;t click.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton1922\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fprince-1-the-black-album%2F&amp;text=Prince%20%231%3A%20The%20Black%20Album&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fprince-1-the-black-album%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><p>TweetShareSo here&#8217;s what happened:\u00a0Prince 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&#8217;ve managed to get my hands on every one of the 39 studio albums Prince released, plus the New Power Generation group [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prince"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1922"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1946,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1922\/revisions\/1946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}