Welcome to MusicDayz

The world's largest online archive of date-sorted music facts, bringing day-by-day facts instantly to your fingertips.
Find out what happened on your or your friends' Birthday, Wedding Day, Anniversary or just discover fun facts in musical areas that particularly interest you.
Please take a look around.

Fact #77082

When:

Short story:

Prince decides to cancel release of his hotly-anticipated Black Album, just one week before its scheduled release date.

Full article:

Prince’s much-bootlegged Black Album first reared its funky head on the Warner Brothers release schedule towards the end of 1987 under a compellingly curious artist heading - Somebody. His pride having been piqued by recent criticisms of his work, Prince allegedly devised a plan to let his next release slip incognito to clubs where it would, he hoped, receive a fabulous reception, at which point all would be revealed, and the critics would be shamed. Inevitably, word got out long before the album could, and speculation about its content was high.

Prince’s engineer, Susan Rogers, has said, “The Black Album came during a break from Sign "O" The Times sessions... Sheila's birthday (drummer Shiela E) was coming up, and Prince wanted to have a big party for her in LA, and he wanted to record some mindless party songs for her. The sessions for Sign had been so intense, and he just wanted to lay down some mindless jams. Not too much thought went into them. He just recorded the tracks, walked over to Bernie Grundman's to master an acetate for the DJ to play that night, and that was it.”

When, on 1 December, it was announced that he had decided to cancel the Black Album, just one week before release, the rumour mill cranked into overgrind. Prince felt that Warners was favouring Madonna over him, or Warners felt it was releasing too much Prince too fast or, best of all, it was just too filthy to release.

When he could be prevailed upon to discuss it, Prince slyly obscured the issue, muttering darkly about how a “dark night of the soul”, (not to mention a vision of the letters G-O-D hovering over a field) made him realise that the album had been a work of malice and revenge, therefore not worthy of release. In the sleeve notes to the following year’s tour, he blamed it on his alter-ego Camille, writing that he had “allowed the dark side of him 2 create something evil.” Don’t you hate it when that happens?

A more mundane, but infinitely more likely, explanation comes from Susan Rogers, who engineered the Sign ‘O’ The Times sessions, during which the Black Album had been recorded. “Sheila's birthday (drummer Shiela E) was coming up, and Prince wanted to have a big party for her in LA, and he wanted to record some mindless party songs for her. The sessions for Sign had been so intense, and he just wanted to lay down some frantic jams. Not too much thought went into them. He just recorded the tracks, walked over to Bernie Grundman's to master an acetate for the DJ to play that night, and that was it.”

In other words, having subsequently been talked into releasing it, His Miniscule Purpleness finally realised that, actually, it wasn’t quite up to scratch, and changed his mind.

Johnny Black