Philadelphia Weekly

I think it was in the movie Chinatown that someone uttered the line, "Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all become respectable if they last long enough." The same could be said for pop stars whom mainstream folk once thought were just too nasty and freaky for the room. Like Prince.

It tickles the hell out of me that Prince Rogers Nelson--who will turn 50 next year--has now become just as much of a respectable, family-friendly entertainer as Andy Williams. I mean, he played a halftime show at the Super Bowl (albeit with a very phallic performance of "Purple Rain" on his guitar).

The man recently did a stint in Vegas doing weekend gigs. Vegas! Didja ever think you'd see His Royal Badness play Vegas like he's Wayne friggin' Newton or somebody? Too fuckin' rich!

It seems almost apropos that all this newfound reputability is happening on the 20th anniversary of his last R-rated stand The Black Album, the controversial follow-up to his acclaimed two-disc masterpiece Sign 'O' the Times. A vinyl-only, eight-song funk free-for-all, it was supposed to be Prince's big fuck-you to those who thought the Minneapolis kid was going too soft after the commercial success of Purple Rain.

But right when everyone was ready to hear what the Purple One had to say to his haters, Prince decided to pull the album. Several theories surfaced as to why Black wasn't released: Prince had a "crisis of conscience" over the album's profane, violent and sexual content; Warner Bros. also thought it was unreleaseable; Prince thought, in retrospect, the album sucked; or my favorite, Prince went through an old-school, Sly Stone-style, drug-induced, devil-hallucinating haze while making it.

Whatever theory you prefer, Black immediately became a must-have bootleg after it didn't make its November 1987 release. With badly dubbed copies circulating all over the place, dedicated Prince fans soon got a taste of the darkness that was lurking inside that petite body of his ... almost. What they got were a bunch of naughty, wacky songs you could dance to.

With the exception of the out-of-place ballad "When 2 R in Love" (which would show up on his following album Lovesexy), Black does have Prince reacquainting himself with his funky side. "Le Grind," "2 Nigs United 4 West Compton" and the legendary Cindy Crawford love letter "Cindy C." is full of Prince's patented synthesizer-heavy big-band sound, while the tawdry combo of "Superfunkycalifragisexy" and "Rockhard in a Funky Place" walks that fine line between being funky and naughty.

Black features Prince at his crankiest. The album's most controversial track "Bob George" has Prince electronically altering his voice to sound like a shit-talking, gun-toting thug, cursing out his girl for creeping on him with a rock star manager character. While "Bob" may have been too over-the-top for 1987, it sounds funny as hell now.

Then there's "Dead on It," in which he calls out rappers for being "silly," "tone-deaf" and letting us down. While this may have sounded back then like Prince being a purist, bitching about rap not being a real musical art form, there's something eerily prophetic about the song. It's as though Prince foresaw the mediocrity that would overtake rap, almost warning us of the whack MCs who'd take over the hip-hop game and turn it into the money/cash/hos racket it is now.

Just like Prince himself, Black today hardly seems like the too-hot-to-handle entity (which Warner Bros. eventually, briefly released in November 1994) it was when it surfaced all those years ago.

Hey, times change; Prince is a Jehovah's Witness, after all. And the young audience who used to rock out and get all sweaty--either horizontally or vertically--to the man's music have gotten older too, are probably railing against the performers their kids listen to now. ("Turn off that goddamn Hannah Montana! It's the devil's music!")

I guess we'll always have the memories. The memories of the Prince that used to scare the hell out of people. The Prince who used to show up onstage in ass-less pants or a trench coat and a pair of black drawers. A Prince who sang about fucking his sister. Those were the days.