The Black Album (1987)
Bob George is a lot of things. A cartoonish gangster daydream. A hilarious satire on hip-hop misogyny. A diss track on both his previous manager Bob Cavallo, and antagonistic critic Nelson George. But one thing I didn’t peg it as was a club banger. Yet when I heard it at a clubnight a few months ago it detonated the dancefloor. The night in question was called Purple Rave and featured DJs spinning nothing but Prince records so it shouldn’t have been too unexpected, but hearing Prince’s thug noir comedy booming out of a sound system in an East London warehouse made my jaw drop. I fell in love with Bob George all over again. This was its intended setting, having been recorded to play at Sheila E’s birthday party. Feeling its sparse funk hammer at my ribcage must have been how fans at the Lovesexy tour felt, where it was last performed live as the first part of a two-part morality play with Anna Stasia. In those performances Prince’s character – decked out in rhinestone sunglasses – would answer the phone as Camille, but on the album it’s not apparent who the protagonist is and sounds more like Prince resurrecting El Virus from Brown Mark’s Bang Bang video. Whoever he is, he’s the zenith of Prince’s beautiful dark twisted comedy and deserves an album of his own. Fun fact: the sped-up Charlie Brown voice you hear on the other end of the line, when slowed down repeatedly says “yes operator, which city please?”