[atari 2600]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bla...rince_album%29

Just before the Black Album was released to the market, Prince recalled all copies and abandoned the entire project, leaving roughly 100 European promotional copies in circulation, copies that would be widely bootlegged in the coming years. Rumors and hearsay abound as to why the release was derailed:

• A bad trip experienced by the artist while using the drug Ecstasy convinced him that the album was evil or represented an ominous portent, although technically speaking this is misleading as Ecstasy is not hallucinogenic.
• Prince experienced a crisis of conscience and marketing identity over the eroticism/violence of its lyrics.
• Warner Bros. Records, his record label, reached the same conclusion.
• Prince may have simply decided that the album was of inferior quality and not a wise release.

However in 2001, his long time keyboard player Dr. Fink told then-internet radio host Ernest L Sewell, IV, of The Ernest Experience Radio Show, that Prince said he saw the devil. He was paranoid due to drugs, and instead of the popular story of him seeing God, he in fact had thought he saw Satan. He told his bodyguard Gilbert Davison this, and Gilbert in turn related it to Fink and possibly other band members. It was this hallucination that had Prince running scared and decided to ditch releasing the album. He even asked for the cassettes of the album back from the band members that are routinely given to them to learn the songs by ear. Fink had later expressed discontent in that he wished he hadn't given it back, or at least made a copy of it for his own personal use.

Almost immediately after the decision to shelve it, The Black Album emerged on the streets in bootleg form, arguably becoming popular music's most legendary bootleg, after The Basement Tapes. Several celebrities, including U2's frontmen The Edge and Bono, cited it as one of their favorite albums of 1988 (Rolling Stone magazine celebrity poll). By the time it was released by Warner Bros. legitimately in 1994 (again, containing only a track listing and catalogue number—45793—printed onto the disc itself and only legal copy appearing on the spine), almost every dedicated Prince fan already owned an illegal copy. It was released in a strictly limited edition and deleted by Warner Bros. the following January. It is believed that this release was legitimized so that Prince could get out of his new 7-album contract with the label, which he had signed the previous year and regretted instantly, because he wanted ownership of his recordings, a rarity in the music industry. Soon before the release of The Black Album, Prince started to appear with the word “slave” written on his face and changed his legal name to the unpronouncable symbol

 

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Original copies of The Black Album sell for up to $5,000.00 or more. The music video for the Lovesexy single "Alphabet St." contains a hidden message reading "Please don't buy The Black Album. I'm sorry."