Click above to hear an audio version of this review, with musical selections. Audio produced by Derrick Stevens.

In the fall of 1988, I went into a tiny record store in New London, Connecticut and illegally purchased a new Prince record, one I'd never seen before. It was The Black Album, a bootleg that came to be one of the most infamous of Prince's career.

Scheduled for release just eight months after Sign o' the Times appeared, The Black Album was said to be Prince's reaction to criticism from the Black community that his music had become too pop, too soft. It might be the darkest, meanest, and most consistently funky album of his entire career.

Just days before The Black Album was to hit the shelves in December of 1987, Prince had a change of heart. He recalled all copies and abandoned the project. While roughly 500,000 commercial copies of the CD that were waiting to be shipped out to record stores were destroyed on Prince's command, about 100 promo CDs had already gone out to critics and DJs, and it was from these copies that one of the most widely bootlegged albums in rock history would be created.

The myth grew until finally, in 1994, Prince and Warner Bros. decided to put it out to help fulfill his recording contract — although it would then go out of print again a few weeks later, probably never to return. It's one of the great mysteries of Prince's career. It brought the funk out in Prince, but the darkness in the music and the story behind the album seem to have influenced his career and his life ever since.