Who Is Spooky Electric, the Disturbing “Entity” That Convinced Prince To Withdraw His Black Album?

In December 1987, half a million copies of Prince’s “Black Album” were sitting on warehouse pallets, ready for national distribution to nightclubs all over the United States, when the musician frantically called his production company to beg them not to deliver the records. Prince argued that the album was evil and asked his team to destroy every copy. (Those that survived became some of the most popular bootlegged albums in musical history.) 

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To the production company, they were following orders from Prince himself. To Prince, he was following the orders of Spooky Electric.

Prince Halted His “Black Album” Release With One Week To Spare

In terms of personal epiphanies, Prince’s was certainly cutting it close. His 1987 “Black Album,” which earned its official nickname for its nearly all-black cover, á la the Beatles’ eponymous “White Album,” had a release date of December 7, 1987. Prince pulled the plug one week earlier after experiencing what he would later describe as “Blue Tuesday.” The musician was visiting a nightclub to test some of his new album’s tracks with the crowd when he began experiencing adverse emotional and psychological reactions to a bad MDMA trip. A passing comment from a poet he met that night, Ingrid Chavez, sealed the deal for Prince’s descent into turmoil: “If you smiled, you’d be a nice person,” per The Quietus.

Prince reportedly looked at his “Black Album” and, seeing his reflection in the glossy sheen, realized he didn’t want to release the record anymore. He called producer Susan Rogers and told her the album was “evil” and that they had to scrap it. The decision undoubtedly baffled his record label, Warner Bros. But the general public was largely unaware thanks to Prince’s decision to limit commercial promotion for the “Black Album,” opting to send it directly to nightclubs across the U.S. instead. The entire debacle would have been an eyebrow-raising event in a prominent artist like Prince’s career.

Prince’s subsequent explanations shed some light on his reasoning behind killing the album, but it shed a few more shadows, too.

Why The Musician Pulled The Album Release

Prince would later say of his decision to pull his “Black Album,” “I was very angry a lot of the time back then. That was reflected in that album. I suddenly realized that we can die at any moment. And we’d be judged by the last thing we left behind. I didn’t want that angry, bitter thing to be the last thing. I learned from that album. But I don’t want to go back.” The musician even went so far as to include a subliminal message hidden inside the music video for the lead single from his 1988 release, Lovesexy, “Alphabet St.,” which read, “Don’t buy The Black Album. I’m sorry.”

Adding to the “Black Album” lore’s almost unsettling narrative is that Prince later blamed the record’s “evil” energy on a character he called Spooky Electric. Many believed Spooky Electric to be the counterpart to Prince’s alter ego, Camille, which he created by shifting the pitch of his voice on his originally unreleased album from 1987, Camille. Whereas Camille was funky and flirtatious, Spooky Electric was violent and jealous.

Warner Bros. Records eventually released Prince’s The Black Album on November 22, 1994, but they pulled the album again just under two months later on January 27, 1995, leaving only the lingering effects of Spooky Electric’s ominous energy (and some very pricey physical copies) behind.

Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns