The Prince song that started a wave of artistic censorship
Prince was so filthy that apparently a plumber once wrote I wish my wife was this dirty with their index finger on his back. The guitar God lothario strangely coupled sensual eroticism with spiritualism in a style akin to the loving Al Green who came before him. He then wove these sordid tales seamlessly into radio-friendly pop provided you were lyrically hard of hearing, so to speak.
However, there were some folks who thought that his sexy stylings were a little too full on, and they rallied against it. In 1985, one of his raunchiest hits and a single incident that it spawned would change the music industry forever. Purple Rain is a record that tells a liberated narrative, but one chapter of the tale drew the attention of censors.
The track, ‘Darling Nikki’, portrays Prince’s encounter with a nymphomaniac who he finds “in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine” before she takes him back to her “castle”, complete a cornucopia of sexual devices that change the little maestro for life. In the morning, this dominatrix is no longer by his side, but she sure did teach him how to “grind”. Then, in trademark Prince fashion, he ends the track with a biblical analogy, singing: “I’m fine because I know that the Lord is coming soon, coming, coming soon.”
Now, that’s certainly a song with some overt adult overtones. Thus, when a mother (Tipper Gore, the wife of Al Gore) found her 11-year-old daughter singing along to it, she set about stopping it from reaching young ears thereafter. The mother in question was the founder of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). The PMRC then proceeded to collate tunes that they deemed unsuitable for minors and presented them to the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver were among the artists who spoke out against the censorship of music amid the wave of discussion that followed. However, the PMRC demanded that a system must be put in place for parents to decipher what music was deemed suitable. Thus, the RIAA came up with a route around censoring the music itself and came up with the explicit content warning sticker on albums. And Gore’s children, as expected, are now well-adjusted adults with Prince’s perversions clearly not affecting them too much.
‘Darling Nikki’ is a mark of Prince’s uncompromising approach as an artist. When a commercially damaging Parental Advisory label was slapped on the record, he refused to yield on his tale of a “sex fiend”. He felt safe in the knowledge that he was not living a life of sin, and any messages he extolled wouldn’t be harmful if sense and sensibility were applied.
The lude recital of ‘Darling Nikki’ is a daring one and it still gives the song a bristling edge even if his liberated approach to sexual lyricism is now widespread. In truth, Prince was a daring artist and the sparse instrumentation of the track seems to lay that bare. On top of that, you’ve got a groove that would even encourage a condemner’s hips to shake at least a little bit.
