“Darling Nikki” isn’t explicit?

February 23, 2006

A number of the people at work have been raving about the new Prince single Black Sweat, from his upcoming new album. The album isn’t out yet but the single finally hit iTunes this week.

So this morning I was in iTunes adding the song to my shopping cart for later. And I noticed there’s a “Prince essentials” link on the page, naturally I clicked and it gave a list of a bunch of his songs that they’re recommending. The thing that immediately caught my eye is that while a number of the songs had the Explicit label next to them, Darling Nikki did not. Nor did it have the Clean label, so it has to be the original version.

How on earth can a song that describes a woman “masturbating with a magazine” not be marked Explicit? Whoever compiled that list should have known the song is explicit, and they should have marked it that way. Unless that lyric doesn’t count as explicit, but I don’t see how that could be.