A remarkably innocent song from the man who gave us lascivious tunes like "Dirty Mind" and "Soft and Wet," "Raspberry Beret" tells the story of a young man captivated by a lady who comes into the store where he is a lowly employee with a rocky relationship with his boss. This girl is a little crazy - she goes in through the out door - very fashionable, and just a touch rebellious.
Prince originally recorded "Raspberry Beret" in 1982, but re-worked it with his newly re-formed Revolution backing band, which had just crystalized into what would become the fan favorite lineup: Brown Mark on bass, Bobby Z on drums, Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman and Doctor Fink on keyboard, backing guitar, and backing vocals. If you blinked in the mid-'80s, you missed it, because this incarnation of the Revolution broke up by 1986, with Prince firing everybody but Doctor Fink.
This stands as one of the finest examples of the "Minneapolis sound," blending in finger-cymbals, a string section, and a harmonica as a strategy to create a well-rounded groove. This style is sometimes called "The Prince Sound," but there were a lot of other folks making it as well, many of them working with Prince at some point.
At the time this was released, Prince was under fire from Tipper Gore during the notorious PMRC witch hunt, which placed two of his songs on the list of the "filthy 15" - "Darling Nikki" was the original song that got Tipper's goat. So this is one of the songs where Prince started making his lyrics more family friendly. Nevertheless, you can't miss "Old Man Johnson" as a reference to his you-know-what. Normally we'd stay clear of looking for euphemisms in lyrics, but come on, this is Prince we're talking about.
The video is an odd mashup of performance footage and animation. Simon Fields, who was one of the top music video producers at the time, said in the book I Want My MTV: "We filmed a whole video, then Prince got a Japanese animator to do a completely different video and we mashed the two up. He would mess with directors. He would give them the impression that they'd be in charge of the video, then halfway through he'd go 'Thank you,' take what he liked, and edit it himself."
Prince is notorious for planting hidden messages in his songs, like the backmasking sequence in "Darling Nikki," so fans were confounded when the video included a coughing jag before Prince started singing. What could it possibly mean? The answer is simple: "I just did it to be sick, to do something no one else would do," he told Rolling Stone in 1985. From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/prince/raspberry-beret
