25 years after first being birthed by Prince, this week’s throwback still sounds pretty damn fresh.
“If I Was Your Girlfriend” was the second single of his 1987 album, Sign “?” the Times. A fun fact: the vocal distortion on the track, according to Wikipedia, is the result of an accident on the sound engineer’s part, which apparently Prince flipped out over like a diva only to love it in playback. When I recently heard it (or saw the video rather) on Radio Capitale, my thought was that it is a complex gender-bending love song, but it turns out Prince wrote the song from the male perspective to his then girlfriend, Susanna Melvoin, who shared a super close bond with her best friend/sister. Managing to capture the jealousy of the female bond, he ended up making an aspirational, orgasmic love song for all, slightly misunderstood but no less fantastic – Prince kills it live, enjoy!
