34: Let’s Pretend We’re Married

1999 (1982)
You’ve probably heard how parental advisory stickers on albums were introduced after Tipper Gore caught her daughter listening to Darling Nikki, but their invention can be traced back to another Prince song and a different 11-year-old girl. In October 1983, while listening to the 1999 album with their daughter, two Cincinnati parents were so shocked by Let’s Pretend We’re Married’s lewdness that it caused them to launch a campaign against “porn rock”. This crusade was taken up by the national Parent-Teachers Association who later teamed up with Tipper’s PMRC to pressure the record industry into issuing the stickered warnings. As origin stories go, Let’s Pretend We’re Married is a much more worthy catalyst for a movement of parental pearl-clutching than the comparatively tame Darling Nikki. Both songs contain risqué opening couplets but it’s not until the f-bombs start dropping in the spoken section of Let’s Pretend We’re Married’s climax when you really hear Prince acting out the “pure sex” persona that he once told his band would be his identity. It contains what may be the most sexually explicit line he ever included on an album and if it still shocks today, imagine the effect it had on early-80s conservative America. In a way though, the track reflects the Christian values of its time. Only a culture with strict views about sex before marriage could birth a song that views marital sex as a guilt-free carnal carnival. Nowadays, we’ve been primed by comedians to associate marriage with drudgery and the idea that lovers would pretend to be husband and wife in order to “go all night” sounds more absurd than the reverse scenario – a married couple spicing up their lovelife by roleplaying a one-night-stand. Even back then it was more usual to have songs like Babooshka and Escape (The Piña Colada Song) with lyrics about marriages chasing the thrill of the forbidden. Prince flipping this message into forbidden sex chasing the thrill of marriage is more subversive to us today than any four-letter outburst. Only Prince could make the concept of marriage sound perverted. It’s the polar opposite of John Cooper Clarke’s view that getting married is like having your sexual relationship ratified by the police. Establishment approval has never been as desirable as forbidden fruit, which incidentally is also the reason why the parental advisory warnings that Let’s Pretend We’re Married and Darling Nikki outraged into existence inevitably failed. As Ice T rapped on Freedom of Speech, “the sticker on the record is what makes ‘em sell gold”. If that couple in Cincinnati really wanted to stop kids from listening to the album they should have instead focused on the song’s closing lines and fought for a sticker that read “parental approval, religious content”.