The Onion has a music section that reviews hipster shit and music you will never listen to or care about. However, I found their latest list very interesting. The article entitled "A turd in the Caviar: 24 songs that almost derail great albums" is not bad. I disagree with them on one issue - Prince's Darling Nikki.

The Onion said this about the song:

The cultural significance of “Darling Nikki,” the sole inessential track on Prince’s classic Purple Rain, lies not in its negligible creative worth, but rather in the outrage it inspired. Professional busybody Tipper Gore was so horrified by Prince’s dirty little ditty about a “sex fiend” he encountered “in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine” that it helped inspire her to form the Parents Music Resource Center to fight profanity and sexuality in pop music. “Darling Nikki” is filthy all right, a nasty, paper-thin funk vamp that would sound perfectly at home on one of Prince’s sprawling, overloaded later albums. But on the otherwise tight, perfect Purple Rain, it feels like a throwaway B-side that somehow made it onto a masterpiece. There are plenty of reasons to object to “Darling Nikki”; the sexual content is just one of them.

The author seems to confuse his hatred of Tipper Gore and PMRC with his ability to judge an album as a whole. The analysis of why this song doesn't belong is that it started a revolution in the music world and forced parental advisory on albums. Who cares? You have to look at how Darling Nikki fits in with the Purple Rain soundtrack as a whole.

Anyone who has seen Purple Rain, Darling Nikki advances the narrative and demonstrates that Kid's personal life, as well as his issues with his girlfriend are affecting his performances. This song is essential for the soundtrack, plus it is awesome.

If you wanted to take an issue with any song off Purple Rain, I think it should have been Computer Blue. That is a bunch of beeps, bops, and seems to have no real point other than auditory masturbation on the part of Prince.

The whole Purple Rain is amazing, but Computer Blue is useless in the overall scheme. It is hard for me to choose a song to highlight off that album, but check out the second song off the album entitled Take Me With U. The strings and two part harmony are sublime in the chorus parts. This was taken from the Purple Rain tour that followed the release of the album and movie. This live version has a ripping solo that was not on the album version. I embeded the album version underneath the live video.