Unreleased (1983)
Prince often wrote songs where a sex toy would inexplicably appear in the final verse. 18 & Over, Mellow and Supercute all feature this late stage cameo with varying levels of subtlety but there’s one song in the vault which devoted the entirety of its verses, chorus and title to the humble battery-operated boyfriend. Vibrator is musically very repetitive but insanely catchy and with some grade A lyrics – my favourite being the comparison between her old and new (electric) loves: “uncharted waters sailed with ease, land is always in sight, but with u it’s always abandon ship and we didn’t even get away from the dock 2night”. It’s when Vanity’s ten-battery “body massager” runs out of juice however when the song really gets going, with a hilarious left-turn into a comedy sketch featuring Jill Jones as clerk number one and Prince reprising his role from If a Girl Answers. Possibly influenced by Purple Rain being in the script writing phase when it was recorded, Vibrator follows a standard screenplay three-act structure, with a sung setup, a comedic confrontation and a literal, final climax. It’s the classic ‘girl meets boy, girl leaves boy for toy, toy dies, girl goes on a quest for batteries’ story. The song got shelved, along with the rest of the second Vanity 6 album when Vanity quit the band but her pleasured moans would live on, later resurfacing on a couple of Madhouse releases and throughout the Come album credited as “she knows”. As famous enacted orgasms go Vanity is only kept out of the top three by Donna Summer, the woman from Lil Louis’s French Kiss and Sally.