Forty years ago this week, Prince's "Little Red Corvette" (not his greatest song, nor my favorite, but quite arguably his single most iconic and best remembered pop number) entered Billboard's Top 40--and...just...wow. If a 14-year-old virgin Mormon who milked cows every morning and rode his bike to school could figure out immediately what this song was about, anybody could (and, I'm sure, did). I wonder if this was the very song that MTV's Mark Goodman was thinking of when he told David Bowie that the station had to be careful when it came to showing this kind of cosmopolitan, sexual stuff that viewers could handle in big cities but definitely not in the sticks. Honestly, it's not even the most explicit--or maybe, better, the most blatant--R&B-style song bout sexual intercourse that made it onto the playlists of the Top 40 radio stations I was listening to back then; Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" was released in October the previous year, but it was still near the top of the charts in February of 1983. Anyway, Prince was amazing--and when he died suddenly in 2016, this song was what people remembered:
