"Raspberry Beret" Is The Best Pop Song Anyone Ever Did

Everyone has opinions about Prince today, and pretty much all of them are good and right, but let’s take a second to talk about “Raspberry Beret,” which is—I would argue—the single most perfect pop song anyone has ever done, slightly more perfect than the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” or Big Star’s “September Gurls.” (You may have other candidates to mention here, and they may be better ones than those I’ve put forward, but they’re still not up to par with “Raspberry Beret.”) Forget the melody, and the chord progression, and the way the strings come in, and the backup vocals and all that—this demi-sex god comes down to the plane of the mortals to sing about his crappy job and old man Johnson’s farm? You can’t do better than that, and no one has.