Prince used to surround himself in Nikki-equivalents - women in lingerie with names like Vanity and Apollonia - and when he decided they were used up, he moved on to Sheena Easton. Nikki was originally supposed to suggest something coarse, scurrilous, vulgar. (U C it in their homework.) Open-mouth kissing between girls in the school cafeteria is a Nikki kind of phenomenon. Kids today, when they’re not allegedly pirating media online, send instant-message come-ons to one another in the same shorthand that Prince wrote lyrics. Stripteases and lapdances are becoming part of the national folklore. Porn became a legitimate industry and cultural dialogue, and the people who star in it find legitimacy and social entree into VIP rooms. Tipper seems, in hindsight, less like the evil queen of censorship and more like some kind of prophetic genius, even if parents are still helpless to ward off all that Nikki wrought. Karenna Gore Schiff is 30, married and has two kids of her own. Last heard from, Prince was going door-to-door, witnessing for Jehovah. As soon as we heard ‘Darling Nikki’ in the office I ran down the hall and gave it to Virgin” - the afternoon deejay at WHFS is named Tim Virgin - “and we just threw it on.” making them part of the Foo Fighters’ repertoire. “But Dave Grohl has always had a flair for picking out underappreciated songs and. “Most cover songs are unnecessary,” Waugh says. Grohl screams in the same places and in the same way Prince screamed, as if to somehow address how far the world has come - or sunk. Happens all the time.) The new version is a note-for-note homage to the old, with the guitars cranked up more. (Self-pleasuring girls-gone-wild who hang out in hotel lobbies? Yawn. The Foo Fighters, fronted by the ever-ironic Dave Grohl (a former member of Nirvana), seem to have known that “Darling Nikki” could hardly cause a blush amid the latest fare from Limp Bizkit, Jay-Z, Korn and Missy Elliott. The world is completely ground, and lousy with Nikkis. “Not only does it rock like all hell, but it’s got those trademark Prince screams in it.” “It’s one of those very visual songs,” Waugh explains (in the hypnotically perfect drive-time voice of a radio lifer). It was like a personal message from the devil.) Nothing freaked out teenagers of the ’80s more than backmasking. (“Darling Nikki” was the last song on Side 1 of the album, ending with a spooky sequence of Prince and company singing something backwards. The song was too hot to touch (or play on the radio) then, and anyhow, “Purple Rain” sold 13 million copies and had four other hit songs on it. When “Darling Nikki” was first released in 1984, Waugh was working at an alternative radio station on Long Island. “That was the first time I think I ever heard that word,” says Bob Waugh, the assistant program director at WHFS. The narrator, Prince, sings of going home with her, where she produces a release form, asking him “Sign your name on the dotted line / The lights went out and Nikki started 2 grind.” only now a different world, a world so sleazy that Nikki sounds comparatively quaint, in retrospect. Same Nikki, same lobby, same magazine, same tawdry notions. Meant as a B-side to the Foo Fighters’ single “Have It All,” the new version of “Darling Nikki” has instead become a breakout radio hit: Locally, WHFS counts it among its most played and most requested songs this month, and on Los Angeles’ KROQ, the tastemaking station of mallternative-skateboarding teen chic, the song has been played several times a day since early October.
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Two slutty decades later, “Darling Nikki” is back, having been faithfully remade by the multi-platinum modern rock band the Foo Fighters. It was, at the time, the dirtiest song we knew.Īnd the world might have been a slightly different place if an 11-year-old Karenna Gore could have prevented her mother from listening to her “Purple Rain” cassette: “Darling Nikki” has the near-mythological honor in pop trivia of being the song that compelled Tipper Gore to co-found the Parents Music Resource Center with other congressional wives, who in 1985 successfully pressured big record companies to create a warning-label system for pop records.
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The song was a soulful limerick from the “Purple Rain” days of Prince, whose voraciously fey Jheri-Curl Lothario act worked its spell even on the most suburban set. “I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine.” “I GUESS U could say she was a sex fiend,” the song goes. The song never appeared on any hit chart, and you never heard it on the radio or at a school dance, but almost any adolescent of the 1980s can still sing about a mysterious and lascivious woman named Nikki: In another epoch, kids listened to “Darling Nikki” because they knew they weren’t supposed to, because it was too naughty.