Hidden Gems: Prince’s Raspberry Beret Extended Version

Today on Hidden Gems I’m going to talk about a song that any fan of Prince will know once it starts playing but did you know there was an extended version of said song and that song is Raspberry Beret.

Raspberry Beret was the fourth track from the 1985 album Around the World in a Day by Prince & The Revolution, which was also the second of three albums Prince & The Revolution would do together. The song is about a teenage love life with a girl he sees at work who wore a raspberry color beret. Now from start to finish of this song you can hear the pop sound and vibe it was going. Prince adding his flavor of singing and musical arrangement that made many of Prince’s songs in the 80’s so classic and one of a kind.

Now here comes the extended version of Raspberry Beret. In this version you can imagine hearing that it was going for a heavy funk sound in the first opening minute of the song, you even hear Prince coughing in there as well. Also when you think the song is over, he and the band goes into this experimental moment where you can listen. What were they trying to experiment on, or was it a simple jam session just for fun? The beauty of this is that we may never know what Prince’s reason for this extended version was. Maybe he was trying something new, having fun, trying to re-invent himself or just did it because he just wanted to.

Whatever the case was, this version of Raspberry Beret was something that I don’t think a lot of people and his fans knew about, including myself. I’m glad that I do now because it shows how versatile Prince & The Revolution were back in the ’80s.