Songoftheday 11/24/12 - I guess I shouldve known by the way you parked your car sideways that it wouldnt last...

Prince - "Little Red Corvette"
from the album 1999 (1982)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #6 (two weeks)
Weeks in the top-40: 15

Today's Song of the Day is by the Purple One himself, who was born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis to musical parents, he started making music when he was a child. His first album, For You, was released in 1978, when Prince turned 20, and the sensual affair produced his first hit, "Soft & Wet", which made the top-20 on the R&B chart, and grazed the bottom of the pop chart as well. The followup, a self-titled LP, did even better, giving him a song that just missed the pop top-10, "I Wanna Be Your Lover", that also was his first dance hit, peaking at #2 in 1979, and his first #1 R&B single. After a overtly sexual album, Dirty Mind, his 1981 album Controversy gave him a double-sided #1 hit "Controversy/Let's Work". This set Prince up for his big breakthrough the next year.

In 1982 he released his most ambitious set yet, the double-album 1999. With the anthemic title song as the lead-off single, it just missed the top-40 on the pop chart that year. But the follow-up, "Little Red Corvette", put Prince squarely in the center of the pop/R&B world, and ran right through the door that Michael Jackson opened at MTV for black artists...

"Little Red Corvette" was Prince's first top-10 pop hit in the States, and surprisingly (probably thanks to MTV did better there than at R&B radio where it peaked at #15, and dance, where it stopped at #61.The single also went to #2 in the UK, and made the top-10 in Canada and Australia.

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There have been many covers and samples of the song, but the biggest crib was by Stevie Nicks, who actually had Prince play keyboards on her similarly sounding "Stand Back"...

in 2000, rap group Bone Thugs N Harmony sampled the song on their single "Change The World"...

..and here's Matt Nathanson acoustically covering the song...

Up Tomorrow: Haight-Ashbury's finest blow into something different.