Prince's Song 'Raspberry Beret' Is, Perhaps Unsurprisingly, About Sex

Over the course of a long and prolific career, Prince wrote songs on a wide variety of topics. Anyone who knows anything about Prince, though, knows that he was particularly concerned with what was going on in the bedroom, although he sometimes hid those references behind a layer of metaphor.

Songs like "Kiss" and "Little Red Corvette" are fairly obviously about sex, but many have long been confused by the meaning behind his song "Raspberry Beret." Here's what we know about it, and the meaning behind it.

Although many of Prince's titles are metaphors for something, the story of "Raspberry Beret" is actually more straightforward than it may seem. The song was first released in 1985, and it was the lead-off single from "Around the World in a Day," and made it all the way to second on the Billboard charts. The song is, in essence, a chronicle of how Prince lost his virginity, or at least that's what the song suggests.

The "Raspberry Beret" of the song's title appears to just be a hat that the woman who took his virginity was wearing, although it could be a metaphor for something more. The song doesn't really hint at what that metaphor might be, though, so it seems possible that Prince was just actually describing the attire of the first woman he ever had sex with.

As the song's chorus makes clear, this girl's hat stands out in her ensemble, in part because she wouldn't need to take it off to do the deed. "She wore a raspberry beret / The kind you find in a second-hand store / Raspberry beret / And if it was warm she wouldn't wear much more / Raspberry beret / I think I love her," the chorus reads. As he progresses through the verses, Prince describes meeting this girl and eventually taking her to a secluded farm.

Although Prince fans have spent plenty of time wondering whether the song's title is a metaphor for something graphic, it seems like in this case, the most obvious interpretation is that a hat is just a hat.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the song as a whole isn't at least a little bit graphic. What it does mean, though, is that you can mostly take the song at face value.

It's a song about losing your virginity, and as such, it fits into the broader pantheon of Prince songs about sex. Still, in its way, it's a fairly innocent song about remembering what it was like the very first time, including all the nerves and anticipation that come with that.

Thankfully, Prince wrote enough material that there are still plenty of other songs to think about and puzzle over. And because Prince was often intentionally enigmatic, we can keep debating about "Raspberry Beret" too, even if its meaning might seem to be relatively straightforward.