Anyone know what the cough is all about during the instrumental break in the extended version of Raspberry Beret?

Was is intended or accidental? Why is it there? It doesn't appear to add anything or have any relevance to the song.

It's in the video too. I think it may be a genuine cough during recording and he just left it in.

So what do you reckon made him cough? Choking on some Cap'n Crunch perhaps?

The cough is Prince telling us how "sick" he is.

Seems like a joke I think.

Like the fake endings of Mountains & Rockhard - or the stuck record of America.

I am aure it was intentional. Prince was making his first foray into psychodelica with the Around the World in a Day record and there are frequently these weird little idiosincratic things in psychodelic albums from the 60s. It was all marketing. I think that next to playing the hell out of a electric guitar, marketing is Prince's greatest talent.

MIAMIVICE said:

WHAT THE FUCK!?

prince also coughs in the video
[This message was edited Wed Feb 19 8:37:48 PST 2003 by DrSeuss]

i'm fairly certain i read an interview with prince quite a few years back where he mentions this - said he just threw it in for laugh cuz he finds it funny the way some people really read into these things and think they're secret/backward messages or whatever...

orlatron said:

Precisely.

.

skywalker said:

I like that

yeah, he just did it 2 be dumb...

I remember People magazine reviewing the video when it came out. They didn't like his "Liza Minnelli" hairdo, and said the cough was the only real moment in the video.

I love the video.


.

must have been a meeean load.

My take on it is it may be a tribute to the Beatles.It's a Beatlish tune and I think you can also hear a cough on the Beatles song "Taxman".Another group from the 60s, Los Mockers, Uruguay's own Beatles also have a song that features a cough...

I been whistling the extended part all day.
.

Shafty said:

I loved that! It's so quirky! Maybe it happened by accident. Here's a hypothesis... Maybe production costs were already through the roof, so he didn't edit it. There's all this incidental chatter during the intro to Sexy Dancer, too. Don't know what that's all about but I love it.

I remember what the cough is all about. It's about the whole backwards "Hello" thing in Darling Nikki. When that guy(cant remember his name) said the Nikki message was just a decoy for Prince's other hidden "devil" messages on the album. (though he never prooved any of couse)

Later on Raspberry, Prince said. there was a hidden message underneath the cough, but there really wasn't.

It was kind of a "made-you-look" kind of joke towards the whole "devil-message" crap.

PMRC (remember those idiots?)
'nuff said.

i've never really wondered much about this... it sounds nice... i doubt that it's an accident, but i also doubt that it has any real significance...

my buddy will, on the other hand, is completely and totally intrigued by it... he always says that if he could only ask prince one question, it would be about the cough in this song...

I love the cough, it cracks me up every time.

I guess I never thought about why it was there, though...I think it was just there for fun