Just found this interesting article from The Arizona Republic...

Hank Stuever
Washington Post
Nov. 26, 2003 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - In another epoch, kids listened to Darling Nikki because they knew they weren't supposed to, because it was too naughty.

Almost any adolescent of the 1980s can still sing about a mysterious and lascivious woman named Nikki:

"I guess U could say she was a sex fiend," the song goes.

The song was a soulful limerick from the Purple Rain days of Prince. It was, at the time, the dirtiest song we knew. And 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 honor in pop trivia of being the song that compelled Tipper Gore to co-found the Parents Music Resource Center and successfully pressure big record companies to create a warning-label system.

Two decades later, Nikki is back, faithfully remade by the multiplatinum modern rock band the Foo Fighters. Meant as a B-side to the Foo Fighters' single Have It All, the new Nikki has instead become a breakout radio hit. Los Angeles' KROQ-FM, the tastemaking station of teen chic, has been playing it several times a day since early October.

Same Nikki, same tawdry notions . . . only now a different world, so sleazy that Nikki sounds comparatively quaint.

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."

Grind?

In a post-Nikki era, everybody grinds. The world is completely ground, and lousy with Nikkis. Britney Spears is nothing but a Nikki. The Hilton sisters are Nikkis. Pink is a Nikki.

The Foo Fighters, fronted by the ever-ironic Dave Grohl, seem to have known that Nikki could hardly cause a blush amid the latest fare from Limp Bizkit, Jay-Z, Korn and Missy Elliott. The new version is a note-for-note homage to the old, with the guitars cranked up more. 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.

Last heard from, Prince was going door-to-door, witnessing for Jehovah. Karenna Gore Schiff is 30, married with two kids. 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.

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Oops apologies to Diamonds if this is the same article from The Washington Post.

That'd be the same article as has been on the front page for the last few days ?!

Gav said:

yeh i hear the foo fighter verion on KROQ alot..it okay i guess

Compared to what's out there today, Nikki is nothing.

"My Milkshake Brings all the boys to the yard, that's right, it's better than yours, damn right it's better than yours, I can teach you, but I'll have to charge".

I have to admit I love that song.