#47, “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” Prince (1987)

150 Favorite Songs: #47, “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” Prince (1987)

There are so many Prince songs that sound like you’ve been invited to the coolest party on earth, even if you’re sitting alone in your bedroom listening to it on airpods. It’s part of the genius of the man, the way he made party music sound so intimate, or maybe made intimate music sound like so much fun. It’s true of his dance-y songs and his ballads, his horny songs and his religious ones, his soulful ones and his rockers. It’s maybe the aspect of Prince’s music that I think separates him from pretty much everyone else—if “Let’s Go Crazy” comes on, everybody on the dance floor is like, “oh, that’s my song.” Anybody can do that with a ballad, but Prince did it with everything.

Which brings us to “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” which is a poppy lil’ number full of programmed beats and live drums, guitar solos and irrepressible major-key riffs, hand-claps and funky bass. And lyrically, it’s, well, very weird. Here’s the story: Prince is out at the club, having a good time, and he spots a lady from across the room looking at him, and he looks back and likes what he sees. He asks her to dance, but when she answers, he can tell that she’s looking for something meaningful, and he’s not that guy, so he apologizes for wasting her time and explains that he’s in his fuckboi era, so he’s gotta go. We get two verses of this, one of those indomitable Prince choruses where he sings “you won’t be satisfied with a one-night stand / and i could never take the place of your man” while backup singers fill it in, then hand-claps and shredding guitar solos to indicate that Prince is out looking for somebody who’s on the same casual page he is, good luck to this young lady, now it’s time for a four-minute instrumental coda that’s by turn ecstatic and then bluesy and soulful. I think maybe it represents Prince going to bone town with the next person he sees and the woman the song is addressed to looking around for a good man? Hard to say for sure. Maybe he was just in the mood to jam.

But I love “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” because it gets at something that you really never see addressed in pop music, which is the way being direct and honest is respectful, and being for yourself sometimes isn’t a vice, if you take care not to hurt anyone while you’re doing it. The song is written from a place of deep empathy for the woman out looking for a good man, and there’s something magical in the way that contrasts with the dance-pop song Prince is in—but that’s the whole point, that Prince is on one tip and the woman he’s singing about is on another one. It’s a really unique and fascinating kind of storytelling, where the incongruity of the song’s theme and its sound are the whole point, delivered effortlessly by Prince in one of his more underrated vocal performances.

And you can listen to “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” a hundred times and never pay attention to any of that, if you want to, which is the other point of Prince. You can dance to the hook, to the keyboard riff, to the hand-claps, to all the drums and the guitar buried in the mix, to the backing vocals that make everything feel detached from reality, to the guitar solos that bled effortlessly into the dance-pop beat, and tune out the story Prince is singing. You probably have! “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” isn’t one of Prince’s absolute most famous songs—everybody can name “When Doves Cry” and “Raspberry Beret” and “Kiss”—but it was a top-ten hit when Sign O the Times came out, is a significant part of the canon, has its own Wikipedia page, etc. You’ve heard it, even if you don’t think about it much.

There’s an old joke about, like, what your English teacher thinks the line “She went through the blue door” means (“the blue represents her depression”) and what the author means by it (the door was blue). With Prince, though, You can go pretty deep into a lot of his songs, break them apart and recognize all of the things he was doing with them, and you won’t be putting anything in there that doesn’t exist. That combination of intimacy and universality is rare, and there aren’t many songs that pull it off better than this one.