If a single song crystallizes Prince’s persona as Imp of the Polymorphously Perverse, it’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” the second single off Sign O’ the Times. It’s a delirious fantasy of self-transcendence, the plaint of a man whose yearning to get close to his female lover is so intense that he’s come to feel that his own gender is a barrier to ultimate intimacy. If only he could somehow be his woman’s best girlfriend as well as her boyfriend, helping her to pick out clothes, confiding and advising, hanging out without the hang-ups and sexual friction caused by the gender divide.

Would you let me wash your hair?

Could I make you breakfast sometime?

Well then, could we just hang out?

I mean, could we go to a movie and cry together?

Right at the song’s end it veers off course a little, verging on hetero-male fantasy of the “I think of myself as a lesbian” type. But for the most part, the desire in the song is not really sexual: It’s agape rather than eros, a dream of companionship and communion. A tense, taut funk track, “Girlfriend” throbs with an impossible longing, an impulse to break through the skin surface, past body parts and erogenous zones, and grasp hopelessly for total mind-meld. The song is too agonized, too twitchy with unrest, to really be sexy. It wants to be free of the straitjacket of sexual identity. Of any identity.

And we don't have to make love to have an orgasm…

Listen, for you naked I would dance a ballet

Would that get you off?

After the unexpected detour into dizzy-making dirtiness in its final half-minute, the flesh fever subsides into calm, and “If I Was Your Girlfriend” ends on a still note of pure mysticism:

We’ll try to imagine what silence looks like.

More than the lyric, though, the conceptual and technical masterstroke of “Girlfriend” is the gender-morphing of Prince’s vocals, which are pitch-shifted to create the feminine alter-ego Camille. Doing peculiar things with the human voice is such a common feature of contemporary music, from the online underground to the upper reaches of Billboard, that it is hard to convey just how confoundingly brilliant, original, and creatively twisted this move by Prince seemed in 1987. Prince-watchers instantly grasped that this was the wholly logical, yet completely unexpected and surprising, extension of his androgyny, his compulsion to dissolve borderlines and barriers.

In another sense, the artificially high-pitched Camille voice was simply a technological expansion upon what Prince already did vocally: sing falsetto in the soul ‘n’ funk tradition of Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,” where the “the sound of a woman coming from a man,” as critic Michael Freedburg wrote, served “to demonstrate to his intended lover that he understands her fears and desires as if he were female himself.”

In a certain way, falsetto—as a contrived vocal technique, an “unnatural” way of using the throat, lungs, etc.—could be seen as kind of introjected technology. As with any extreme mode of singing—yodeling, Tuvan throat singing, opera, Inuit vocal games, you name it—there’s almost a disembodiment of the human voice, as it is pushed to produce sounds that seem to speak of things outside earthly existence, far beyond our physical mortal limits. That’s why these forcibly etherealized vocal sounds generally connote the angelic, the extra-terrestrial, the cosmic and otherworldly. They can also be the sound of those who feel alienated from mundane normative existence, who feel like they are from some other place.