Songfacts®:

• Leave it Prince to deliver a huge hit that sounds dirty but really isn't. "Cream" is about pushing yourself to get the most out of life, a play on the phrase "The cream rises to the top." But the way Prince sings it, and considering his "Dirty Mind," it feels a lot more suggestive. Prince was a also very playful in his songs, and he was clearly having some fun with lines like that have double meanings like "You got the horn so why don't you blow it."
  
  It was Prince's last #1 hit, spending two weeks in the top spot in November 1991.
• In the liner notes to Prince's The Hits/The B-Sides compilation, it states that this song was "reputedly written while standing in front of a mirror."
• The song is part of Prince's 1991 album Diamonds and Pearls, the first with his New Power Generation backing band. On many of his earlier albums, Prince played most of the instruments himself, but at this point he was involving his band more.
  
  "'Cream' was done while we were in Europe," Tony Mosely, a vocalist in The New Power Generation, told Billboard magazine. "When we're on the road, [Prince] will book studios and we'll go in and jam. And that was a vibe that the band, Levi Seacer Jr., Sonny Thompson, and everybody else came up with. The message is, keep striving, keep pushing, and it will happen - perseverance."
• "Cream" was the second single from the Diamonds and Pearls album, following "Gett Off," a song where he's quite clearly singing about sex. The third single was the title track, one of more straightforward and accessible love songs in his catalog. That one was a bit hit, going to #3 and helping the album sell over 2 million copies in America.
  
  At the time, Prince and his record label, Warners, were hunky dory - the label really liked this version of Prince. But two years later they were feuding like bad neighbors; Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and waged a campaign to emancipate himself from the label. His big issue was over control of his music and which songs would get released - he wanted to put out lots of songs that didn't have much commercial appeal. As the fight dragged on, Prince's new music was ignored by all but his most faithful fans. He fully broke from Warners at the end of 1999 but never had another big hit. He did, however, stage the top-grossing tour of 2004: the Musicology tour.
• "Kiss" director Rebecca Blake opens the video with Prince and his crew strutting through a crowded train station before hitting the stage to perform the song. They hang around the station for a bit first, making lots of references to the song title, with Prince licking whipped cream off a girl's fingers.
  
  Blake tried, and failed, to incorporate street argot into the dialog. "We found out that it that the street jive in Minneapolis was totally different than in LA," she recalled in a Golden Age of Music Video interview. "So we then met with the New Power Generation, they were like, 'What's up? We don't talk like that.' And we have to rewrite everything based on the new viewpoint. And there was a lot of improvisation, like for example, there was a barbershop scene which was totally improvised, and there was a restaurant scene that was pretty much improvised. I just kept blocking and moving the camera, and so it's feeding lines to people. I think Prince had actually loved that. He really loved that stuff. And some of them–some of the things were pretty funny and I thought, 'Oh God, it's funny but I don't know, maybe it's offensive.' And Prince was like, 'No, no, no. I love it. Let's get to work that.' So that was good."