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The Sex Of It is the third track on Kid Creole and the Coconuts’ eighth album Private Waters In The Great Divide (their third album on Columbia Records), and, a few weeks before the album’s release, The Sex Of It was released as the album’s first single. In 2003, it was included as the sixth and final track on the third and final disc on the compilation album The Ultimate Collection.
Basic tracking took place on 29 July 1987, at Paisley Park Studios in Chanhassen, Minnesota, a few weeks after the studios opened for recordings (the day before Eleven, Fifteen, Ten, Ten And ½, and three other instrumentals later named Night Owl, Overnight, Every Night and Andorra). August Darnell (a.k.a. Kid Creole) recorded his own vocals over the basic tracks in late 1989 or early 1990 (at either Sound Ideas, Shadow Sound or Electric Lady in New-York, NY).
The album was completed and scheduled for release when Prince submitted the song in late 1989 (which he had promised when meeting Darnell in Europe during the Lovesexy Tour), and the record company delayed the release to include the song. August Darnell reluctantly agreed to include this song on the album at the insistence of his record company and ex-wife Adriana Kaegi. In the liner notes of 2018 reissue of Private Waters In The Great Divide, August Darnell discussed the last minute inclusion of the song:
"I had finished the album and delivered it to Columbia. The executive in charge (....) said "I cannot hear a single". I counted to 435 and then counted backwards before I responded to him. I appealed to my erstwhile manager, Tommy Mottola but alas, he was too busy running a record company and wooing Mariah Carey to care about my little problems. The powers that be insisted that I add the Prince penned song to the album. My ego was bruised. "No way", I said, over and over again. To make a long story even longer, it was my ex-wife, Adriana Kaegi (Mama Coconut) who finally advised me to LET IT BE. And so I agreed to put my vocals on top of Prince’s funky track. The powers that be were pleased and they assumed this would be a NUMBER ONE record. They were terribly wrong, of course. Radio programmers refused to play the song because of the hook. Wow, how things have changed (...). Saying "You just want me for the sex" may have been frowned upon in 1990, but today it would be considered a bit too limp...I mean - timid. "
A handwritten tracklist for The Time’s Corporate World on which Prince and Morris Day worked on in Summer 1989 shows that The Sex Of It was, at one point, also considered for that album. But it is not known if an actual recording with Morris Day’s vocals took place.
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