New name a symbol of Prince’s frustration
He surprised us with each and every hit single, from Purple Rain to Raspberry Beret…and he surprised everyone with this one as well.
It was the day Prince changed his name. Not to a different name, but a symbol.
Today marks 27 years since the singing sensation made the announcement to celebrate his 35th birthday. From this moment on, the former Prince, who was named Prince Rogers Nelson at birth, said he wanted to be referred to as the combination symbol for male and female, the symbol that served as the title for his latest album at the time. The only problem was, it was unpronounceable.
“It is an unpronounceable symbol whose meaning has not been identified. It’s all about thinking in new ways, tuning in 2 a new free-quency,” he wrote in a statement at the time.
According to Neal Karlen, a former Rolling Stone writer who was one of the few journalists the late musician gave access to, together they wrote up a full explanation for the name change to bury in a time capsule at Prince’s Paisley Park estate in Minnesota.
The controversial decision to change his was derided as “crazy” and “ridiculous”, “a bizarre media stunt”.
The singer’s record sales declined.
It presented all kinds of logistical challenges for the media, resulting in the clumsy title, “Artist Formerly Known As Prince”.
The symbol was a rebellion against Prince’s record label, Warner Bros. He first signed with the company in 1977 when he was still a teenager, and together they produced some of his most famous titles, including Purple Rain and Sign O’ The Times.
But after inking a new deal in the early 1990s, Prince chafed under the company’s rigid production schedule.
A prolific songwriter, he wanted to release material as soon as it was ready – he had 500 unreleased songs in his vault.
But Warner Bros refused, believing it would saturate the market and dilute demand for the artist’s music.
Prince compared his contractual obligations to slavery, and began performing with the word “SLAVE” on his cheek. He saw his own name as a part of his contractual entrapment. “Warner Bros took the name, trademarked it, and used it as the main marketing tool to promote all of the music I wrote,” Prince once said in a press release. “The company owns the name Prince and all related music marketed under Prince. I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Bros.”
In 2000, after the contract expired, Prince went back to using his old name, which also freed him to innovate new ways of making money as an independent artist. Prince produced music on his own independent label, he bundled exclusive LPS with concert tickets and newspapers. He became one of the first artists to sell an album online, and won a Webby Lifetime Achievement award for “visionary use of the internet to distribute music”. Sadly, the musician who created more than 30 albums and won seven Grammy Awards over a 40-year career, was found dead in Paisley Park, his Minnesota home, on April 21, 2016.
In 2016, Prince sold more albums than any artist that year, dead or alive.