Why Prince Changed His Name to an Symbol 30 Years Ago, and What Happened Next | Hacker News Reader

Why Prince Changed His Name to an Symbol 30 Years Ago, and What Happened Next

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143 pointsthunderbong97 comments

It's still absolutely insane to me the amount of music Prince produced and the amount of money he made. I know of a handful of his hits, but never in a million years would I guess his impact on music if I didn't look it up on Wikipedia.

Ok, here’s something you probably don’t know. Prince’s album Purple Rain literally changed the face of music (at least in the US). All those Parental Advisory stickers on the front of albums with “explicit” lyrics are basically the result of Tipper Gore (Al Gore’s former wife) overhearing her daughter singing along to a track on that album, Darling Nikki (don’t listen to it without first listening to Computer Blue (one leads into the other)),in which Prince describes meeting the titular Nikki while she masturbates with a magazine in a hotel lobby.

Tipper wasn’t a fan of this, got together with some other senators’ wives, and now we’ve got those stickers everywhere.

Even stranger: Prince was a devout Jehovah's Witness who regularly attended his local Kingdom Hall meetings, where he was known simply as "Brother Nelson".

I had been a fan since "1999" came out and I was surprised to learn this factoid upon his death. But it explains quite a lot about his career, not least the preacherman intro to "Let's Go Crazy".

He only became an Jehova’s Witness in 2001. He stopped performing these explicit songs, in live shows, thereafter.

I mean, "I Would Die 4 U" is very explicitly representing Jesus...

I often wonder how many artists ended up making explicit music simply to get that sticker. There's no doubt that it became a marketing ploy for artists. As an edgy teenager I was put off by albums that didn't have said sticker. What a time to be alive.

It is a great sticker: bold, all caps, tons of contrast. I think it would be really hard to fit more attention-gettingness in that little space.

Quite a lot. Frank Zappa had a ton of fun with it as well, putting his version of the notice on even his instrumental albums.

Something I learned last year at Sinéad O'Connor's death, is that her hit Nothing compares to you, was written by Prince.

Wait until you find out Killing Me Softly by the Fugees is a cover of the original hit by Roberta Flack

Not an exact corollary, since Prince never actually performed it for one of his own albums. He had one of his many front bands record it. IIRC, the only Prince versions are a studio demo/outtake (not very good, IMO) and a live version (which is better than the Sinead version, IMO, but is marred by technical issues).

Agreed, not exact, but as a grizzled old man it still astounds me the number of people I meet that don’t know Nothing Compares 2 U was written by Prince, and also (though not necessarily intersecting) those who don’t know Killing Me Softly isn’t an original Fugees track. I suppose it only bothers me because people just don’t seem to care about the history of things?

Do you immediately check the Wikipedia article for every song you hear on the radio? I imagine almost nobody you know actually owns a Sinead O'Connor or Fugees album, they heard it on TV/radio and never thought of it outside that context.

Or that Tainted Love by Max Raabe & Palast Orchester is a cover of an original composed by Ed Cobb and recorded by Gloria Jones in 1964.

You surely mean Tainted Love by Soft Cell!

Tainted Love by Broken Peach.

Which feels like a cover of Tainted Love by Marilyn Manson.

Amazing that it is from 1964 originally!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73IhpmXPQvw

What about Johnny Cash's Hurt... can you believe it was written by them noisy Nine Inch Nails?

"Because the night"? Bruce Springsteen.

Co-written by Springsteen and Patti Smith, not a Prince song.

Yeah, I mentioned it just as a classic item in the "I didn't know that" list.

Nothing Compares 2 U was originally performed by The Family back in 1985: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_(The_Family_album)

> The symbol, originally a combination of the common gender symbols for male and female, previously had appeared in slightly different form in the artwork of several Prince albums, first on “1999” and later on the sleeves of “Purple Rain,” “Graffiti Bridge,” on tour laminates and the like.

Also, his motorcycle from Purple Rain: https://www.flickr.com/photos/minneapolisorg/30142462774

And of course, there's an ASCII version: O(+>

"Prince and the Warner dispute": https://goldiesparade.co.uk/new-power-generation/

Prince understood the Internet like a techie. Along with David Bowie these guys were both ten years ahead of their time in how they used the net.

Now he did say the Internet was dead in 2010. But I think it was because he felt the innovation had slowed or stopped. Yet that exact time was when a lot of companies that are giants today were founded.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/04...

Prince didn’t understand at ALL, but he experimented a lot, repeatedly launching website projects for albums, creating short-lived memberships, failing to deliver e-commerce orders, and generally impatient with both results and his actual fans when we complained.

Prince was ridiculously fickle and capricious, bringing chaos and disorder everywhere he seemed to go, but, quite frankly, we loved that side of it in a world that was highly organized.

In 2014, our little fan group spent days combing Twitter and the news for intel on the next gig and a couple of thousand of us speculatively queued up in Camden ALL DAY - cold and wet - for a possible gig. Turned out to be two gigs in one evening. Did Prince get on Twitter to tell anyone? No. Did he launch a website? No. He did a random press conference a few days before from Lianne La Havas’s tiny flat.

Did he take Bitcoin? No, it was cash on the door.

So much of what he did from about 1994 on was driven by a slightly paranoid suspicion that he was being ripped off somewhere along the line and only he should control how his work was enjoyed, leading him into weird situations with his fans, other bands and musicians (remember his cover of Radiohead’s Creep), and it only really eased up once he STOPPED trying to work with internet technology and realized his performance skills were his bread and butter.

While I absolutely love and adore his music, I consider him to be a control freak and a terrible communicator outside of the studio who couldn’t handle reality, which is probably what helped kill him in the end, along with some dumb beliefs. I could honestly kick Larry Graham in the balls for that.

For plenty of supporting source material, check out Kevin Smith’s incredible answer to a question about Prince, go look up the Hit & Run tour, and the vast swathes of terrible album covers that helped to bury so much of his later work - that and the fact that you couldn’t buy many of these albums in the shops anyway.

Thanks for a fun bit of insight to a fan base.

For those curious about the Creep cover:

> The most jaw-dropping moment of the night came near the end of the main set when he broke out Radiohead’s “Creep.” He had never played the song in concert before (or any other Radiohead songs for that matter), but across eight glorious minutes, he completely made it his own. It popped up on YouTube the next morning – with shots from many different angles – but the Prince camp is extremely vigilant with the Internet and had them all taken down. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke found this hysterical. “Really? He’s blocked it?” York asked an interviewer. “Surely we should block it. Hang on a moment. Well, tell him to unblock it. It’s our song.” It was hard to argue with that, and it remains on YouTube even though most Prince material has been yanked for quite some time.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/flashback-prin...

The cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uu5vMLufNA

Thanks for links, really need to go listen to that tonight. Took years for Radiohead to play it again after originally getting sick of it, was stunned when I first heard them play it. There’s a band that REALLY understand things.

Technically there are two set of rights: writing and performing. In this case Radiohead own the former, but not the latter. Prince would still have been in his legal rights to block reproductions of that particular performance, and I'm sure he was advised as such; he probably just made a call based on marketing instincts or as a favour to Yorke.

My wife was manager at a pop podium, and she worked on a day where Prince might give a concert (it was a surprise concert while he was in The Netherlands, though the rumors were omnipresent). As a huge Prince fan, she was happy she was able to witness that concert, but it was chaos as the man had to be paid in cash. Also the tax had to be deducted on the go. They had to count 150k EUR manually (one ticket cost 100 EUR). This was in 2010.

Without context of that quote of Prince, it is a useless statement. Because many internet pioneers such as Marleen Stikker (DDS) also see the internet as (partly) failed.

> I could honestly kick Larry Graham in the balls for that.

Do you mean his introduction of prince to the Witnesses? I'm not really so familiar with their relationship or what happened. Was there more to the story than that?

I could also kick him in the balls for playing Purple Rain as the FOURTH song in the tribute show in London, no sense of timing.

But yes, it was mainly his ongoing evil Jiminy Cricket act pushing Prince into more extreme religious views (see Kevin Smith talk about Prince putting fans into groups of believers and non-believers) and tactics that affected his health (painkillers vs surgery).

I only witnessed the tribute abberation in-person so certainly could only convict on the basis of that, perhaps a massive wedgie with an option to upgrade to a kick in the balls if he did indeed have a hand in the downward spiral.

Oh yeah, I didn't think that the witness' doctrine against medicine could have resulted in him taking painkillers, but that makes sense, and would be such a tragic consequence of such a stupid doctrine.

> Now he did say the Internet was dead in 2010.

And he was right. By 2010, most of what made the internet great was already dead and gone.

Side story on Prince: This American Life, episode 750, part 3, has a story I enjoyed about the guy who opened Prince's vault after his death.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/750/transcript

Reminds me of the Laurie and Fry sketch

"Your name, sir?"

https://youtu.be/hNoS2BU6bbQ?si=YQHAo8mOz1jamSvG

Okay but, can we type it now? Did it ever get added to unicode?

Not exactly, but you can combine unicode glyphs for a simulacrum: Ƭ̵̬̊

For an explaination, see https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-...

lol, seems like a demilitarized version of zalgo text

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalgo_text

It is interesting that the glyph above renders perfectly for me and the one on the website you link to, does not.

Brave OSX

I did not know about this. But suddenly Eminems Without me text makes sense all these years after :)

Now let's go, just give me the signal

I'll be there with a whole list full of new insults

I've been dope, suspenseful with a pencil

Ever since Prince turned himself into a symbol

Especially because after the word symbol there is an extra cymbal played...

Without Me is a tirade on how press and tv treated Eminem at the time, btw. The (literally) murderous lyrics on his first big album, the fact he was white... The establishment really loved to hate him.

Sometimes I wonder how people can actually enjoy songs that are so utterly linked to their times.

> Sometimes I wonder how people can actually enjoy songs that are so utterly linked to their times.

Because they are linked to their times. That song teleports me back to the best parts of high school, particularly my then girlfriend who was obsessed with Eminem.

> Sometimes I wonder how people can actually enjoy songs that are so utterly linked to their times.

Because it sounds good and the more times change, the more they stay the same.

Also, almost every song, every work of art is inextricably tied to their times. From the Bible to Shakespeare to Bach to Prince and Eminem. You can enjoy a work of art in any time, but you can't truly understand it without understanding the context.

And yeah, the first thought that came to mind when I read the title was eminem's without me. Truly, great minds think alike.

https://archive.is/XH3af

So interesting to learn about Prince, whose music was such a huge part of the world growing up in the 1990s

Huh. So, after decades of reading about "The artist formerly known as Prince", I finally know what he is now known as. I never cared enough to find out myself and always simply took the weird description in stride ;)

Spoiler: he likely took ‘why’ to his grave. All this article does is tell stories that suggest guesses, while also taking care to reiterate how every single anecdote was likely the artist creating art, and not a genuine or complete explanation.

Can't help but wonder if the primary reason was simply a marketing opportunity.

No it was part of his dispute with his record label, he wanted to leave them the Prince name and be something new. It was of course marketing but it was intended to create a separate listing in the old Flying Fish record catalog. Record stores used to have a huge loose leaf book with most recordings listed, it was a way to see if you could get older records. Sometimes you had to just look around, I had to buy the first two Yes albums from a flea market seller who also carried those old vinyl bootlegs. I'm dating my self as an early Gen-Xer with all this obsolete arcane 'knowledge'.

I appreciate the insight and that's a much more fun backstory than expected. I was born a few years after Purple Rain so Prince's era is mostly unknown music history for me.

You forgot to mention (or left a deliberate opening for other "millenials" like yourself ;) that at one point, he had "slave" tattooed on his cheek - for the same reason.

If memory serves, the "tattoo" was nothing more permanent than a Sharpie.

Once in a while we are blessed with these people who are completely authentic to themselves, incredibly talented, and willing to share with us. Let's be thankful.

Why does Prince (or Björk or Bowie) do anything? Only they know.

I mean, in Bowie's case at least, probably loads and loads of cocaine.

As opposed to Zappa, who did not.

Thinking of symbology and zappa, I think of "ship too late to save a drowning witch"

Zappa smoked like a chimney and drank coffee incessantly. He was hardly as sober as he claimed to be.

I really don't think "completely authentic to themselve" is an accurate description at least for David Bowie, who had to come up with "personas" to embody so he could feel comfortable on stage.

Go back to the article.

Prince signed expecting to release music at a faster cadence so he would have been out of his contract in about 4-5 years with stuff that was kind of sub-par even for Prince. Warner told him that wasn't going to happen as they needed to do marketing and that meant he wasn't going to get out of his contract until 10 years or so. This was the disconnect--Warner thought they locked Prince up for 10 years and Prince thought he was getting out in 5.

Prince, for all his brilliance, was really the one who screwed this one up--likely because of ego wanting "The Biggest(tm) Deal". He had a huge amount of leverage after "Diamonds and Pearls" and just negotiated poorly. It's not like Prince didn't understand the music business by 1991--he had been in it and complaining about it since the 1970s.

> and complaining about it

Do you have any links to articles about this? I’m interested in learning more.

I remember some interview (probably from YouTube) from something like the late 70s/early 80s where Prince is excoriating his contract because the album cost more than the advance.

Sorry I can't be more specific.

Characterizing it as him having negotiated poorly conjures a vision of That One Scene in The Social Network ("You're gonna blame me because you were the business head of the company and you made a bad business deal with your own company?"), or perhaps Nelson Muntze ("Stop hitting yourself.")

>Prince had always been provocative, perplexing and often strange artist, and frequently used symbols (such as an eye for “I”) or numbers (such as 4 for “for”) in his album artwork.

This sentence is perhaps the new best example of fluff.

Why is it fluff? I know nothing about Prince other than that he changed his name to a symbol (and that is because Eminem told me). Knowing that he used symbols in other ways could add context to his choice to change his name to a symbol.

I'd say it's fluff because the first half adds nothing you don't already know by that point, and the second half is a longwinded way to say 'he liked rebuses'.

TIL that "rebus" is a word. Thanks!

I could have sworn we in Sweden used another word for rebuses and I was proven wrong many times in a pub discussion recently but I'm on a hunt for my word. (Very interesting I know...) If you don't mind what word did you use before for rebus? (I haven't given up there is an archaic or "brand name" out there I saw in my youth...)

Dingbat? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingbats_(board_game)

Dingbats! Thank you so much! I don't know why this was such a hard google! Legend! :)

So glad I could help :)

Honestly I don't think I ever had a specific word for that. It's not something I ever had cause to discuss.

The evidence for him being provocative, perplexing, and strange, is that he used 4 instead of 'for'. This is not evidence of anything except that the authors want you to think that Prince is provocative, perplexing, and strange. This sort of writing is more or less the definition of fluff

> > Prince had always been provocative, perplexing and often strange artist, and frequently used symbols (such as an eye for “I”) or numbers (such as 4 for “for”) in his album artwork.

I don't interpret the second clause primarily as evidence for the first. I view them as two related statements--

He was already known as provocative and strange; he'd already used symbols more than most people before.

This is important context to his strange move of changing his name to a symbol.

It's more longwinded than necessary, but it's not awful.

It's certainly idiosyncratic, I might go so far as provocative or strange myself, but perhaps perplexing is a bit far, because it's not like what he meant was unclear.

(Unless one finds the question "buy why mean it that way?" to be perplexing)

That was much more unusual when Prince did it in the early '80s than it is today. The article is a bit fluffy, yes, but I'm not sure that line is the best example.

The past is a different country.

In the 1980s, it was indeed very strange to do that, especially in the official names of songs and albums. It was something kids or the illiterate did. It was embarrassing for an adult to use 4 for 'for' in anything important, even art. Today, that is not strange at all, it is common slang.

Prince is one of the reasons why we don't see that as strange today. He was one of the first to (re)introduce doing that on purpose in a major work of popular culture.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180310080910/https://jarretthe...

https://vimeo.com/102959171

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc&t=120s

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820457

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820971

jcl on April 9, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Jarrett Heather presents: Word Crimes (2014)

Love the song and video -- great to see the behind-the-scenes and in-jokes.

One thing I'm still curious about is the lyric: "You should never / write words using numbers / unless you're seven / or your name is Prince" -- particularly, whether it was an intentional reference to the movie "Se7en". If it was, it seems like a missed opportunity in the video.

DonHopkins on April 9, 2020 | prev [–]

Funny, I thought the symbol for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince was informally pronounced and spelled "BRUCE", which is less cumbersome to speak and spell than the official alternative (which is unspeakable unspellable silence).

His PR company sent this memorandum around to the press and industry, including step-by-step downloading, installation, and usage instructions for Macintosh and PC, of a special [BRUCE] font with just one unpronounceable [BRUCE] symbol, to be used when referring to The Artist in print. I guess Weird Al didn't get the memo.

https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html

>Why, the ``Bruce'' font? Because someone jokingly suggested that because it was way too cumbersome to say, ``that symbol guy'' or whatever, it'd be much easier to give the symbol a name, and that name should be ``Bruce.'' So there.

>[BRUCE] Background: On June 7, 1993, mega-star Prince surprised fans and the entertainment industry when he announced that he was separating from his band New Power Generation and changing his name. At that time, the performer legally changed his name to the symbol "[BRUCE]", which has no verbal pronunciation or spelling. He did not reveal his reason for the change.

>The "[BRUCE]" is now the artist's legal name and should be used whenever referring to him in print. However the first time he is referenced in a story, you may wish to use the phrase "[BRUCE] (the artist formerly known as Prince)" to avoid confusion. Thereafter please use the [BRUCE] font.

>To obtain a copy of the [BRUCE] font, which can be easily installed on any Macintosh or IBM compatible PC, please contact Lisa McCormick, Lages & Associates at 714/453-8080. Or the fonts are available onlilne from CompuServe.

>To download the fonts from CompuServe, GO WBRECORDS after logging on, then SEARCH from the LIBRARIES menu for PRNFON.ZIP (for the PC version) or PRNFON.SIT (for the Macintosh). Please follow the instructions in the readme file for any updates on how to load the font on your computer. The fonts are located in Library 2 (the Warner Bros. Library).

Want the Original Prince Symbol Font? Here You Go...

https://techguylabs.com/episodes/1284/want-original-prince-s...

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/prince-font-install-love-symb...

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jvj2ss4jfymvir1/AADXW3RWGwgykj1mg...

https://www.bustle.com/articles/156408-a-princes-symbol-font...

>Though it's become an undeniable piece of musical iconography and a supreme emblem of everything he represents, the meaning of Prince's symbol actually goes far deeper than being just an exercise in artistic branding. Chosen for its impracticality and difficulty to reproduce, the symbol was a way for a fed-up Prince to mess with Warner Bros., his record label, who were critical of the speed of his output, as a way to negotiate the contract he had with them.

>In 1993, when Prince changed his name to an untypeable and unspeakable symbol, it caused problems beyond his record label. Music journalists everywhere had no way that they could feature him in their publications without having a name. So, Prince came up with the perfect solution, creating his very own custom-designed font which substituted a capital P with Prince's symbol.

What happened to HN... A few years ago type of article wouldn't have even been acknowledged on this site. Forgive me if I am missing something here..

It’s an interesting technical problem in a time before widespread internet. Something you can’t just put in a press release. Something you can’t describe.

> Since, obviously, the symbol did not exist on a computer keyboard, Warner Bros. sent floppy discs to media outlets containing a digital rendition of the image, although most gradually landed on referring to him as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” Television outlets were also provided with a brief video featuring the symbol, punctuated with an appropriately iconic-sounding digital clank, similar to the ones film companies used when their logos appeared in film credits.

As a researcher of LLMs and a student of semiotics, I find this piece to be cultural-politically interesting, especially from a socio-cybernetic perspective

This is about an intellectual property dispute, which seems fairly on point.

With an added dash of the hacker ethos of sticking it to "the man". In this case, the record labels.

It was a big deal at the time in 1993. Everybody in the music and multimedia and press industries received a copy of his floppy disk in the mail with his "Princely" font, with instructions on how and when to use it. And people on the cutting edge of digital technology could even download it from CompuServe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38964005

Prince's death was posted on HN and had basically the same criticism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11543668

Look at the evidence.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Plenty of submissions and comments of this subject for several years.

HN hasn't changed, we do.

So, I ask an honest question and get downvoted (or stripped). Seems like HN people ARE getting worse, and way more petty. smh.

Not all of us live in this zone and some of us do want to understand people's thinking without getting hated on. Guess I'll move on to a safer place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com