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Behind Prince's Name Change And Label Woes

11:14 a.m. · October 20, 2011 · by Andrew Winistorfer

Later this month, St. Martin's Press is releasing Prince: Inside The Music and the Masks, an extensive biography of Prince. Needless to say, there are probably crazy stories in the book. But the only one we know for sure is this one that is on Vanity Fair's website right now, which details Prince's name change in the early '90s.

In case you're not in the know, in the early '90s, Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, mostly so he could release different music on smaller labels. It's long been accepted that this was so he could renegotiate his contract, but according to the story in Vanity Fair, he did that cause he didn't think his name mattered so much. Here's an excerpt. Read the whole thing here:

Some reporters claimed Prince was discarding a celebrated trademark. But Prince felt when the lights went down in a concert hall, and he spoke into a microphone, “it doesn’t matter what your name is.” Jokes and references to “Symbol Man,” “the Glyph,” and “What’s-His-Symbol” crept into stories. As did accusations this symbol was part of a renegotiation strategy or scheme to escape his contract. Prince claimed he was just drawing a line in the sand. “Things change here.” He was seeing which media outlets respected him. And if something frustrated him, Prince remembered that Muhammad Ali saw reporters and fight fans call him Cassius Clay for years. Privately, however, Prince knew this decision was shrinking his audience even more.

“It was the worst period of my life,” he later told Salon.com. “I was being made physically ill by what was going on.” But he had started on this path and couldn’t give in. He had to keep putting on a brave front. He told another writer at Paisley Park, “Here there is solitude, silence. I like to stay in this controlled environment.” People were saying he was out of touch. Fine. He’d create 25 to 30 albums and “catch up with Sinatra so you tell me who’s out of touch.” Detractors could say what they want. “One thing I ain’t gonna run out of is music.” A magazine wrote that fulfilling his Warner contract with vault songs while releasing new ones somewhere else as didn’t “hold much promise as a legal theory.” And before Prince knew it, the media had a new name for him. After a British journalist described him as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, others adopted the phrase. It seemingly ridiculed his decision, but American newspaper writers used it, too. So did TV stations. He frowned. “I’m not the Artist Formerly Known as Anything. Use my name.”

By July 1993, he wanted to release a song as on another label. Warner chairman Mo Ostin said no. They could find a way “but they’re afraid of the ripple effect, that everybody would want to do it,” Prince felt. But Warner wasn’t the only problem. It was the entire industry. “There’s just a few people with all the power.” After declining to play the MTV Music Awards “suddenly, I can’t get a video on MTV, and you can’t get a hit without that.” He came to respect Pearl Jam, who had recently decided not to film any more videos.