Dig If You Will the Picture by Ben Greenman

Author:Ben Greenman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Section Three

METHOD, MADNESS

10

WHAT’S MY NAME

Why He Changed His Name, and What That Wrought

Any discussion of freedom and Prince has to contend with the extended period in which he sought freedom from Prince. On June 7, 1993, his thirty-fifth birthday, Prince announced that he no longer wished to be referred to by his birth name. Instead, he asked that others call him by his new name, the squiggly glyph that had appeared the previous fall on the cover of the Love Symbol album.

He had always had a penchant for unconventional typography. Controversy had newspaper-like headlines and a normal Gothic font for the title of the fake paper, the Controversy Daily, but in the top right corner there was Prince’s name, with superfluous floating slits (or were they pupils?) inside the “P” and the “R” and an oddly curved top on the “E.” Dirty Mind was even stranger. At first, the letters seemed normal, but a closer inspection revealed that they were decoratively edged, like they had been cut out with special scissors. Most people associated Prince with the Purple Rain logotype, originally commissioned by Warner Bros. and adapted by Jay Vigon for the record cover and all associated singles. But there were dedicated fonts for every album—for Lovesexy, for Batman, for Graffiti Bridge. And then, of course, there was the famed Prince shorthand. In 1980, on Dirty Mind, he recorded a surprisingly nuanced assessment of a threesome called “When You Were Mine.” A year later, on Controversy, he recorded a silly but entirely enjoyable guitar rave-up about masturbation called “Jack U Off.” The stylized spelling took hold: The next album, 1999, had “All the Critics Love U in New York.” Purple Rain had “Take Me with U” and “I Would Die 4 U.” As he released more records, he began using more abbreviations in addition to “4” and “U” (his debut, “For You,” stuck out like the sorest of sore thumbs): “to” became “2” and “are” became “R.”1

The Love Symbol was a clean break, and a messy one as well. All lines, swirls, and loops, the symbol mystified people at first. Was it a doodle that had come to Prince in a dream? A pilcrow clambering up an ampersand? Reporters quickly sussed out the meaning: it was a glyph that combined the astrological symbols for Venus and Mars and added in a kind of royal trumpet (alarum!). Oh, why describe when you can show? It looks like this: .

And why just show when you can show while quoting from an official document? In late December 1992, Prince’s lawyers filed four trademark applications for the use of , which they referred to as “Love Symbol #2.”

—U.S. Reg. No. 1,849,644 for entertainment services

—U.S. Reg. No. 1,871,900 for posters, publications, bumper stickers, and stickers

—U.S. Reg. No. 1,860,429 for clothing

—U.S. Reg. No. 1,822,461 for sound recordings and videotapes featuring music and entertainment

Down in the search fields, the trademark office tried to describe the symbol: “Brass instruments, including trumpets, bugles, tubas, trombones, hunting horns and post horns; Bugles; Trombones; Trumpets; Tubas.

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