As Prince took his fight with Warner Bros. public—for his freedom and his masters—he changed his stage name to an unpronounceable symbol as a direct assault on his record label, who owned his birth name. While Warner would shelve his next album temporarily, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and the New Power Generation had actually created an eclectic and well-received pop effort with 1995’s THE GOLD EXPERIENCE.
THE UPRISING by Dean Van Nguyen
Prince urged Warner vice president of special projects for Black music Marylou Badeaux to talk her bosses into forgetting all common marketing strategies so he could release what he wanted, when he wanted. “I would tell him that it was counterproductive, that people can only absorb so much music from one artist at a time,” she told Billboard in 2016. “His answer was, ‘What am I supposed to do? The music just flows through me.’ ” That a company owned and controlled his name—as well as any music released under that name—was also a point of contention in the public feud. Not owning his own masters tugged at Prince’s purple lapels—his condemnations of the music industry became increasingly loud. He was one of the most gifted artists to ever walk the planet— more deity than mortal. Yet the Kid considered himself no higher on the hierarchy than a slave. In 1993, the situation hit its apex when Prince announced that he would no longer go by the first name on his birth certificate, but rather the unpronounceable hieroglyph he’d launched into the cultural lexicon the previous year with the Love Symbol album. The funky emblem encapsulated the artist’s virtuosity by blending the gender symbols for a man and woman with a musical instrument in a manner that resembled a cross. As Margaret Rhodes wrote last year in Wired , “It’s impossible to know the depths of Prince’s intentions, but the Love Symbol swiftly harmonizes ideas often in conflict—man vs. woman, sex vs. religion.” From the flames of the conflict emerged The Gold Experience , released on Warner Bros. in 1995. The first album to be released under the Love Symbol moniker, the music became lost in the crush of the battle with the label and blurred by the negative headlines surrounding its creator. Over two decades on, it remains something of a forgotten masterwork in Prince’s 24-karat canon—a record that
Artistry is about forward motion. It’s that commitment to adding new brushstrokes to a body of work that can never feel complete or absolute. Leave it to the historians, chroniclers, and fans to gauge a legacy. While we’re gathered here to get through this thing called life, artistry is going onstage armed with a purple guitar shaped like an unpronounceable symbol and “SLAVE” scrawled across its face because iconography matters. Prince Rogers Nelson was serious enough about his artistry to give up his name. The Purple One had been locked into a marriage of convenience with Warner Bros. since the late 1970s, when the corporate titan joined forces with the Minneapolis teen virtuoso and gave him the tools to climb the highest peaks of Planet Pop. But by the early ’90s, the relationship was beginning to lacerate itself, wounded by the indomitable beast that was Prince’s own irrepressible genius. Warner’s plan for all its high-profile artists was set in granite: drop an album every two or three years, pluck a handful of radio-friendly singles, and watch the record hit Purple Rain –level sales. But Prince’s mind didn’t grind like that. The Kid was a relentless creative. His output couldn’t be confined to the immovable margins of a company spreadsheet. When one album was ready to be released, Prince already had a handful more in the chamber. His famous vault swelled with unreleased pieces. One of his many plans was to put out 700,000 copies of blues music free with a guitar magazine. But the idea was thwarted by Warner’s executives, desperate to stop their star’s enormous inventiveness from diluting his commercial viability. “That intense creativity,” says Michael B. Nelson, a trombone player in Prince’s band throughout the 1990s (though no relation), “it was certainly at odds with how any record company would want to handle an artist and how they would perceive making money with an artist.”
( opposite ) Prince, with his notorious “SLAVE” message, during his Ultimate Live Experience Tour at Wembley Arena in London. Photo by Ian Dickson/Redferns.
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