Publication: MetroNews [US]
Date: June 11, 1993
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Title: " -- Symbol Of A Midlife Revolution For Prince?"
Written By: Earl Swift

Time plays hell with your head. You spend your teens and 20s convinced, deep down, that you'll be the exception to that business about getting old and dying. In your early 30s you acknowledge, strictly as an abstract, that OK, maybe someday you might be pushing little daisies.

Then you hit your middle 30s, and as you lie awake one night you suddenly realize your life is already half over, and you don't care for the way it's headed.

You rise the next morning with a skull full of madness, a drive to make changes. Clean breaks. New beginnings. Maybe you buy a sports car, or drop your old wardrobe. Become a body nazi. Quit your job. Begin an affair. Read a book. Move.

Or, if you happen to be an internationally celebrated musical genius, perhaps you throw out your name and adopt a new one that cannot be uttered.

That happened Monday, when he whom we've known as Prince turned 35 and, in an apparent fit of middle-aged craziness, dumped his band and changed his name to (symbol).

"From now on," a news release from New York-based Reach Media Relations announced, "Prince will be referred to as (symbol), the combination symbol for male and female which also served as the title for his most recent multiplatinum album."

When I first heard this I though that the former Prince's bent for newsmaking had finally reached the level of profound absurdity.

But I've had a full day to think about it, and I think the diminutive musician may be onto something by adopting a symbol in place of a more traditional form of address.

This is the age of the image, after all. Of the quick cut, of promoting style as an equal or better to substance. "Stylized" is today synonymous with "cool."

So why choose a name, when you can go by an icon that not only identifies who you are, but what you represent?

Where (symbol) went wrong wasn't in changing his name to a little squiggly thing, it was failing to offer a pronunciation guide, so that no one, his publicists included, knows how to say who he is.

He provided no phonetic clues on "(symbol)," his last album: Some reviews called it "Androgyny," others labeled it the former Prince's "untitled" disc, and the Village Voice referred to it as "Prince XV."

"There is no pronunciation for it," one of (symbol)'s publicists told me Thursday. "(Disc jockeys) just have to deal with it. They just have to explain what the symbol looks like."

This is a problem. The new name works OK in print -- it's certainly simpler to spell that P-R-I-N-C-E -- but (symbol) is a man who makes his living with sound, and he's chosen to be called something no one can hear because no one can speak it.

"MTV, whenever they say his name -- well, they don't say it, but they use his symbol and they run a boingg, it's this sound they have whenever they say it," the publicist told me. "Maybe we're going into a new age in which people have sounds instead of names, and Prince is the innovator."

Could be, but let's hope that instead (symbol) tells us how to say (symbol), before the notion behind it is discarded out of frustration. The idea of going by so concise, so streamlined a name is appealing.

In fact, when I turn 35 next month, I'm tempted to follow suit, provided I can arrive at a symbol that captures my spiritual essence. I could take the easy way out, and simply adopt a shorter name. Like "Prince." No one's using that one any more, it'd be a royal promotion from Earl.

But the symbol thing is hip. I could go by 10, or "The Power of 10," which certainly has a studly ring. Or I could write my name >, and ask you to call me "Greater." If I relly hoped for omnipresence, I'd just become a comma.

My friends have tried to be helpful. One urged me to adopt a small drawing of lips. Another suggested a bloody dagger. I'm unsure, however, that I'd be comfortable hearing myself referred to as "Mouth" or "Slice," and all of these names could be too easily forged if I lost my checkbook. I have six weeks to work on it.