Because of my age, Prince was not "Prince" for much of my childhood; I was introduced to him as "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" and just assumed that that was all we'd ever call him in the future.
Renaming oneself is surely not any new phenomenon, but the reasons seem to get more and more interesting. Malcolm Little famously erased his "slave name" and replaced it with an X. I also just recently learned about FM-2030. And then there's the self-naming practices that grew around the hacking and early web scenes, and which still features prominently in places like the FGC and furry fandom.
So you've got a guy fighting cynical capitalist legalism, a guy attempting to erase the detritus of colonialism from his identity, another guy trying to erase his ties to tribalism, and then a bunch of people trying to mask their identities in presumed Dark Forest (concluding in, essentially, the creation of alter egos).
Own yourself. Own fragments of yourself. Own your public self as something separate from your private self. Own a public self that does things your normal public self would never (be allowed to) do. Own a new identity, maybe it'll replace your main one if it really works out.
Even to this day, calling him prince feels like an abbreviation.
Was that an obituary? "The former artist known as Prince" died in 2016.
Did that symbol ever make it into Unicode?
Um, "You're Prince!" No, I'm not. That's the point of this conversation. I am no longer Prince. Do not call me that.
"Ok. Steve it is then."
As far as I'm concerned, by failing provide something usable himself, he waived any right to ownership or interest, and everyone was free to apply whatever placeholder label they want when they need to refer to him. It's no longer any of his business. He opted out of having any say in it.
In other words this is not a Dayta vs Dahta situation.
I'm lucky in that I have no reason to refer to him for any reason that doesn't involve his music or performances from the time when he was still named Prince, so as far as I'm concerned, for all of those references at least, it's still valid to refer to that artist by that name, and it doesn't matter that some other artist exists at some other time. It's a Prince album, a song written by Prince, Prince played pretty great guitar in a special one time, etc.
I bet he still collected royalty checks that Prince earned and retained ownership of all his posessions and copyrights even though he was supposedly not Prince any more. Oh I guess Prince, while still Prince, had the right to gift everything to the new person same as to a child or anyone else, but then that comes with a pretty big tax which I bet he didn't pay at the time of this massive transaction.
They retain claim on any rights of being a Musk family member?
If either of those then yes of course. But that's not the case is it?
Talking about little bobby drop tables. name = NULL would at least be disaster safe.
> They retain claim on any rights of being a Musk family member?
I don't know. It sounds like Musk would love to not claim rights as family members to avoid having to provide support. He's not as rich of a man as he was last week. poor guy
My understanding was that he couldn’t use the name Prince for a while for legal reasons. The logo was a clever trick. He couldn’t call himself Prince. He could have done a full name change, but would have lost a certain amount of brand recognition in doing so.
Adopting the emblem with no pronunciation meant people resorted to calling him “the artist formerly known as prince”, referring to the name Prince without violating the laws prohibiting him from using that name.
Imagine if he made a dating site.
If everyone started doing it, people would quickly begin ignoring it, or a standard Unicode mechanism would have been developed.
And now, his name has reverted to Prince.
The Legend of Prince’s Special Custom-Font Symbol Floppy Disks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600091 - April 2016 (18 comments)
MisterTea•8mo ago