Prince literally wanted us to call him a symbol with no explanation.
It took me years until I finally learned why he did that. It had something to do with the music industry owning his name. He reclaimed ownership of all his music and art and made a departure from the extortionate music industry.
Could’ve picked something easier to pronounce, though.
It was actually brilliant. Got everyone talking about him without really giving up ‘Prince’ in the public consciousness.
Never thought of it that way but yeah. Gave up his name without actually giving it up. Brilliant. That guy was savy as fuck. Also a genius.
He chose an unpronouncable symbol because it allowed him to break his recording contract.
I seeee! Never heard the finer details of that whole thing (I was young and not super into his stuff anyway). Smart guy though by the sounds of it!
I asked GPT why:
In the early 1990s, Prince was embroiled in a contractual dispute with Warner Bros., his record company. He felt they were restraining his creativity by not allowing him to release albums as frequently as he desired. In 1993, in an act of rebellion, he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, which was a combination of the male and female gender symbols, in order to free himself from his contract obligations to Warner Bros. Since the symbol had no pronunciation, he was often referred to as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” during that period. He returned to using the name Prince in 2000, after his publishing contract with Warner Bros. expired.
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The comment is talking about prince.
I am le stupid
The unpronounceable symbol :
Hollow circle above downward arrow crossed with a curlicued horn-shaped symbol and then a short bar(known to fans as the “Love Symbol”)
I’m in awe of the outstanding quality of the symbols pic
24 x 28 pixels, 320 bytes, from Wikipedia…
Prince_logo.svg.webp
… if it really was SVG format it would be much greater quality.They may have made the classic “let’s batch-optimize all images for the web” or maybe using a CDN provider, either with wrong settings.
Yeah SVG would make it almost endlessly scalable.
Yes … and I did not find the original SVG but I found this 800 pixels :
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Prince_logo.svg/800px-Prince_logo.svg.png
From this :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)Nice - i also found lots of prince wikis, but not the svg
I know now what to hear tonight, perfect
Maybe you know, did he want to be called “the artist”? And then everyone added “formerly known as Prince”?
Artists be like that. Stage names have been a thing for quite some time.
Writers use pen names too. I’m kinda confused why OP even thinks this is notable?
Maybe they don’t. They never even finished the sentence, so maybe they were going to say “…is incredibly mundane and unnoteworthy”
Isn’t that just kind of… how names are supposed to work?
I had to double back to your comment because at first I glances at it and thought yeah… Then I thought about it some more and thought … Yes! That is exactly how they work. Papers plus or minus but that is the way they work. We all agree upon it and bam. You are now named!
The fact there is a dude out there who wants to be called “Buckethead” and wears a bucket of KFC over his head but also has the sickest guitar skills ever is even weirder.
Never heard of Buckethead before so I had to look him up. HOLY FUCK can that dude shred.
I found out about him in Guitar Hero 2(?) because Soothsayer is on there and was the only song that used all 4 fret buttons even on the easiest settings (which would normally limit the fret buttons needed to just the first 3). I couldn’t physically press all 4 buttons at once (the distance between them was such that my pinky didn’t quite reach enough to actually press the last button in) which was why I only ever played at Medium or lower.
Pro tip: it’s easier to leave your whole hand shifted up and reach back for the green with your index finger.
5 buttons no? Medium used 4 and easy used 3.
JK Rowling also writes as Robert Galbraith.
Does that qualify as irony?
Like Rafael Cruz’s proposal that everyone else must use their given name, TERFs have rules for thee not for me.
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Irony of the subtype heavy.
In case people don’t know, JK Rowling’s pen name is a reference to Robert Galbraith Heath, a psychiatrist who experimented with gay conversion therapy in the 60s and 70s using surgically implanted electrodes on gay men’s brains. He claims to have “cured” one of them. He did lots of other fucked up things too, and of course Rowling denies her pen name has anything to do with him. FWIW, she also claims she’s not a bigot, but her words and actions clearly indicate otherwise.
JK Rowling’s pen name is a reference to Robert Galbraith Heath, a psychiatrist who experimented with gay conversion therapy in the 60s and 70s using surgically implanted electrodes on gay men’s brains.
Unless thats some conservative dog whistle I don’t know about, (and I’m no JKR apologist) your statement directly contradicts her own official answer as to the origin of the name:
Why the name Robert Galbraith?
I chose Robert because it’s one of my favourite men’s names, because Robert F Kennedy is my hero and because, mercifully, I hadn’t used it for any of the characters in the Potter series or The Casual Vacancy. Galbraith came about for a slightly odd reason. When I was a child, I really wanted to be called ‘Ella Galbraith’, and I’ve no idea why. I don’t even know how I knew that the surname existed, because I can’t remember ever meeting anyone with it. Be that as it may, the name had a fascination for me. I actually considered calling myself L A Galbraith for the Strike series, but for fairly obvious reasons decided that initials were a bad idea. Odder still, there was a well-known economist called J K Galbraith, something I only remembered by the time it was far too late. I was completely paranoid that people might take this as a clue and land at my real identity, but thankfully nobody was looking that deeply at the author’s name.and of course Rowling denies her pen name has anything to do with him.
What’s wrong with LAG other than computer lag?
It’s British slang for a convict or prison term. It’s not very common now, but “old lag” used to mean a habitual criminal. No idea of the etymology though - maybe related to a lag (in time)?
I don’t see how. The initials JKR dont appear anywhere in there, is there something Im missing?
Can you think of another author who uses JK before their surname? It would have been a pretty big hint as soon as people realised JK Galbraith didn’t exist.
None, but it still feels like someone wanted to add to her list of crimes. Like is he famous? Is it likely she knew of some random scientist before she came up with the pen name?
Plus her name is literally Joanne Rowling. She already had one initial.
Sorry, I confused myself and thought you were replying to a later comment - I thought you were asking how people would have guessed JK Rowling and JK Galbraith were the same person.
I think it’s fair to say Robert Galbraith-Heath is an (in)famous psychiatrist. I remember his name from my student days. As for her purposely using the name of a conversion therapist as a pen name in order to… be more homophobic? That seems like a bit of a leap to me, but idk her bigoted views in any real depth tbh.
And I looked up the other name before I realised I’d confused myself and found there was a famous JK Galbraith too, according to wikipedia He sounds like a bit of a dick too. Sorry for the confusion, I need sleep.
No worries, I do the same thing sometimes. I hope you sleep well!
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I agree Noble Shift.
I second BarqsHasBite
right on ShotgunSamurai
Lady Gaga:
All we hear is, radio Gaga
Exactly.
Where’s Lord Gugu, btw?
…yeah? What about that fact?
Like a lot of celebrities?
All I know is that I love it when they call me big papa.
Often, while waving their hands in the air like they just don’t care.
I’d love to see Republicans up in arms over preferred names and pronouns try giving Alice Cooper shit for calling himself Alice Cooper instead of Vincent Furnier.
They love him after he called transgender people a “fad” so
I mean, have you seen/heard her perform? She’s very convincing.
yeah her music videos are absolutely mesmerizing. I would do anything she tells me.
Just wait until you hear about Engelbert Humperdinck.
Humperdink! Humperdink! Humperdink!
I bet he was born John Smith, and Engelbert Humperdinck is a stage name that he chose for some insane reason
Steph-Steph-ooh-la-la doesn’t have quite the same ring.
