Prince, ‘My Name Is Prince’: A rose by any other name

Plus: the first great rave album, The Prodigy Experience

Prince
‘My Name Is Prince’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 7 on October 11, 1992

1. My name is Prince and I am funky

Do you like your name?

Is your name a source of power, a part of your identity? Perhaps your name is a family heirloom, a delicate braid connecting you to previous generations. Maybe your name was chosen for its special meaning, or maybe you’re more like Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction (“I’m American, honey. Our names don’t mean shit.”)

My name is Bernard, which is something of a Primark sweater of a name: dull but functional.

You’d be surprised at how many regional pronunciations of Bernard exist. Americans stretch it out—“Ber-nawrd”—so it almost rhymes with “Die Hard”, which is fun. Australians and English people elide the middle letters, pronouncing it like “Beh-nid”.

Here in Ireland, it is unmistakably pronounced as “Burn-Nerd”. Small children find this hilarious, and they love to put a heavy stress on the “Nerd” part. My own daughter regularly mocks me about it and asks why I don’t change it.

“But that’s my name!” I say.

“Get a better one, nerd,” she replies.

I’m not sure I want to change it though. Your name is such a fundamental part of who you are. A new name would feel like a new identity.

2. I did not come to funk around

In the United States, names have a complicated history. Enslaved people had their names taken from them, and often were appointed new names by the people who enslaved them. A cruel slaveowner joke was to give some slaves very regal names, such as Caeser, King, Queen—and Prince.

Slavery wasn’t that long ago, historically speaking. The grandchildren of those freed in the Civil War were the people who gave us the first generation of popular music. For example, a slave who was forced to work for the Confederacy had a grandson who became a famous jazz pianist: Duke Ellington.

Duke Ellington’s real name was Edward, but he chose the regal stage name himself, as did his contemporary William “Count” Basie. Both men picked these names as a reflection of their lofty ambitions.

Another person who picked a regal stage name was a Louisana jazzman called John Lewis Nelson. He played around Minneapolis in the 40s under the name Prince Nelson, although he wasn’t as successful as Duke or The Count, and failed to land a record deal.

In 1958, Nelson fathered a son, and decided that this boy would succeed where he failed. He named the boy Prince.

So, you see, Prince wasn’t lying when he said his name was Prince. It’s not an honorific. It’s not a nickname or a stage name. He was, and always has been, Prince.

And Prince was fully aware of the history that came with that name, including the associations with slavery, as well as his father’s expectations. A piece in the Quietus says:

“In his unfinished memoirs, Prince describes his mother’s eyes lighting up, teaching him to write [his name], conferring onto him his father’s sexy authority. Prince never tired of trying to redeem this frustrated musician.”

3. God was worried until he heard me sing

My daughter recently surprised me by asking if she could change her name.

Not a big change—she just wants to legally adopt her preferred spelling. Still, it still came as a bit of a shock. Kids these days seem so cavalier about their identities, chopping and changing everything in the name of clearer self-expression.

I sometimes wonder who Prince really was in 1992, and if he even really knew himself.

Obviously, we all know what happens to Prince in the 90s. He released ‘My Name Is Prince’ (a song in which he states that his name is Prince twenty times) and then, almost immediately after, he changed his name to an unpronounceable emoji:

Now that’s comedy.

Prince changed his name because of a creative dispute with his label, Warner, with whom he had just signed a $100 million record deal. He said, “Prince is the name that my Mother gave me at birth. Warner Brothers took the name, trademarked it. I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Brothers.”

If we see ‘My Name Is Prince’ as the opening salvo in this battle with WB, then the song takes on a different meaning. He’s not saying “My name is Prince”; he’s saying, “The name, Prince, is mine”.

4. When it come to funk, I am a junkie

But I think there’s something else going on here too.

Prince always had a slightly fraught relationship with hip-hop. He tried rapping a few times in the early 80s before declaring the form to be a creative dead end. But hip-hop didn’t die, and songs like Public Enemy’s ‘Fight The Power’ made him realise that rap music wasn’t going away.

(There’s an excellent deep dive into Prince’s rap career here.)

The problem was that Prince—the man who could normally do everything—wasn’t an especially strong rapper. His solution was to bring in Tony M, the guy with the deep voice on ‘Gett Off’, who was arguably an even less good rapper than Prince.

‘My Name Is Prince’ feels like Prince’s attempt to jump the hip-hop bandwagon. The lyrics are written in the grand tradition of rappers introducing themselves and then telling you what they’re here to say, something that started with the Sugarhill Gang back in 1979. Tony M appears at the end of the song to spit some bars. They’re… fine.

Prince pushed hard for ‘My Name Is Prince’ to be the opening single from The Love Symbol Album, arguing that the hip-hop elements would make him relevant to a younger audience. Warner Brothers disagreed and pushed for a more traditional Prince song, ‘7’.

Prince won the argument, but ‘My Name Is Prince’ flopped in the states, failing to make Top 30. The great pioneer Prince seemed to be chasing a trend for the first time in his career, and he was being left behind.

Annoyingly, Warner Brothers were right about ‘7’. It went Top 10. It is very good.

This moment must have been a crisis of confidence for Prince. Every Prince has to become a King someday, but people like Dre and Chuck D were occupying his throne.

Maybe—and I’m just speculating here—that’s part of why he changed his name. The craziness of the Warners deal (a hundred million dollars!), the shifting musical landscape, the disappointment of ‘My Name Is Prince’.

It must have been tempting to hit the eject button and try not being Prince for a while. Maybe a new name can lead to a new destiny?

That’s just speculation. I have no idea what really happened in the mind of His Purple Majesty. All I know is that if you do change your name, make sure it’s something people can pronounce. Otherwise, people will just call you The Artist Formerly Known As Bernard until you get so annoyed that you just change it back.

Have you ever thought about changing your name? Do you think Prince was an underrated rapper? Share your thoughts on this piece in the comments:

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