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Needs a (2016). 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
by frmersdog 1y ago
Needs a (2016).
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).
- egypturnash 1y agoTo name a thing is to own it. 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.
- wodenokoto 1y agoI also learned of prince while he was the artist formerly known as prince and it took me a long time to learn that it wasn’t some quirky stage name but that he actually was an artist that was formerly named prince. Even to this day, calling him prince feels like an abbreviation.
- Animats 1y ago> Needs a (2016). Was that an obituary? "The former artist known as Prince" died in 2016. Did that symbol ever make it into Unicode?
- cormullion 1y agoUnicode doesn’t allow any logos or “personal characters” so it wouldn’t be accepted for inclusion…
- kazinator 1y agoWow, it actually has gatekeeping!