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It is impossible to mention Prince without his famous Love Symbol #2. In a contract dispute with Warner Bros. Prince temporarily changed his stage name to this unpronounceable symbol. However, this symbol symbolized more than a contract dispute. It was a combination of the traditional male and female symbols, signifying his blend of genders and his androgyny.

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For 14 years, The Artist Formerly Known As "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" - who was born with the name Prince Rogers Nelson - was merely known by his first name: Prince. Starting with his 1978 debut, For You, the funk singer published 13 albums under that one-word moniker, including his quintessential record Purple Rain... until 1992, when he suddenly and inexplicably changed his name from "Prince" to an unpronounceable symbol (seen above). With the tragic news this Thursday that Prince has died at the age of 57, you may find yourself looking back on his storied life and career and wondering what Prince's symbol meant, where it came from, and why he adopted it in the first place.

For something that became so iconic, Prince's symbol apparently had a very utilitarian beginning: as a tool for contract negotiations with his label, Warner Bros. According to Rolling Stone, the label wanted Prince to slow his pace - he had released an album every year since his debut except for 1983 - for fear of flooding the market. Unwilling to acquiesce to their request, Prince actually increased his pace, and it became not uncommon for him to release two albums per year - and in one case (2004), three. The title of the first album in this new wave, released in 1992, was the infamous unpronounceable symbol.

The following year, Prince doubled down by officially changing his stage name to this same symbol. In the words of Rolling Stone, Prince employed this symbol "largely to mess with [Warner Bros.]," it being so difficult to reproduce. The label was forced to send out a mass mailing of floppy discs containing a whole new font for publications to use when writing about their artist. (If you don't have the font in question, the closest you can come to typing the symbol on most computers is: O(+> .) Many people didn't even try, simply referring to the singer as "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" - a name that stuck. And, since TAFKAP had copyrighted the symbol as "Love Symbol #2," the album in question became widely known as the "Love Symbol Album."

But what did the symbol actually symbolize, other than a frustrated artist's clever subversion? It derives from a combination of the symbols for both male and female, and it supposedly "entered his consciousness during meditation," according to a report by The Independent. Given that - and the fact that he named it the "love symbol," - it's clear that it had a much deeper meaning to Prince than a simple negotiating tool.

Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images Sport/Getty Images

In fact, the symbol meant so much to him that he continued to use it long after he changed his stage name back to Prince... which he did in 2000 when his contract with Warner Bros. finally expired. But "Love Symbol #2" had already become so iconic that it was difficult to disassociate the artist from the symbol, so he kept using it in his jewelry, his album artwork - even his guitar (as seen above). It's hard to think of a more appropriate symbol for a musician with such an eccentric and androgynous style

Now, with Prince's unexpected passing, it's also hard to think of a more appropriate symbol for us to use to express our love for the legend than his own "Love Symbol #2."
Images: Warner Bros.

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What Did Prince's Symbol Mean? It Was Both A Contractual Tool & Meaningful Emblem

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For 14 years, The Artist Formerly Known As "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" - who was born with the name Prince Rogers Nelson - was merely known by his first name: Prince. Starting with his 1978 debut, For You, the funk singer published 13...

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This is the cover of Prince's 1980 album, Dirty Mind. It is known as Prince's most creative album, setting the artistic path that he would undertake for the rest of his career. On the cover, he has a jacket on his shoulder, but only wears a scarf, briefs, and thigh high stockings. This album defined his career in many ways, including the beginning of the fashion icon that he would later become to be.

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Prince was also known for using a high falsetto in his songs, before using falsetto was the norm in pop music. This song exemplified Prince's falsetto usage with a song about love. Prince's blend of his natural tenor range with his ability to effortlessly shift into a falsetto blended the line between genders.

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Prince & The Revolution - Kiss (Official Music Video)

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Prince #27- Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Artists

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Prince #27- Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Artists

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For Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Artists, the excerpt for Prince at #27 was Ahmir Thompson, also known as Questlove. Questlove mentions how big of an influence Prince was, not only about his androgynous image, but his impact on how black people were perceived in the 80s.

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In 2004 - 50 years after Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studios and cut "That's All Right" - Rolling Stone celebrated rock & roll's first half-century in grand style, assembling a panel of 55 top musicians, writers and industry executives (everyone from Keith Richards to ?uestlove of the Roots) and asking them to pick the most influential artists of the rock & roll era. The resulting list of 100 artists, published in two issues of Rolling Stone in 2004 and 2005, and updated in 2011, is a broad survey of rock history, spanning Sixties heroes (the Beatles) and modern insurgents (Eminem), and touching on early pioneers (Chuck Berry) and the bluesmen who made it all possible (Howlin' Wolf).

The essays on these top 100 artists are by their peers: singers, producers and musicians. In these fan testimonials, indie rockers pay tribute to world-beating rappers (Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig on Jay-Z), young pop stars honor stylistic godmothers (Britney Spears on Madonna) and Billy Joel admits that Elton John "kicks my ass on piano." Rock & roll is now a music with a rich past. But at its best, it is still the sound of forward motion. As you read this book, remember: This is what we have to live up to.

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In 2004 - 50 years after Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studios and cut "That's All Right" - Rolling Stone celebrated rock & roll's first half-century in grand style, assembling a panel of 55 top musicians, writers and industry executives (everyone from Keith Richards to ?uestlove of the Roots) and asking them to pick the most influential artists of the rock & roll era.

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Prince was known to be controversial in terms of his public image, especially in the 1980s, when androgyny was just being introduced into pop culture, with others such as David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix. The song "Controversy" was created to address these questions about his sexuality, religion, and gender.  He asked why people kept questioning his being and why they keep trying to make him into what they want him to be and not what he wants to be, a struggle also shared by LGBTQ+ people in the 80s.

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Prince - Controversy (Official Music Video)

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Prince was known for his androgynous fashion style that broke through all types of barriers and conventions about gender and sexuality. He was treated poorly by people who could not stand his flamboyant personality, such as getting pelted with cabbage on stage.

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" If I was your one and only friend-would you run to me if somebody hurt you even if that somebody was me?" - Prince, "If I Was Your Girlfriend"

The 1970s was the Glam Decade. But in some ways the '80s were even glammier. Gender-bending was rife, from synth pop's eyeliner pretty boys to cross-dressing UK stars like Boy George, from Long Island's frightwig rockers Twisted Sister to the Sunset Strip's gaudy parade of mascara metal. Unlike the glitter '70s, the pop charts were overrun not just by straight boys posing as gay or bi, but by actual gay frontmen like Marc Almond, Holly Johnson, and Jimmy Somerville. And for the first time women got in on the glamdrogyny too: Grace Jones, Annie Lennox, Siouxsie Sioux.

Prince was right in the thick of all this ambiguous '80s action. Just check the covers of his records as the decade proceeds. On the back of 1980's Dirty Mind, he poses languidly in black thigh-high stockings, bikini briefs, and little else: an invitation to the kinkiest of reveries. For the front cover of 1981's Controversy, he's fully-clothed this time, but still very much the dainty dandy, sporting eyeliner and blush, and clad in mauve coat, wing-collar, and cravat. On Parade, from 1986, he's wearing mascara and a stomach-baring top that cuts away just below his nipple line. And by 1988's Lovesexy cover, Prince appears as an angelic nude hovering amid lush blooms. In a sly, saucy touch, one flower's stamen-close by the singer's crotch-mimics the arc of an erection.

Even the color that Prince fetishized so flamboyantly had gay overtones. Purple represents gay pride; its paler hue lavender was once code for homosexual pulp fiction and a word to describe marriages where one or both spouses were closeted. Over the centuries the color has also connoted ambiguity, royalty, artifice, and pretentiousness ("purple prose"), all of which fit Prince abundantly. In rock's own lexicon, purple suggests hallucinatory sensory overload, thanks to Jimi Hendrix and more recently Future (aka Future Hendrix), who titled a recent mixtape Purple Reign. But you didn't need to consciously tune into any of these resonances to grasp that Prince's empurpled excess was a way of declaring himself "not like everybody else."

In the early '80s, Prince's unmanly aura was taken as an affront by punk-funkateer Rick James, who also presciently grasped the commercial threat posed-perhaps subconsciously sensing that Prince's deviance would make his own bad-boy image look old-fashioned. In an increasingly one-sided feud, James accused Prince of not only "faking the funk" but being a bad role model. "He's a mentally disturbed young man," James told one interviewer, sounding incongruously prudish. "He's out-to-lunch. You can't take his music seriously. He sings songs about oral sex and incest."

Decades later, recalling the time Prince played support on 1980's Fire It Up tour, James' uncomprehending disgust was still apparent, however much he tried to disguise it as condescension and pity. "I felt sorry for him," he wrote in Memoir of a Super Freak. "Here's this little dude wearing hi-heels, playing this New Wave Rock & Roll... Then at the end of his set he'd take off his trench coat and he'd be wearing little girl's bloomers... The guys in the audience just booed the poor thing to death." Yet Prince's prancing stage antics made him a misfit in mainstream rock as much as in R&B. Supporting those ageing androgynes the Rolling Stones on their 1981 tour of America, Prince was pelted with cabbages.

All this attention, negative and positive-for some rock critics, he'd already become a mascot figure for the dream of a genre-crossing, races-uniting superstar-to-come-went to Prince's head. The result was Controversy and its titular lead single, on which the racially/sexually mixed-up singer presented himself as the Enigma at the roiling center of a vortex of discourse, parroting back the fascinated confusion of his audience and the media: "Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?" By the time of Purple Rain, his mass-market breakthrough 1984 album/movie, Prince's sense of himself verged on the messianic: Not content with naming his backing band the Revolution, he sang, on "I Would Die 4 U", about how "I'm not a woman, I'm not a man/ I am something that you'll never understand." Prince posed himself as a human question mark, a mystery creature who could not be contained by conventional categories, someone whose very being transgressed and transcended any division or boundary that stood in the way of total emancipation.

The culmination of this trajectory was the singer's decision to abandon nomenclature itself as too confining: He swapped his given name Prince for an unpronounceable glyph composed out of the male and female symbols, which, in a concession to the pragmatic needs of everyday discourse, he deigned to translate as The Love Symbol.

Prince's '80s evasion of conventional gender definitions speaks to us now in this trans-aware moment. But it also harks backwards in time to the origins of rock'n'roll in racial mixture and sexual blurring. The earliest ancestral echo is Little Richard-right down to the dainty little mustache they share. Hendrix, another obvious influence on Prince, seems hyper-masculine at first glance: Originally marketed as rock's wild man, he wielded his guitar like a phallus and bombarded audiences with blazing noise. But Jimi was also a dandy; he was drawn to delicate 'n' dreamy ballads as much as virile strutting raunch; on his oceanic-rock masterpiece "1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)," he came over like a child-man seeking womb-like sanctuary from a scary, ruined world in an undersea utopia.

As far as '70s influences go, Prince must have picked up something from the genderqueer Bowie of "John, I'm Only Dancing" and "Boys Keep Swinging"; at his last concert on April 14th, he covered "'Heroes'." But if there's a true glam precursor to Prince, it's probably Bolan more than Bowie. After witnessing him play New York's Ritz Ballroom in 1981, NME's Barney Hoskyns-one of Prince's most perceptive early critics-testified that it was like "like seeing Marc Bolan and Jimi Hendrix in the same body." Prince's "Cream," from 1991, is a fairly blatant homage to T.Rex's one Billboard smash, "Bang a Gong," also known as "Get It On."

The bopping elf and the purple pixie had a bunch of things in common. They were both petite; they were both lovely little movers onstage; they both released a string of decade-defining singles that funked as hard as they rocked. Bolan's nubile boogie-groove (which he nicknamed "the slide") anticipated the urgent-yet-languorous feel of Prince tunes like "I Wanna Be Your Lover" and "Dirty Mind"; in both cases, the love-action conjured is a reciprocal grind rather than a unilateral wham-bam body-slam. Above all, what the singers shared was a vocal quality of feline narcissism: A purring, honeyed rasp with Marc, a fluttery falsetto with Prince, but in both cases it comes over coquettish, suggestive of someone preening and pirouetting in a mirror while knowing all the while they are being watched by rapt eyes.

If a single song crystallizes Prince's persona as Imp of the Polymorphously Perverse, it's "If I Was Your Girlfriend," the second single off Sign O' the Times . It's a delirious fantasy of self-transcendence, the plaint of a man whose yearning to get close to his female lover is so intense that he's come to feel that his own gender is a barrier to ultimate intimacy. If only he could somehow be his woman's best girlfriend as well as her boyfriend, helping her to pick out clothes, confiding and advising, hanging out without the hang-ups and sexual friction caused by the gender divide.

Would you let me wash your hair?
Could I make you breakfast sometime?
Well then, could we just hang out?
I mean, could we go to a movie and cry together?

Right at the song's end it veers off course a little, verging on hetero-male fantasy of the "I think of myself as a lesbian" type. But for the most part, the desire in the song is not really sexual: It's agape rather than eros, a dream of companionship and communion. A tense, taut funk track, "Girlfriend" throbs with an impossible longing, an impulse to break through the skin surface, past body parts and erogenous zones, and grasp hopelessly for total mind-meld. The song is too agonized, too twitchy with unrest, to really be sexy. It wants to be free of the straitjacket of sexual identity. Of any identity.

And we don't have to make love to have an orgasm...
Listen, for you naked I would dance a ballet
Would that get you off?

After the unexpected detour into dizzy-making dirtiness in its final half-minute, the flesh fever subsides into calm, and "If I Was Your Girlfriend" ends on a still note of pure mysticism:

We'll try to imagine what silence looks like.

More than the lyric, though, the conceptual and technical masterstroke of "Girlfriend" is the gender-morphing of Prince's vocals, which are pitch-shifted to create the feminine alter-ego Camille. Doing peculiar things with the human voice is such a common feature of contemporary music, from the online underground to the upper reaches of Billboard, that it is hard to convey just how confoundingly brilliant, original, and creatively twisted this move by Prince seemed in 1987. Prince-watchers instantly grasped that this was the wholly logical, yet completely unexpected and surprising, extension of his androgyny, his compulsion to dissolve borderlines and barriers.

In another sense, the artificially high-pitched Camille voice was simply a technological expansion upon what Prince already did vocally: sing falsetto in the soul 'n' funk tradition of Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up," where the "the sound of a woman coming from a man," as critic Michael Freedburg wrote, served "to demonstrate to his intended lover that he understands her fears and desires as if he were female himself."

In a certain way, falsetto-as a contrived vocal technique, an "unnatural" way of using the throat, lungs, etc.-could be seen as kind of introjected technology. As with any extreme mode of singing-yodeling, Tuvan throat singing, opera, Inuit vocal games, you name it-there's almost a disembodiment of the human voice, as it is pushed to produce sounds that seem to speak of things outside earthly existence, far beyond our physical mortal limits. That's why these forcibly etherealized vocal sounds generally connote the angelic, the extra-terrestrial, the cosmic and otherworldly. They can also be the sound of those who feel alienated from mundane normative existence, who feel like they are from some other place.

Some Prince-ologists say that the singer chose the name "Camille" for his alter-ego after a 19th century French intersex person generally known by the name Alexina Barbin but who later called themself Camille. Barbin was brought up as a girl but was reclassified as male at the age of 22 and came to use "Camille"-in French, it can be both a female and male name-to describe the masculine phase of their short life.

Partially reproduced in a 19th century medical paper, Barbin's memoirs were rediscovered and published in 1980. Philosopher Michel Foucault, who was gay, wrote an introduction celebrating Barbin as a sort of exemplar of the sexual misfit, whose biography spoke to and for all those "virile women" and "passive men" who live in a "happy limbo of nonidentity." But Barbin's story leaned more to the tragic: grappling externally with uncomprehending medical and religious institutions, and internally with persistent feelings of "vague sadness," "inexpressible uneasiness," and "strange perplexity," culminating in lonely suicide at the age of 30. If it is in fact true that Prince's "Camille" was inspired by Barbin's tale, it's possible that he didn't get it from the republished memoir but from the 1985 movie Mystère Alexina.

Prince originally intended to release a whole album of material using the Camille alter-ego and the pitch-shifted, feminized vocal sound. But the self-titled, eight-song LP Camille was scrapped, with most of the tunes resurfacing later as album tracks or B-sides. "If I Was Your Girlfriend," "Housequake," and "Strange Relationship" appeared on Sign O' the Times; "Shockadelica" came out as the B-side to the single version of "Girlfriend." Camille is also said to be the guiding force behind another abandoned project, The Black Album, and to figure in the spiritual schema of 1988's Lovesexy, which involves a struggle with a darkside alter-ego called Spooky Electric. But by this point, even for a fan like myself, Prince's personal cosmology is getting too convoluted to follow.

As much as I love "Girlfriend," I don't know if it's my favorite Prince song. Depending on the day, that might be "Pop Life," or "The Beautiful Ones," or maybe "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker," or "Hot Thing," or most every song on Dirty Mind. "If I Was Your Girlfriend," though, is certainly the Prince song I find most impressive; the one I admire as well as adore. Far more than famous anthems like "1999", this feels like Prince's mission statement, his (wo)manifesto. It's a mystical-political rebuke to reality. A prayer.

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How Prince's Androgynous Genius Changed the Way We Think About Music and Gender

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" If I was your one and only friend-would you run to me if somebody hurt you even if that somebody was me?" - Prince, "If I Was Your Girlfriend" The 1970s was the Glam Decade. But in some ways the '80s were even glammier.