The cover of Prince's fourteenth studio album carried no words a person could say aloud. Instead, there was a glyph, a swirl of curves that looked like male and female signs melted together. Officially registered as Love Symbol #2, that unpronounceable mark became the title of the record Prince released on October 13, 1992, with his band The New Power Generation.
The fight behind the symbol
So why would one of the biggest pop stars on earth put an unsayable symbol on his new album? The answer had little to do with music and everything to do with a fight. Prince was locked in a dispute with Warner Bros. Records, the label that put out the album through Paisley Park Records. He was angry that the company refused to release his growing pile of unpublished material, and he claimed it had registered his real name for advertising purposes.
The symbol was his answer. From 1993 until 2000, Prince used that same Love Symbol as his stage name, a protest that made him impossible to promote in the usual way. The album itself was meant to be a fantasy rock soap opera, with spoken interludes stitching together a story about an Egyptian princess who falls for a rock star and hands him a sacred relic called the Three Chains of Turin.
A scrambled rock soap opera
That princess was played by Mayte Garcia, making her first appearance on a Prince album. She flees seven assassins who murdered her father to get the relic. The released version of the story feels scrambled, because Prince cut many of the spoken links to make room for the song I Wanna Melt with U. The interludes that survived, mostly with Kirstie Alley as reporter Vanessa Bartholomew, show her trying to interview Prince while he hangs up on her or gives deliberately evasive, nonsensical answers for his own amusement.
The music itself pulled R&B, funk, pop, rock and soul into one restless mix. The first two singles, Sexy MF and My Name Is Prince, had only moderate success on the American pop chart, but both reached the top 10 in the United Kingdom. The third single, 7, did the reverse: it missed the UK top 10 but climbed into the American top 10, proving the album could land hits in different markets without a single obvious formula.
Fans who bought the record early got a small piece of the spectacle: the first pressings had a gold love symbol embossed on the jewel case, sometimes matte, sometimes glossy. Later copies printed the symbol inside the booklet or dropped it altogether. The album reached number 5 on the Billboard 200 in the United States and went to number 1 in the United Kingdom, Austria and Australia, earning platinum status in both the US and the UK.
Critics noticed that Prince was making a point about his own stamina. After Diamonds and Pearls became his biggest seller since Purple Rain, the Love Symbol album arrived as proof that he still had funk to spare. The record placed 14th in the Pazz & Jop poll of the best releases of 1992, and Robert Christgau wrote that it demonstrated Prince still had the groove, even while the label fight threatened to overshadow the songs.
Thirty-four years on, the album remains a strange artifact: half blockbuster pop record, half unfinished radio play. The princess, the assassins, the sacred chains and the reporter all drift through songs that never quite resolve their story. What holds it together is the symbol itself, a mark Prince chose because it could not be said, owned or reduced to a brand. That was the point.
What holds it together is the symbol itself, a mark Prince chose because it could not be said, owned or reduced to a brand.