Thoughts on Language in Prince’s Work
by Ivana Recmanova, edited by Vojtech Janda
Producer, singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Prince became known for many things — his music, his extravagant clothing style, his general sense of ambiguity and mystery. But among all this, there was a curiosity for language, partly expressed in the titles of his songs as well as in interviews he gave to various media outlets. As an example, he thought that music and illness were connected concepts because the words “melody” and “maladie” (French for “illness”) sounded similar. Now, from a linguistic point of view, this idea is misguided, but it illustrates the way that this musician thought about the sound of language, which ultimately led to some interesting developments in today’s English.
Apart from his music itself and his reflections on language and its relations to the real world, Prince became well-known for using what we call “Internet language” today. What does that mean? In the age of Twitter and instant messages, when texts have to be short, people have created abbreviations, such as ‘U’ for ‘you’, ‘4’ for ‘for’, etc. These words are homonymous, meaning they sound the same but mean different things. Prince’s song titles were full of these abbreviations before the Internet became a thing: I Would Die 4 U, Eye No, Fall In Love 2nite, When 2 R In Love, X’s Face, The One You Wanna C and so on. But when the Internet became a thing, he started tweeting in these homonymous terms as well:
“Note to self….tell the boss I need to take off 1/22 AND THE 22nd AND THE 23rd cuz I’m going 2 the Park. This gonna 🐝 epic!!!!”
“We need new ideas. We need new life. Most of all, we need new peace. The kind of peace I’m talkin’ about is P-I-E-C-E. Next time I come through Baltimore, I wanna stay in a hotel owned by [black people].”
Although it looks like Prince was the first one to start writing like this, he actually wasn’t. As Brian Morton wrote in his book ‘Prince’, Prince was influenced by graffiti art. Raúl Rossell also notes on FeelNumb.com that it is “pretty clear that Prince did not invent short code but he is somewhat responsible for bringing the short code style into pop culture.”
So even though he had no linguistic education and some of his thoughts about language were wrong, it is obvious that he was thinking about the way words sound in an interesting way. Just as he was able to pick an instrument and play it, he was able to pick a word, play with it and twist it into something else.
And the best thing is that you can get creative with English too, just focus on the sound of it! Of course, we are here to help you with the language itself as well as with the linguistics basics if you’re interested.
