ok... stealing from alt.music.prince, and im sorry not to give credit to whoever originally found this out...

>>By OTAN, he means the phonetic pronunciation of Aton, the the first conceived
> >>monotheistic God of which Akhenaton was His Priest.

now this was disputed in the newsgroup, BUT, at a lot of shows he has said, "the opposite of NATO is monotheism", and it also agrees with his whole, coming together under music, coming together at all, kinda thing.

some guy from the newgroups 2 cents misec in with mine...

I agree with this interpretation - Aton was the single god worshipped by the forward looking and thinking Akhenaten - his religion was ultimately disbanded and Tutankaton moved back to Luxor to worship the Amun - changing his name to Tutankamun - and thereafter murdered by the priest Ay!!!

Interestingly the Akhenaton tomb has never been found

Sorry - but its interesting to me!!

my sisters a history grad and a museum artefacts masters...shes just the same.
makes me smile...

LoveRobot said:

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[Edited 5/26/12 7:04am]

Phil said:

That makes sense. My m8e went in2 a chat room when P. was on-line a couple years ago and he picked her out and spoke 2 her... what was her name...

"AtenO"

'dre

???

Nonsense ...

The phonetic pronunciation of 'Aton' is:

a) in English: [e:iten]

b) in any other language (well more or less): [a:ten] with 'e' representing the 'schwa'.

So there is absolutely whatsoever no link with Aton - whoever interesting Egyptian history may be.

I've heard Prince say 'The opposite of NATO is me'.

I've got no idea what he means !

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[This message was edited Sun Mar 2 9:44:47 PST 2003 by IstenSzek]

u r all wrong on this one, at the sound check in buffalo he was directly asked 2 clarify the meaning of all this cryptic nonsense involving these lyrics. "it is what it is " was his response, he then went on 2 say the opposite of A TAN, not otan, is NO TAN, not nato. as he said A TAN, he waved his hand across his butterscotch complexion, as he said NO TAN, he gestured over to john renato who is white as snow. he was quite serious in his explanation and said it amuses him to no end when the fams make something out of nothing. i think i was one of the very few fams out there who knew this 2 b the case. this is just another case of prince playing the race card in one of his songs.

This explanation has been discussed here many times, it's not new. I'm definately not convinced, but if he has been singing "monotheism" instead of "otan", then it does add more weight to the arguement.

GatDammit...im STILL confused!!

leibfrei said:

you can kiss your top ramen money goodbye...

I always thought the opposite of NATO was The Warsaw Pact...

DSR said:

The point is he says "Aten" in the song. If you went by what is written in the lyric book he would have said "OH-TAN" which is NOT what he says.

It's a play on words/concepts/sounds...

NATO=the dependence on government of man, which strict monotheists would consider polytheistic to depend on other than God
ATEN=monotheism

When he said the opposite of NATO is me, he's playin with the fact that he knows people are somewhat puzzled by the reference and won't get it.

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[Edited 5/26/12 7:04am]

Yeah, all of this was discussed on the 'old Org' right after TRC was released to the Club Members...

Blue
Times...times