One name or two?

We're just a couple of posts into 2005 and our vast readership is already complaining about the length of the posts and the weighty subject matter therein. We therefore offer a detour into the arcane world of the New York Times editing of reviews of new urban contemporary albums. In Monday's NYT, we enjoyed the favourable review given by Kelefa Sanneh to the John Legend album Get Lifted.

Sanneh is a very reliable reviewer and we've appreciated, for instance, his willingness to praise the talents of Snoop Dogg while nonetheless criticising Snoop's occasional lapses into misogyny. And as for John Legend, since we've devoted even more time following the disastrous Dubya re-election to watching music videos, we've seen even more of his excellent single "Used to Love U." So where are we going with this? To a recurring puzzling usage in the NYT review:

Like lots of old-fashioned R&B singers, John Legend loves melisma and falsetto, but he also knows his way around a hip-hop beat, and Mr. West [mentor/producer] gives him a handful of good ones. For "Used to Love U," the lead single, Mr. West gives him a chewy electronic bass line and a clattering backbeat to match John Legend's ecstatic piano; for a cheating nonapology called "Number One," Mr. West creates a loping soul track, then adds a verse of his own, happily sabotaging John Legend's suave song ... Sometimes John Legend's high-spirited ad-libs carry him up and away from the melody ...

Having already mentioned his name before this section, why not an occasional Mr. Legend, or Legend? He does it for Kanye West, so it must be a deliberate choice. While we assumed therefore that John Legend must prefer to be called just that, we couldn't find evidence of this on his website, which quickly shortens his moniker to Legend. But full credit to the NYT for sticking rigidly to the full name. Who amongst us doesn't recall the opposite situation, the Mr Loaf fiasco of the late 1970s?