> > Prince had always been provocative, perplexing and often strange artist, and frequently used symbols (such as an eye for “I”) or numbers (such as 4 for “for”) in his album artwork.

I don't interpret the second clause primarily as evidence for the first. I view them as two related statements--

He was already known as provocative and strange; he'd already used symbols more than most people before.

This is important context to his strange move of changing his name to a symbol.

It's more longwinded than necessary, but it's not awful.