Every 8 minutes, I have a great idea for a name for a band. I retain that great idea for about 3 minutes. As yet, I have been unable to form a band within that time frame. But when I do, I want to be ready.
Coming up with the right name for your band is absolutely crucial. After all, most listeners will hear the name of your band before they see how awesome your beard is. First we need to be aware of the don’t dos.
Spelingmistayks and other assorted grammatical no-nos.
No matter what Facebook, Twitter and every rapper on the planet are trying to tell you, don’t be fooled: bad spelling is not cool. Removing vowels from a word is equally not cool, and if you think it is, try reading this: nqvcl. That’s right, it says unequivocal. Don’t know what unequivocal means? That’s cos you’re spending all your time writing texts like ‘OMG, mi m8s r so awsum!!!!’ (Actually, I put a comma in there, so it’s not as bad as it could be.) What was my point again? Oh yeah, read a goddamn book!
There used to be this band, right, and they were called Limp Biscuit. No one knew what that name meant, but that was okay, ‘cause it didn’t stop there. In an effort to make it even more incomprehensible, they decided everything should be in lower case (limp biscuit) and then maybe just misspell the whole thing (limp bizkit). Finally, to really ram it home, let’s remove that pesky space in the middle. That gives us the utterly perfect name limpbizkit. My understanding has always been that ‘biz’ is short for business. So a ‘biz kit’ would have maybe a notebook, a stapler, some pens, that sort of thing. They may as well have called their band floppysuitcase.
Dishonourable Mentions: Linkin Park, lostprophets
Numbas 6000!
15 years ago, all you had to do was add some kind of number to the end of your band’s name and you were automatically 1.5 times more awesome - What the hell, 311’s whole band name was just a number! But this is no longer the case. Adding numbers to the end of your band name is now just recognised for what it really is: a desperate attempt to add mystique and possibly length to your band’s name.
Dishonourable Mentions: Blink 182, Sum 41, Powerman 5000)
What The?
What about if we add ‘The’ to the name? That’s a word that’s definitely underutilised in English. What do you notice about the following band names when you take the 'the' away? That's right, they suck. When 'the' is the most important part of your band's name, you have not hit on a winner.
Dishonourable mentions: The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Killers, The List Goes On... (Not a band name. But it totally could be.)
Rude!
You can get out of a limousine with no panties on all you like, but if you decide to call your band something like Da Cunnilinguists 6000, expect 17 U.S States to set your billboards on fire.
Okay, enough theory, let’s get real.
Some Real Life Naming Mistakes for you to Learn From!
Lady Antebellum – Classic bad naming. This is a two-part name, one word of which is clearly made up. So I’m going to focus on the lady part. First, let us consider the 1:2 ladies to beards ratio. Clearly beards are more prominent in this band. I get that they wanted to emphasise that there is a lady in the band, because everyone loves ladies, but perhaps a more appropriate name would be ‘Lady Beardface’ or ‘The Bearded Ladies.’ Both those names, I think you’ll agree, are still sexy, whilst being more representational of the overall image of the band.
Even after a totally democratic vote, the one in the middle refused to grow a beard.
Eve6 – Naming your band after an episode of the X Files is cool. Until the X Files starts to suck and you’re still putting out records. And then the X Files finishes and you’re just three guys making music who gave their band a girl’s name and a goddamn number.
"So guys, what happened to the other three ‘Eves’?"
Funeral for a Friend – Why a super awesome Welsh Alternative band would name themselves after an Elton John song I will never know. I mean, that’s not even close to the same as Radiohead naming themselves after a Talking Heads song. What I do know is, whenever you look up Funeral for a Friend on the internet, Google decides that you’re gay.
I’d wear black and look all morose too if guys kept posting photos of themselves in frilly pink g-strings on my fan page.
Name it!
This is all well and good, you say, but it doesn’t help me name my band! Salvation is impending! When I was younger, Marvel comics used to be made of paper, and at least one page per issue was devoted to Stan Lee rambling on about whatever he felt like. Kind of like this blog, actually. (Mental note: find and emulate Stan Lee’s blog) But in one issue, his innermost thoughts took a hiatus and instead my young brain was rocked by the superhero name generator!
Its methodology was simple: two columns, one column made up entirely of adjectives and verbs, the other of sweet animals or other awesome nouns like ‘volcano’.
The same principle can be applied to naming your band. Just choose one word from the first column and one word from the second column.
Column One Column Two
Lady Beardface
Sweet Volcano
Smashing Leopard
Terrific Dandelion
Dynamite Pumpkins
Cincinnati Bowtie
Tiny Monster
Extreme Phallus
Spider Man
Total Fat
Thrashing Butterfly
Some of these combine to make actual band names, which is as close to proof as I am interested in having in this blog.
2 comments:
You forgot to mention bands that start out having numbers, but then change the numbers to the word form. ie:
Matchbox 20 : Matchbox Twenty
30 Seconds To Mars : Thirty Seconds To Mars (*cries* but it's true)
I think there are two possible reason why a band would do this.
Firstly, when spelled out in full, it just looks a lot nicer from a marketing standpoint.
Secondly, when said number appears at the start of a band name, It can be hard to find in your local HMV or Real Groovy. Does it come under first letter of the number or at the end of the alphabet for the numbers section if there is one. Way too confusing.
Though lets face it, most kids buy music online these days and it would probably come up in a search regardless of the spelling.
You're right I DID forget to mention that. Mostly because I hadn't noticed they did that...
At least they didn't go the other way, like MB20 or something. That just sounds like a machine part. I hate when that happens.
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