Band Name Trends (1 of 2)

A group effort.

Dmitri Borgmann was the first editor of Word Ways, and one of his first contributions, “Musical Nouns of Multitude,” is a time capsule from 1968, when the Beatles were still new and strange to Borgmann’s generation. (Though I suspect some of his sniffing below is tongue-in-cheek.)

Long, long ago, groups of singers went by innocent, logical names such as “The Andrews Sisters.” Some current groups, clinging to the past, still use titles of that kind: "“Chad Mitchell Trio”; “the Statler Brothers”; “the Johnny Mann Singers”; “the Baja Marimba Band”; etc. To a large extent, however, such ordinary names have given way to exotic, weird concoctions that are studies in irrelevancy. That is, the name of a pop group is often about as far removed from suggesting music as anything can possibly be. Let’s examine some of the trends discernible in today’s naming craze…

Borgmann classifies alliterators and rhymers (Herman’s Hermits, Smothers Brothers), self-praisers (The Supremes, The Sensations), misspellers (The Beatles, The Monkees), intense images (The Searchers, The Doors), religiosity (The Righteous Brothers, The Apostolic Intervention), self-condemners (The Zombies, The Rejects), and names startling in their abstraction—the out-of-this-world (Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd).

So what’s happened since 1968?

Well, sorry, Borgmann…band names have not gotten less out-of-this-world, and they sure haven’t gotten literal. For every exception like the Dave Matthews Band, there’s a misleading name like Mumford and Sons. (They’re not his sons.)

Despite the musicality of alliteration and rhyme, those devices haven’t caught on. And though certain genres of music are big on self-praise (like hip-hop) or self-doubt (like trap music), self-praise and self-condemnation don’t find their way into many band names. Though I’d certainly give a fair listen to any bands named “The Totally Awesomes” or “Sorry for the Noise.”

On the other hand, intense images are still big (Mastodon, Falling in Reverse, Cage the Elephant, Walk the Moon). Religious imagery still appears in a few prominent band names like Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Leviticus. I could survey Christian bands, but that feels like biasing the results.

Strategic misspellings mark many band names (bannd namez?), especially in metal (Korn, Jackyl, Skrape, Outkast, Staind, Limp Bizkit, Karnivool, Puddle of Mudd).

• A subset of those revolve around creative use of the letter V, as in CHVRCHES, Wavves, Alvvays, Hovvdy, and Pvris.

• Many modern band names resemble acronyms, using all caps and “disemvoweled” spellings (MGMT, MSTRKRFT, STRFKR, SBTRKT, MNDR, BLK JKS, ASTR, SCXRLXRD, RVIDXR KLVN (Raider Klan), EC8OR, BTS).

• Others include numbers (Blink-182, Maroon 5, 3 Doors Down, +44, Matchbox 20, 98 Degrees, 30 Seconds to Mars, Sum 41, Eve 6, 311, Eiffel 65, June of 44, Isotope-217, and Ho99o9—pronounced “horror”).

These trends even influence solo artist names like Deadmau5 and The Weeknd. And they make these bands easier to google—a factor today’s aspiring musicians consider when naming their bands.

And yet! A handful of bands, even recently named bands, have names so vague or weird as to make Google searches more difficult (The The, Was (Not Was), The Band, The Who, The Guess Who, Yes, Wham!, The Beat, The National, The 1975, and most of all, !!!, pronounced chk-chk-chk. To find that last one, you have to do a search like “three exclamation points band.”)

It isn’t just Google that can find these names confounding, as seen in the “(The) Who’s on First” routine playable at the YouTube link below.

So if easy findability doesn’t inform the weirdness of band names, what does?

Chi Luu, writing for JSTOR, best expressed the answer: “The unconventionality of rock ‘n’ roll life is often expressed through unusual syntax or syntactic violations.”

And that’s true of newer genres too, since they’re often rebelling against now-established rock conventions. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the new trends in such syntax that sprang up after Borgmann published his piece.