How do bands find the right name, an attractive moniker? This is often the first thing you know about a band, you see their name on a concert/festival schedule and it should raise your interest right away, evoke something, otherwise the band has already lost something. Personally, the weirder the name, the more I may be interested to go check the band, but some monikers are just plain silly and just a stunt.
If you can’t pronounce it, it is a problem, if you can’t remember it, it’s also a problem! If the moniker is unsearchable on Google, like Girls, Men, Man Man, Fun, and even Cults… it’s another one! Idealistically, the moniker has to reflect some idea of the music the band is producing, don’t you think so? But it is challenging for a band to come up with a good name that sticks in people’s brain but is not too weird, too blank, and just right. However, you never know, who would have guessed that the simplest name of all, The Band, could have worked?
Recently, a lot of indie bands have chosen celebrities' names for moniker and tortured it a little bit, just like the Dead Kennedys did it. There actually are bands which called themselves Truman Peyote, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Com Truise, Nicole Kidman, Kevin Costner Saves the World, Nathalie Portman’s shaved head, Hype Williams, Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin, Gay for Johnny Depp, Bono Must Die… and there's probably even more of them out there! These bands are clever they know that originality doesn’t really exist, and they chose to ride on someone else’s pre-existing celebrity status.
Colors seem to be a recurrent theme in music monikers, and although this isn’t a scientific study, I bet black, which is in fact the reverse of color, is the winner among band names, there are so many of them: The Black Crowes, Black Flag, Black Sabbath, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, Black Box, The Blackbyrds, Black Star, The Black Keys, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Black Angels, The Black Lips,… new bands should stop using black, there is too much of it already and if Black Flag meant anarchy, now the term has lost any significance because of its abundance and redundancy.
There are pages and pages on the internet how famous bands got their names, and I am not going to go there, but usually bands have a few techniques to find a moniker:
– some bands think about a name that has some significance for them, a book, a play, a location such as Titus Andronicus, My Chemical Romance, Sea Wolf, or Linkin Park, Soundgarden, Beirut… but animals are also a big thing: Artic Monkeys, Modest Mouse, The Mountain Goats, and wolf has been used way too much (Wolf parade, Sea Wolf, Wolf, We Are Wolf, Wolfmother, Howlin’ Wolf, Wolf Eyes,…)
– some bands use even a reference to another musician, or a song title or lyric, like Panic At the Disco, Radiohead (after a Talking Heads’ song), the Ramones (Paul McCartney’s alias), The Rolling Stones (after the Muddy Waters’ song).
– some bands simply use initials, REM, AC/DC, ABBA…
– some bands use existing names but intentionally misspelled it such as Korn, but the Beatles were the first at playing that game! And metal bands use a lot of this Nordic looking ö or ü letters, such as Motörhead or Mötley Crüe.
Now how does a new band manage to come up with a good name? With the multitude of groups that already exist, it must be so hard. So I picked up a few names of some hot and upcoming new bands, and ask myself if they had made the right choice:
Grimes: No idea how she got her name, but since she lived in Montreal this could come from the French word 'grimer' which means to apply make-up? I have given up to understand the Grimes phenomenon anyway
DIIV: It looks like Roman numbers but comes from Dive, The Nirvana song, and since Nirvana is a big influence, it’s a good choice although not completely obvious.
FIDLAR: It means 'Fuck It Dog, Life’s A Risk' and it fits them like a glove, they live it to the bones!
Haim: Girl band with a Hebrew name that means life, but wait it’s just the real last name of the three sisters! Let’s keep it simple.
TEED or Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs: totally silly name for dance music, I’d have imagined metal and I hear glittering synths!
The Neighborhood: One of these ungoogle-able monikers, but it’s welcoming, although it doesn’t say anything about the music.
LP: Exactly the same problem than above, and despite the fact these are Laura Pergolizzi’ s initials, it doesn’t reveal anything about her powerhouse voice.
Youth Lagoon: I actually like the moniker, it’s fresh, limpid and cozy for Trevor Powers’ bedroom pop, but I keep have visions of Brooke Shields for some reasons.
Milo Greene: It’s nobody, just an inside joke for the band, and that’s fine, just fine.
Alabama Shakes: they wear their influences on their sleeves and in their name, and there’s nothing wrong with that.