The Flaming Lips- Great Band Name
The band name is one of the most important parts of a band’s entire career. It is your title/legacy, it is on all of your albums and all of your songs. They can get you shows and they can lose you shows. The New Pornographers lost a show at Calvin College because their act was associated with pornography and the college does not endorse pornography. Is their music offensive? No, is it about pornography at all? Nope. It is important that your name associates with your act. Imagine Cannibal Corpse being a country band, it doesn’t work. There are so many different kinds of band names. Let’s name a few: band names that are overly simple and generic (The Smiths) are easy to remember. Band names that pay homage to celebrities (The Dead Kennedys) are witty and memorable. The band names that are a full sentence and fit across the whole album cover, and contain punctuation. (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) There are ones that are evocative, suggestive, funny or completely strange and they can be remembered for their quirkiness. Gibby Haynes, the singer of the Butthole Surfers, when he told his dad that he was naming his band The Butthole Surfers his dad said that “Even the Beatles would have been a flop if they called themselves that.” Some of my favourites bands make you “sound” it out. (SBTRKT, MSTRKRFT, CHLLNGR) Bands that mix it up, literally. (Japandroids)
Here are some of my favourite band names of all time. If you think I’ve missed any obvious ones, please comment below, and if you would like to beef the commenters who leave dumb band names, please do so.
Joy Division (from a prostitution wing of a Nazi concentration camp mentioned in the 1955 novel The House of Dolls. They were originally called Warsaw) Disorder – Unknown Pleasures (1979)
The Smiths - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out - The Queen Is Dead (1986)
Sonic Youth - Teenage Riot – Daydream Nation (1988)
The Velvet Underground - Sweet Jane – Loaded (1970)
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Soft Shock - It’s Blitz (2009)
The Flaming Lips - Race For The Prize – Soft Bulletin (1999)
The Butthole Surfers - Who Was In My Room Last Night? – Independent Worm Saloon (1993)
The New Pornographers - Myriad Harbor - Challengers (2007)
The Fiery Furnaces - Here Comes The Summer – EP (2005)
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - Heart In Your Heartbreak – Belong (2011)
We Were Promised Jetpacks - It’s Thunder And It’s Lightning - These Four Walls(2009)
Electric Tickle Machine - Gimme Money – Blew It Again (2009)
Betty’s Not A Vitamin (The Flinstones vitamins- Fred, Wilma, Barney and Dino all were vitamins. The company Bayer fixed this in 1994.)
Thesaurus Rex
Wavves (The vees look like a wave, ya see?) – Post Acid – King Of The Beach (2010)
Cap’n Jazz - Oh Messy Life - Analphabetapolothology (1998)
Guided By Voices - I Am A Scientist – Bee Thousand (1994)
And So I Watch You From Afar - The Voiceless – And So I Watch You From Afar (2009)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Dogs Die In Hot Cars (They do!)
Japandroids - I Quit Girls – Japandroids (2009)
The Jesus and Mary Chain - Just Like Honey - Psychocandy (1985)
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments
The Dead Kennedys
Xiu Xiu - I Luv The Valley OH! - Fabulous Muscles (2004)
!!! (Pronounced “Chk Chk Chk”)
-Dino
lmfao to whoever said Guns & Roses was a best band name