So you and your best friends (or the least retarded people who answered your ad on the coffee house bulletin board) have been working in a garage putting a band together. You’ve been working on tightening up, wrote a few original tunes, prepped a few Screeching Weasel/Metallica/Kinks/Johnny Burnette/”wacky,” “ironic” top 40 pop hit* covers, choreographed a stage show involving bottle rockets and strobe lights. You feel you’re finally ready to make your live debut. You call your local promoter trying to set up a show opening up for whatever shitty local band is playing to a handful of drunks on a Tuesday night, only to have a bombshell dropped upon you.
“Well kid,” he says, between hacking up huge gobs of backed up phlegm brought upon by years of smoking $1 cigars purchased at the nearby Circle K, “wot’s yer name?” You blank, and the resulting silence causes him to hang up, forever closing the door on the opportunity for you to open up for a group that has a following of maybe tens of fans. Sucks for you, dude.
Like television shows, bands starting off don’t need to attract an audience as much as they do the right audience. If you don’t believe me, put Coldplay or Bright Eyes onstage in a bar full of drunk bikers and see what happens.** A name is important for helping people decide at a glance whether or not they’d be interested in seeing you without knowing anything else about you besides your name.
Do not, however, take this as encouragement to come up with something that will attract people under false pretenses. Sure, names like “Barenaked Ladies” or “Free Beer” might draw in people who might not have otherwise come to your show, but if you think that they will, upon realizing that they’ve been hoodwinked, have a good laugh about the whole thing and enjoy the show, you’re about to lose some teeth, bucko.
As you can see, choosing the right name is an important step for your band, especially if you’re just getting started. If you’re already famous, you can call yourself something as stupid as Audioslave and people will still show up. If you’re starting from the garage, remember that all people will likely know about you is your name. This is why you need to determine what vague genre your band belongs in so that you can tailor the name to appeal to the fans of those genres – if Pavement had called themselves something like Modern Life is War, nobody would have ever heard of them. If you’re one of those idiots that thinks that your band is “just a rock band, mannnnn,” you’re lying to yourself worse than most people, because people who say that are usually in some insanely narrow, trendy subgenre.
Once you’ve figured out what genre your band belongs in, use the following guidelines to picking out the best name for your group. You’ll be annoying bar patrons in no time!
Indie Rock: This one is the easiest, because most indie bands just name themselves after a random noun. Look around where you are right now, and I bet you can come up with a million different equally legitimate names for your indie band. Here are mine: Bottle, Canister, Wallpaper, Window Screen, Outlet. See how easy that was? For bonus points, you can pluralize the noun, i.e. Sombreros, Door Jambs, Shelves. Double bonus points if the noun you use is an antiquated, obscure technology, such as Cherry Wood Spirit Level or Jointer Gauge. Triple word score if any of these are in a language other than English.
Scene/Screamo: Your name needs to be a full sentence and almost always contain the first person pronoun. If a band is named I Would Rip Out My Heart and Send it To You in the Mail, you can be pretty sure that they’re going to be xmyspace corex. If it sounds like a stupidly long sentence from a book that’s at least 100 years old, there is a 100% likelihood that the band members have reverse mullets, hockey puck earrings, and/or the shaved head/outta control beard combo.
Metalcore: It doesn’t matter what your name is, because you’ll be signed to Ferret and recording a shitty debut within the month, so go apeshit wild and have fun.
Hardcore: This particular genre is rife with the worst band names ever, so feel free to have fun and go over the top, provided your name is macho and looks good on a t-shirt. It doesn’t even matter if the name is nonsensical (Death Before Dying, These Arms Have Hands); hardcore kids don’t like music so much as they’re “down for the ‘core,” so they won’t ask critical question out of a desire to “keep it posi.” If your band is a particular style of hardcore, make sure your name reflects that. If you’re a straight-edge hardcore band, you should have something like Bros With Crossed Arms Who Never Smile; if you’re a vegancore band, it should be something like Burn Down the Steakhouse.***
Punk: If you’re one of those cute little idealistic junior high kids that thinks punk still means something and have chosen to spend money on instruments in lieu of more Violent Society patches, your band name needs to reflect your misguided ideals. Punk names should always represent how apart you feel from society while also being in the plural so as to emphasize the collective unity of the group. Reject or Pariah are good, but The Rejected or The Pariahs are better. It’s not like it matters. Being in a punk band is just something you do until you discover 40 oz. beers and Pantera/Radio Birdman records, so it doesn’t mean anything in the long run.
Ska: Anyone in a ska band is, by definition, a complete and utter tool, so this needs to be made obvious so that anyone who wasn’t in a high school marching band can stay far, far, far away from your concerts. The best way is to incorporate the word “ska” into your very name, making it obvious to even the biggest laymen that you are a bunch of awkward people with trumpets in the back of your van. You could do this by incorporating “ska” into a word that already has a ska-ish sound to it (Eskape, Skarred), make it a prefix to a well-known word (Skatarded), or just make it as obvious as possible (Grown Men With Braces And Out-of-Style Hats Who Play Ska).
Rap Metal/Nu Metal: As long as there are trailer parks in Florida, there will be a Limp Bizkit fanbase. If you think black clothes, goatees, chugga-chugga riffs, and self-created angst are your ticket out of Tampa Bay, more power to you. Just remember that most of your potential fans are essentially illiterate, so don’t spell your name correctly, because it might make them feel stupid and thus less inclined to forego $15 worth of Whip-Its in order to buy your CD. Bigg Chodde is good, as is Tarnishd or Fuct. Remember, just because you own baseball hats and jean shants doesn’t mean you’re not angry at the world!
Jimmy Buffet-style Party Music: Don’t bother coming up with a name. Just hang yourself in the bathroom and save us all the hassle, ok?
Emo: See above.
VH1 “Rock”: Come up with a really badass name like the Killers or the Fray and then play total douchebag music for secretaries who still own their old Kajagoogoo records. If you play totally wussy synth-rock for people aged 25-40, why not call yourselves the Murderers? Or how about the Granny Kickers? Why not call yourselves the Satan Jizzers and then proceed to play wimpy ballads for people who don’t like being challenged? Lenny Kravitz hasn’t released a record in years, so this is an orchard prime for the picking.
Pop-punk: There are only two acceptable things from which you may derive your name. The first is from a line in an 80’s teen movie (probably by John Hughes). The other option is to name yourselves after an inside joke, or at least claim as such afterwards. This basically means any random collection of words you and your friends regularly string together and laugh at could potentially be your band name. When I was in high school, my friends and I used to call each other “cockmaster” a lot; this would be a good example. Another good one would be The Dr. Brightman Experience. Don’t get it? Then it’s a good pop-punk band name.
Psychobilly: This is a tough line to straddle. Not only do you want to appeal to gloomy goths who like atmospherics more than chord progressions, you also want to draw in hard-drinking greasers who think people stopped making original music in 1958. This means you need to combine two disparate subcultures. The best thing I could think of was Lowrider Ghouls, provided you think The Reverend Horton Hell would get you sued.**** I’m sure if you go to sleep thinking of Gene Vincent as Frankenstein, you’ll wake up with a name that’ll draw all the bangs-toting chicks in bandanas and Bauhaus t-shirts.
I hope this guide comes in handy so that when you and your bandmates are standing around yelling at each other in the practice space because you can’t decide what you’re going to call yourselves for the next three months before you break up onstage in front of bored drunks. God save rock ‘n’ roll!
*The latter in the case that your band is comprised of unfunny douchebags in Hurley t-shirts
** Seriously, please do this
*** This particular name thought up by my clever friend Nick Feratu, who plays in the Phoenix, AZ group The Limit Club. His idea for a pro-meat hardcore band? Hickory Smoked Victory. No wonder he gets laid almost as much as I do.
**** Which it almost certainly would
– Matt Corbett