Name Your Band Something Gross to be Successful
Name Your Band Something Gross to be Successful
Looking for a band name? Ask a third grader.
A few years ago, Dave Grohl (rock music’s ever-present uncle) poked his head out to say that he hates the band name Foo Fighters. Which is a shame for him, because he’s made himself a tidy little living off of it.
“Had I imagined that it would last more than a month-and-a-half, I might have named it something else,” Uncle Dave says in the 60 Minutes interview. “It’s the dumbest band name ever.”
How quaint.
In 2018, Jimmy Eat World took to Twitter to offer some advice to young bands. Be careful when you’re naming your band, and make sure that when you abbreviate it it still looks good. (Someone called out Saves the Day in the comments, too.)
Band names are funny. For most people, their music is never going to get off the ground our out of the basement, like Grohl thought (which was dumb because he had just been in the most famous rock band on the planet). So, you can go from Scarecrow Boat to Mouse Rat in a second and no one is going to bat an eye. All of the bands I was in in high school did that. And it didn’t matter. But sometimes you get lucky like Jimmy Eat World or Saves the Day or the Foos and you are now a highly commercially viable entity despite the fact that your name is somewhat regrettable.
Picking a band name for the long haul is immensely stressful (I imagine. Again, most of my previous band names were dumb and we only played to a handful of people). It’s a thesis statement. It’s how you’ll sculpt your overall aesthetic. Your brand. Your merch. Your identity.
And now that everyone finds music online, now you have to worry about SEO. Sometimes even a decent band name can fall flat when it comes to Googling.
Example: There’s a very good Philly band called 2nd Grade. They just put out a very good song called “Boys in Heat.” I wanted to send it to my friend, so I went on the googler and searched “2nd grade boys in heat” and then immediately screamed OH SHIT and slammed my laptop shut and threw it out the window, waiting to hear the sirens coming for me.
Here’s the song so you don’t have to make that same mistake.
With these SEO best practices in mind, and maybe the hopes to play it safe by piggybacking on other tried and true artists who have navigated the waters of branding before them, bands (especially in indie/pop-punk/emo) have sort of pigeonholed themselves into a few categories lately. They are:
Person performing a task: (Jawbreaker, Pallbearer, Cliffdiver, Broadcaster, Daytrader, the list goes on.)
All-caps all-consonants but pronounced like the regular word: (SWMRS, STRFKR, RVIVR, CSTVT)
Mommy/Daddy names: (Mom Jeans, Dads, Soccer Mommy, Prince Daddy & the Hyena) Adult Mom is exempt from this list because they have publicly acknowledged being tired of defending their name.
[Person] & the [Animal] names: (Noah & the Whale, Judah & the Lion, Hootie & the Blowfish and uhhh Prince Daddy & The Hyena I guess.
Novels: (The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, ...And You Will Know Us By Our Trail of Dead, Empire! Empire! I Was a Lonely Estate, etc.)
So let’s say you and your friends are starting a band. You have the songs, you just need a name for your Bandcamp page. Ideally, this name would stick and you can enjoy a long career of being easily googled and standing out on the Fest lineup flier. What do you do?
Well, one thing comes to mind. And it’s the scene in School of Rock where the kids come up to Jack Black (rock music’s actually fun uncle) with some band name ideas.
They are:
The Bumblebees (which he dismisses as sissy but would make for a decent ska band or gang in The Warriors)
The Koala Bears (also dismissed as sissy)
And Pig Rectum. At this point, he quickly shoos the kids away from the table of teachers eating, but this was actually the right answer.
Because, dear reader, the way to perfectly find yourself in the middle of the venn diagram of band names—not taken, has that punk edge you want to portray, concise—is to get real gross with it.
There are two perfect examples of this: Mannequin Pussy and Diarrhea Planet. Sure, the uninitiated might write you off unfairly. But fuck them. You don’t want them at your shows anyway. People with curious minds will see that and think “Wow, I gotta check that disgusting sounding band out.” There are fliers all over Philly still from when Mannequin Pussy’s Patience came out last year. And no one bats an eye. You know why? Because Philly is a weird town and also because the band is so undeniably good that we look past the name.
The same went for Diarrhea Planet. They transcended all of the publications writing pieces about “can ya believe they’re called dIaRrHeA pLaNeT?” and wrote about the music instead. Be so undeniably good that your disgusting band name doesn’t matter.
Hell, Steely Dan is super gross but you just don’t know that. So is Pearl Jam.
So, my unsolicited advice as someone who never once became successful in the music industry? Name your band something gross and easily googled (but not something that will put you on a list you don’t want to be on).
That, or just use the Wu-Tang Clan name generator. It worked for the kid from Community.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Jeff Rosenstock.