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" The terrible band name has been around as long as kids have been picking up guitars in their parents&amp;#039; garages. It&amp;#039;s a sturdy tradition. It&amp;#039;s the subject of one perfectly on-point scene in This Is Spinal Tap in which David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) explain their band-name lineage and how they came to work together. They formed The Originals together, but that band already existed, so they changed their name to The New Originals, after which the previous Originals became known as The Regulars.      The point is: Band names are largely arbitrary. Would The Beatles still be The Beatles if they were instead, say, The Tigers? Eh, probably. What does The Velvet Underground mean really, beyond the vague suggestion of too-cool exotica, also the basis of Lou Reed&amp;#039;s entire persona, which would inspire druggie anthems like &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m Waiting for the Man&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Heroin&amp;quot;? The band name that just sounds cool has been an almost infinite well that our aspiring rock stars go back to again and again, with varied levels of success \u2014 Eels, The Strokes, The Dandy Warhols (like I said, varied). But a new tradition has sprung up in the world of rock, pop, and hip-hop, particularly of the &amp;quot;indie&amp;quot; variety, that is troubling to say the least. This would be the novelty name, and under that category the dreaded misspelled name. In a world that has fewer and fewer cool names to monopolize (good thing Grimes got to it while she still could), these more-horrible-than-previously-horrible band names stake out uncharted territory of lameness. Musicians are adopting names so wacko or just dumb, that they will inevitably be the top result in Google searches, more important than ever in this SEO-driven, brand-worshipping postmillennial consumer market. This is how you get a name like Chvrches, a group of Scots making thumping electronic music that has earned itself a large following with only one studio album. That&amp;#039;s right: Churches, but with a &amp;quot;V&amp;quot; instead of a &amp;quot;U.&amp;quot; Even the lads of This Is Spinal Tap would hang their heads in shame. I don&amp;#039;t mean to single out Chvrches. This has become a widespread phenomenon that reached pandemic status with last month&amp;#039;s SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas. \u2020\u2020\u2020, the side project of Deftones&amp;#039; Chino Moreno, was there, refusing to use letters to spell out their name (say it &amp;quot;Crosses&amp;quot;). So were Eagulls, another ascendant band too happy to swap letters around, as well as Highasakite and the rapper IamSu!. A young rapper I&amp;#039;m quite fond of, Le1f, has shortened his first name Khalif and added a numeral to it because... why not? An emblem of this problem is Merrill Garbus&amp;#039;s tUnE-yArDs, the aggressive spelling of which seems to hint at the love-it-or-hate-it music she makes (I am not on the &amp;quot;love it&amp;quot; side).  The problem runs deeper. Some new band names seem to self-consciously not take themselves seriously. They ditch the whole idea of a &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot; band name. This is the case with Joanna Gruesome, a name that commits the triple sin of 1) being a pun, 2) being a pun only music nerds get, and 3) losing any humor it had immediately after the first time you hear it. Joanna Gruesome make some nice punk music, but their name says they can&amp;#039;t give enough of a shit to even come up with one of the old kind of terrible band names. The same could be said for Hurray for the Riff Raff, whose earnest do-gooder moniker is probably not a joke but sounds like it could be. As the Village Voice observed in its history of bad band names not too long ago, it&amp;#039;s gotten to the point where some of these artists can&amp;#039;t even explain how they came up with what they call themselves. They&amp;#039;ve given up. Luckily, some new bands are still aiming for the dreams that occupied the heads of Spinal Tap&amp;#039;s members. They prove that we can do better if only we put in the effort, and that all the unnecessary punctuation in the world can&amp;#039;t combat a clever, simple juxtaposition of words. Perfect Pussy is the delightfully suggestive name of a quickly rising punk band. The sister group Haim sticks to the tried-and-true method of using your actual name. And then there&amp;#039;s Melt Yourself Down, an indescribable world-funk-jazz fusion group that seems to have given itself that name simply because, well, it sounds cool. Good enough for me. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a28179/your-band-name-sucks/>