When you form a new band

Written by Tommi on 10.08.2009 17:46:36

When you form a new band, even if you're from America - the cradle of all meaningful culture mankind has ever produced thus empowered to reign supreme over lesser countries, like Europe - please oh please oh please check if the name you're going for is taken. It takes like 5 minutes to do a bit of Googling and going through services like Last.fm to see if there's a band active under the name.

I don't really care too much about the plethora of Fun's and Viola's out there, but what really pushed me over the edge (pun intended) today was finding out about this band: Outlast from New Jersey.

How retarded can you get? Not only did they grab a name that was taken, they took it one step further and grabbed their name from one of the best bands ever from their specific miniscule niché of straight-edge vegan youth crew hardcore.

Ok, granted, Linköping's Outlast (the real Outlast) isn't the most well known band in the world, but even though they didn't get too many releases out in their way-too-short career, they're still hailed as one of the best youth crew acts ever. It would've taken these NJ wimps a matter of minutes to check out the roots of their selected style enough to know that a band with this name already made some pretty huge waves in the niché.

So what's next? Someone coming up with an emo band called Rites Of Spring? Or maybe a metal band called Venom. I'm going to go ahead and kick off my solo career under the name "Michael Jackson".

Seriously, do your damned homework.

rss-feed - link to this blog post - Back to blog index

10.08.2009 19:31:35 Lassi wrote

I think the infamous "Metallica" that came after Metallica was so obviously retarded choice for a name that it was actually pure genius. If I'm gonna start another band sometime I might just as well call it Metallica.

10.08.2009 19:34:27 Kennu wrote

The electronic music scene has long had an interesting solution to overlapping names: Artist and dj titles are often suffixed with a [context] like "Eliot Ness [reiv:]".

I guess it reflects the fact that names and brands should not be that important, compared to the actual music and content.. They should just be symbols for the audience to know who they are seeing.

Having said that, I still fully understand your pain Tommi, I also hate it when some mainstream jerk steals my favorite underground artist's name :-D

12.08.2009 14:00:22 "Unicode"

I just realized that if I ever form a band again, I want its name to be expressable in one unicode character (like Biohazard, Black Flag, Wheel of Dharma etc.) Unfortunately it doesn't seem as easy as I thought. There already is a band called ? (Hot Springs) and ? (Gear) is taken as well.

Currently I'm thinking about Neuter which has a nice symbol (?) plus some nice gender-political connotations as well. Depending on the type of music the band would play, Hot Beverage (?) could be another alternative.

12.08.2009 14:02:29 Eetu wrote : "Damn it"

Ok, so the custom-tailored CMS doesn't like unicode in comments, which kind of ruined my last comment. So it was me who was trying to play with characters.

16.08.2009 17:03:32 arttu wrote : "d'n'b is for dumbasses..."

I always thought it was hilarious that a group of d'n'b churning dimwits decided to call their conglomeration Bad Company.