Sorry, you’re too late. There aren’t any band names left. Every possible band name you could ever think of has been used!
Okay, so that’s not true, but sometimes it seems like it.
Who hasn’t heard an interesting word or ironic phrase that sets off the alarm, “that would make a great band name!”? I do it to a fault, sometimes with OCD passion. But with the collective conjury of search engines, it often feels like there isn’t an original thought of any kind left. Short of random letters, numbers, and symbols, just about anything you search for has already been used, and often many times over.
Twitter’s version of the band name experiment is found with the hashtag #bandnames. Some recent favorites include “Second Breakfast” (Hobbit-related), “Confused Dads with White iPods”, and “Judd Nelson’s Nostrils”. I have Tweetdeck set to relentlessly pop these up all day long, and it never gets old.
Early on the web, there was a site that collected what they called “Stoopid Band Names”. The idea was to combine several band or musician names into a new name, with bonus points for irony and wordplay. From simple amalgamations like “Gwarbage” (Gwar + Garbage) and “Wall of Voodoobie Brothers” (think Jeopardy’s Before & After), to consonant substitution like “Lemmy Kravitz” (booo!), and the downright ridiculously complex “MC 900ft Liquid Jesus Lizard and Mary Chain Jones” (wuh duh fuh?). I can’t find the original web site any more, but that list lives on in this Google group. I find it totally infectious, and it’s taking an incredible amount of life force to not spend the next couple hours grubbing for more.
Sadly, band name creation has slowly devolved into a sea of automatic random word generators. Just search google for “band name generator“. It definitely takes the soul out of the process. But if all you’re looking for is a simple random adjective and noun combination, I guess it isn’t a bad way to go…
