PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

by Jeph Johnson

Most music these days is far from original. I mean more than half of all songs are either covers or interpolate riffs, lyrics and melodies from other songs.

Remember when you discovered the band Duran Duran was named after a character in the cult film Barbarella? Or how Jim Morrison named the Doors after some existential book he read while smoking peyote with Native American ghosts in Arizona? (I'm not so sure that's the story, but that's how my brain remembers it)

It actually was creative when bands like Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard and Thin Lizzy, back in the formative years of classic rock, intentionally misspelled the words in their names. And it got creativer (I just made that word up, see how easy it is?) when Prince began spelling his name with a symbol and his "you" as "U", "you're" as "UR", "to" as "2" and "I" as "eye".

But just a quick scan of the top 50 makes one wonder if young musicians these days have such a lack of originality that they've started looking at license plates for inspiration for their band names?

AOA, Blr, BRKLYN, BTS, CHVRCHES, DNCE, dvsn, KINGDM, KOLAJ, KSHMR, LANco, M83, MGMT, MK, MKTO, MNDR, MNEK, Pvris, RY X, and last but certainly not least, The Weeknd.

C'mon, when you ask the lead singer of a band "how'd you think up the name of your band?" and her answer is "it was my email address back in college" that pretty much explains why Donald Trump won the Presidency.

And by the way (this goes for FetLife screen names too) why does a 23 year old choose the name WellHung23 or a new rope bottom the name Bunny2016? Do those people only plan on being kinky for just one year?

As Steve Miller* so succinctly put it:

"Time. Keeps. On. Slippin'. Slippin'. Slippin'. Into. The. Future."

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*he also spoke of the pompetus of love.