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I’ve gotten more careful about how I write about those kinds of bands. The thing with a lot of those bands is, they’re also the ones that tend to have issues with women. Grindcore bands, they’re often going for extreme sort of scatological humor, and a lot of them are trying to be funny. Death metal and grindcore bands, they will often just-so ridiculous-they’re often trying to sound super evil and blasphemous but it comes across as comical a lot of the time. The bonus edition I’m actually writing right now is about death metal bands. Understandably, because I was telling them they have a stupid band name. But usually the people that didn’t like it were the ones who appeared in that category. Most bands took being featured on the list well, and sort of in the spirit of what it was. One of them was just “No.” It was just cheesy or melodramatic or florid band names. The categories would change every year, but there were some that were always there. Yeah! In the Year In Band Names, I’d always break it up by category.

In your mind, are there different categories of bad band names? Are band names bad in specific ways like that? The platform I use, the minimum I can charge is five bucks a month, and I’m like, that’s stupid.

#Avclub i am jesus christ free#

And I also did the thing where it’s free and then you can also pay a few bucks a month and you get an extra newsletter. The best ones are these anonymous bands that play like shitball bars in the suburbs and have some ludicrous name that’s super funny and has a lot of personality, and I really love writing about them. Like, “I’ll send you 50 bucks.” So I was thinking about how newsletters have had this resurgence in the past year or two, and I was like, this could actually work in this format, where every month I’ve got a few bands and I’ll send it out and it’s a much more doable way of doing something that I really do enjoy: writing about band names.

But it was still something I liked doing.Īt the end of every year people would hit me up on Twitter asking me if it was going to happen. Club wasn’t asking for me to do it again, and I wasn’t necessarily… Doing it every year was this big project that was a lot. Club in 2018 I ended up doing one more for that year, even after I left. It would just destroy weeks of my life, but the feedback was always good. It was always fun to do, but it was a crazy amount of work to assemble every year. Club’s big features at the end of every year, called The Year In Band Names. And that turned into this annual recap that became one of The A.V. So, I was doing all the show listings that were in the newspaper and I would just write down goofy band names. Years and years ago when I started at The A.V.

Tell me the origin story of Band Name Bureau. We hit him up on Skype to find out what it’s taught him. It’s safe to say that few people on the planet have ever spent as much time thinking about bad band names. Club, and more recently as a Substack newsletter called Band Name Bureau. Club editor Kyle Ryan has been collecting notably awful examples of the form and sharing them with the world, first through a long-running year-end roundup for The A.V. Since the early MySpace days, writer and former A.V. Every one of the millions of other names that people have come up with for their musical groups lies somewhere on a spectrum between “dumb” and “offensive.” That includes nearly every mediocre local band to ever play a Tuesday night college town dive bar, but also almost all of the greats: The Stooges? The Rolling Stones? Led Zeppelin? If you look at any of them-or literally almost any band name-for more than a couple of seconds, you’ll start to wonder why anyone would think it was remotely cool. There have been maybe a couple of dozen band names that are actually good in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.