The Fredösphere

The Haiku form performs several jobs in our kollective kultural konsciousness.  It's the symbol for a kind of extreme refinement of expression;  it's a poem's poem.  This makes for great irony, as when Garth observed

This is really weird.
We're looking down on Wayne's place,
But it's not Wayne's place.

or when people (like my friend Rick) survive boring meetings by recording the minutes in Haiku, or when a certain pork product ... oh, why don't I just give you a link.

Haiku also serves as a symbol for the ultimate in terseness.  I believe it no longer deserves this distinction.  We need to realize that band names are a form of poetry, and that Band Name is the most terse of all possible poetic forms.

Indeed, the terseness makes it the perfect form for today's microscopic attention spans, which explains its ubiquity.  Indeed, I'm almost ready to assert that in some cases, bands have been formed for the sole purpose of justifying the existence of the name.  If you've heard some of the bands I have, you know there is no other reason.

A band name works best as poetry when printed on a poster and stuck to a wall or a kiosk on a busy street corner.  Its terseness means the old method of printing a bunch of examples in a book does not work.  The mind (or at least, the modern mind with its itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny attention span) cannot absorb the full effect of many band names in one sitting. 

At this point, I wish I could send you to the webpage of band names that a former co-worker used to maintain, but apparently he gave up on it.  This was for proposed band names, not real ones, and demonstrated Band Name in it's most purely poetic expression. 

No, wait!  It was well-hidden, but I found it!

After reading a few dozen of the names (and the page has thousands) the mind simply stops working.  I submitted a few names to the list; I recall Anthropomorphine got me some nice compliments, although a few seconds of Googling reveals the pun has been discovered or stolen by one or two others in the intervening years.

What are the rules that the form imposes on the would-be poet?  I don't claim to have found the exhaustive list, but here are a few:

• Limit yourself to three words (or maybe four, if one is an article:  Toad the Wet Sprocket).
• Non sequiturs are easy and work well in the ironic age we live in.
• Don't rip names from today's headlines.  The Miami Relatives may have seemed like a good name when Elian Gonzalez was in the news, but it isn't.
• If you can find a term of art from some subculture that is only dimly known to the general public and has a certain goofiness when ripped from its context, you may have a winner.  See Charismatic Megafauna below.
• Avoid all intellectual (and especially philosophical) pretention.  See Orthogonal To Blackness below.
  

Thanks to Alex Ross, we now know that some string quartets are following these rules.

Here's a list of names I've come up with over the years.  To avoid fatigue, I'll limit myself to the very best.  (Yes, that means I have others that are even worse than the ones you see here.)

Anthropomorphine
Bat-Winged Boston Terriers
The Day the Ivy Died
Electroschlock
Beyond Chocolate and Vanilla
Charismatic Megafauna
Dog Dish
Orthogonal To Blackness
Guppies Be Good
Pitchforks and Torches
Tragicomic Flatulence
Where Egos Dare
White Like Ike

Need I point it out?  Replace "band" with "blog" everywhere it occurs in this post and most everything I wrote is still true.