Cause celebs: Why so many musicians once named their acts after famous people
Ringo Deathstarr, anyone? Remembering those pun-driven band names that ran rampant in the early 2010s
Music Features Musicians
Imagine the late Steven Paul Smith never produces music as “Elliott Smith.” Instead, he kicks off his career in 1994 under a different pseudonym—a pun inspired by a young actor then conquering Hollywood. Elliott Smith, songwriting legend, releases his first solo music as… Sad Pitt.
Despite claiming to be no “sadder than anybody else,” Smith and his lacerating, soul-baring music became inextricable from the most troubled elements of his personal life, penning him in as a poster boy for depression.
But what if he’d arrived with a name that downplayed the confessional quality of his work? Would mass audiences have embraced “Sad Pitt”’s music in the same way? Could they have appreciated its emotional intimacies without feeling compelled to project them onto Smith the man? Hard to say, but this is roughly the premise by which Mathew Lee Cothran began his career as Elvis Depressedly.
Cothran’s first musical project, Coma Cinema, started generating blog chatter back in 2010. Though excited to grow his audience, the North Carolina native became convinced that personal scrutiny would derail his art, his private life, or both.
But before those fears had a chance to become reality, they manifested creatively. Cothran’s anxiety destabilized the bedroom-pop sound that had defined Coma Cinema. As his songs turned more introspective, Cothran grew fearful the new music would not only alienate his fanbase but also trap him in the public imagination as a “sad singer.” Out of this artistic crisis, Cothran saw an opportunity.
“I realized if I came up with a funny moniker it could be a way to distance myself from my music,” he told The A.V. Club. “A buffer to keep me and any listeners from taking things too seriously.” Cothran settled upon Elvis Depressedly, a portmanteau he’d discovered while vying against coworkers at a local kitchen for the most obnoxious celebrity pun.
As it happens, the first Elvis Depressedly album, Save The Planet, Kill Yourself, arrived in August 2011 alongside a wave of indie musicians with names that were also styled after celebrities. The same year saw releases from Com Truise, Dale Earnhardt JR JR, Ringo Deathstarr, Chet Faker, Joanna Gruesome, and others.
“We knew all these bands who took themselves so seriously that they had a hard time naming themselves, forget making music,” says Elliott Frazier of sloppy shoegaze revivalists Ringo Deathstarr. “For us, laughing at yourself really became a kind of crucial attitude.”
“We’d begun as a songwriting exercise with no artistic identity in place as a starting point,” says Josh Epstein of pop craftsmen Dale Earnhardt JR JR. “At that time there were a lot of really serious indie bands, so having the levity of a ridiculous name allowed us to focus on our project as more of a creative outlet. The idea of even having a name was kind of a joke to us.”
These otherwise dissimilar bands, with diverse career ambitions and sonic agendas, came independently to goofy names through the same motivating anxiety as Cothran. Out of the fear that an all-encompassing persona would trap their indie artistry, they sought creative freedom through frivolity, distance, and an instinct for terrible celebrity humor.
But why all at once around the turn of decade? Perhaps it’s because, having come up alongside nascent streaming services and MP3 blogs, these musicians were the first indie generation for whom flippancy need not spell a career in the underground.
“As it became easier to make and release music, indie went from this passionate, ride-or-die thing built through touring to an internet game where anyone could get huge from their bedroom,” recalls Larry Fitzmaurice, who joined Pitchfork as a staff writer in early 2010. “In that climate, it was kind of just like, ‘Who cares? Just go for anything.’”
But for some music fans, the rapid saturation of artists with mock-celebrity names became evidence enough to label them all as trend-hopping opportunists.
“We had so many of those celebrity bands in rotation,” says a former college radio DJ in Minnesota, who prefers to go by his online handle “Mookid.” “And I remember just thinking, ‘Okay, what’s next? How are you gonna make a serious album with a name like Salvia Plath?’ It was like getting noticed with a crazy name was their only goal.”
Posting on RateYourMusic.com, Mookid sublimated that distaste into a list: “Artists from the late 2000s/2010s whose names are an ironic parody of the name of a celebrity.” Eight years and 116 entries later, it’s one of the most popular lists on the site—easily the biggest database of these artists on the internet.
The list embodies a fear many of its subjects have come to share: They will be remembered only as fad chasers. “I definitely have worried that my legacy will be that I have one of the many stupid band names on that list,” says Elliott Brabant, whose band Michael Cera Palin appears at entry 91.
Also preserved in amber are the frustrated captions Mookid wrote under each entry: “Mark Twain is not your cute little device for making people think you’re clever. Go die now.” And: “Why are you branding your art as a lame attempt at wordplay?” These comments mirror the vitriol many of the band members recall receiving online at the time.
“As the trend got bigger … people went from being like, ‘Hey your name sucks’ to ‘I want to kill every motherfucker that has a name like this,’” says Cothran. “People thought it wasn’t serious art because they were such tacky, cheeky names.”
Much quieter, though ultimately far more decisive, was the disdain from the music press. “I had colleagues who took celebrity names to be just cynical trend-chasing on the musician’s part, and I can tell you for a fact that it hurt coverage,” says Fitzmaurice. “Like, ‘This name’s dumb and what it’s trying to do is cheap, so it gets a slightly lower grade or I’m not even listening to it.’”
“I can’t help but wonder if being part of that trend inhibited us,” says Frazier, whose only Pitchfork coverage is a two-sentence track review that doesn’t discuss the music but does refer to his group as “absurdly named.” “The internet has a lot of power to keep people away from stuff that they think is lame.”
Fittingly, the only contemporaneous article to focus on these musicians as a group, a July 2011 piece in The Guardian, strained to put a positive spin on their perceived internet-age opportunism, clocking the “attention-grabbing names” as “good marketing sense” for an “information-glutted age.” When that’s your trend’s most flattering press clipping, it’s no surprise these artists felt singled out.
Of course, musicians with punny celebrity names were hardly the first to seize simultaneously upon the same kind of goofy moniker. One need only glance sideways for a contemporary (and far less contentious) trend: disem-voweled, all-capped names like MGMT, MSTRKRFT, and STRFKR.
What’s more, acts having fun with the names of famous people have roots in extreme music that go back to the 1980s. It’s tough to imagine anyone accusing ’90s pre-internet punk lifers like Urethra Franklin and Jon Cougar Concentration Camp of being unserious.
Yet, as The Guardian pointed out, those “willfully unpopular” predecessors had very different agenda than the “credible and commercial” bands of 2011. In a determinedly underground band such as Kathleen Turner Overdrive, the sonic abrasion of the music works in tandem with the commercially untenable name to make a fervent statement about commitment to music over popular acceptance. When a careerist indie-pop band calls themselves the Dolly Spartans, it can feel gimmicky by comparison—like an act is trading off the fame rather than subverting it. Some artists will admit to doing just that.
Take Brabant, who wasn’t even in a band yet when he came up with the name Michael Cera Palin, which he debuted in 2015. He reverse-engineered the moniker after he concluded that “celebrity names were very algorithm-friendly” and his music would thus “reach a nonzero amount of ears.” The musician wasn’t even aware his creation also parodied comedian Michael Palin until a Monty Python Facebook page accidentally auto-tagged his group in a post.
But, like his fellow mock-celebrity artists, Brabant’s ultimate motivation was never gaming the algorithm. “My music is incredibly personal, but being an artist and being a human are two very separate spaces that I don’t want to mix, and my goofy name definitely helps me do that,” insists Brabant, who also recalls the influence of Matthew Lee Cothran and his conception of Elvis Depressedly as a buffer.
Of course, as Cothran would find out, there are some things a goofy name can’t protect you from. In April 2019 a Twitter thread by musician Sam Ray accused Cothran of emotionally abusive behavior and threats. It caught enough traction to inspire others to open up with similar stories on Reddit.
Though Cothran contests many of the allegations, none of which are legal in nature, and counters with his own accusation that Ray was trying to drive him to suicide, he says the incident “upturned” his musical career to the point where he doubts he’ll “ever recover.”
Yet, for all the fans who spoke of their sense of betrayal, nearly as many wondered why this uncomfortable personal affair had become a “matter of public interest.” Unlike his namesake, Elvis Depressedly was not at the level of celebrity that usually brought such granular revelation.
But as political commentator Chris Hayes recently pointed out in The New Yorker, “the previous limiting conditions on what’s private and what’s public have been lifted” throughout the past decade. “Fame has gone from a novelty to a core human experience.”
Thanks to the mounting likes and retweets of social media, sharing once-discreet political opinions, idle commentary, and personal drama has become inextricably associated with popular affection. As much as we’d like to deny it, when our worth pivots around disclosing these aspects of our private lives, we may begin to feel we have the same right to everybody else’s.
In 2021 we’re all celebrities, and it’s never been harder for artists—and, indeed, regular people—to gain attention without a persona connected to some socially acceptable idea of the “real them.”
“Social media has been really damning for the indie scene, to a point where it’s barely about the music anymore,” agrees Fitzmaurice, who published a Stereogum article on the phenomenon last year. “Increasingly artists have to sell ‘themselves’ as funny or woke online if they want any kind of audience growth for their music—music that may or may not be as funny or woke.”
Indeed, many indie artists worry that the social media celebrity they build will muddle their relationship with listeners and infringe upon their creative aims. When they look at their retweet numbers, how many represent fans of their work vs. fans of their Twitter persona?
To hear Fitzmaurice tell it, a lot of that pressure comes from the top down, behind the scenes. Inspired by the success of indie crossovers like Phoebe Bridgers and Car Seat Headrest—who invite an obsessive, empathetic fandom with a cohesive personal narrative traceable from their songs to their postings—social media managers and publicists work to foster a “genuine” persona, even for artists whose music might not welcome one in quite the same way. And at that point, it’s unlikely a goofy celebrity name would have much effect.
“I have gotten advice verbatim to use my band account as a personal account,” Brabant confirms. “If I’m expected to market my art, I don’t want the package I’m selling to be me as a person.”
While these cultural shifts affect all musicians, viewing them through the lens of artists with mock-celebrity names does lend their long struggle for acceptance a ruefully ironic shade. After nearly a decade facing accusations that they were more committed to making internet noise than making music, these artists find themselves in a world that rewards those who do exactly that.
Of course, there are still exceptions: Perhaps the most buzzed-about indie artist of fall 2021 is the outlandishly named Illuminati Hotties. Bandleader Sarah Tuzdin’s alternatively sarcastic and sincere music might as well be designed to flummox any listener searching for a consistent, “real” her (they’ll find no help from the band’s Twitter account, which mostly limits itself to promoting media engagements). And yet, perhaps assisted by their name, Tuzdin has translated her winky-face evasion to a growing audience.
Still, with so many artists looking to cultivate that same healthy distance between artistic persona and private life, one wishes that slapping a goofy moniker on all of them were not such an obviously futile proposition. It’s worth asking whether those acts from 2011 would use the same name if they were starting today.
“We would probably just go by our names,” says Epstein, whose band shortened their name to JR JR in 2015. “The easiest way to brand yourself today is to go by your actual name and hope that your name becomes a big brand, right?”
“I always thought of [Ringo Deathstarr]’s name as like asking [the audience], ‘Hey, trust us.’ Like, we all know it’s goofy, but the music isn’t, so just listen and don’t worry about anything else,” says Frazier. “But I’m not sure that trust exists as much anymore.”
At least one artist is left still asking for that trust, whether he wants to or not. With the first Google search suggestion following “Elvis Depressedly” forever locked at “abuse,” it’s not surprising to learn that Cothran initially lost faith in the moniker that he created to “shield himself.”
“There was a period right after [the allegations] where the name became a pariah in my mind, something that had turned bad, maybe had always been bad,” he says. Yet as Cothran kept working on new music, finding himself unable to create outside the lens of the project he’d built, he became reacquainted with the original appeal of Elvis Depressedly—the creative freedom it gave him from “the need to be liked.”
“I realized the people who care about my music don’t care about the internet drama, and those are probably the same people who never cared about the goofy celebrity thing,” he maintains. “And that really was the whole point of the name, finding that audience, even if it’s, like, three people.”
Julian Towers is a burgeoning writer currently based out of Austin. He is his own Wonderwall.
122 Comments
Nice article, but you have to give some ink to the real trailblazers in this area: the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Elvis Hitler, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. I think the first two were all about the shock value when their band names hit you in print form, BJM was likely more about that shielding thing that the article talks about. Giving a very emotionally vulnerable songwriter a silly shield of ironic distance.
I don’t understand why someone would do this.
Why did members of punk bands like the Dead Kennedys give themselves wacky pseudonyms like Jello Biafra? Or the unrelated Ramones names that made them seem like a family? It’s a gimmick.
I sometimes do live folk gigs with my mother, who’s been writing and performing since the 60’s. We call ourselves Live Kennedys. The gimmick is we are a family and it is our real name.
Do you also cover classics like ‘Let’s Tip The Landlord’ and ‘California Uber Convenient’?
“Nazi Punks Can be Rehabilitated With a Little Bit of Understanding”
Good idea… see what I can do!
Hopefully somewhere there’s also a Dead Kennedys cover band called the Ted Kennedys
There used to be one that played Buenos Aires under the name “The Dead Menems.”
I’m not sure there is but there was once a punk band called the Modernettes with a bassist named Mary Jo Kopechne.
If you think they named themselves The Dead Kennedys or Jello Biafra as a gimmick, you missed the point.
Write this VERY long, boring ass article that could just as easily be a single paragraph Wikipedia entry? Me neither
Username comment synergy at its best!
I know exactly what you mean, Hank Wilhem Scream Jr.
It’s almost like there’s some level of self-awareness here.
Maybe your rowdy friends can explain it to you when they come over tonight.
I always thought Minus the Bear (named after the TV show “BJ and the Bear”) was silly yet not so obvious as most of the bands mentioned here.
Plus, they were an awesome band.
Oh I get it.I wonder how long it takes bands who name themselves after gross sex stuff to regret that decision. Like 10CC, which is a great band, but once you hear why the name they become significantly less awesome.
10cc and The Lovin’ Spoonful are both supposedly named after the same thing but you’ll also hear people involved in both bands deny it.
“Cherry Poppin’ Daddies” always grossed me out.
Ditto Squirrel Nut Zippers
Yeah, I hate swing music too.
took me a second.
I prefer bands that actually live up to their funny names, like Dread Zeppelin.They’re a reggae band that does Lead Zeppelin covers and as an added bonus, the singer is an Elvis impersonator and actually sound good.Still, I suppose being an indie band with a celebrity word-play moniker is better than all those one-hit wonders of the late 90’s/early 2000’s with vaguely cryptic numeric names like 3rd Eye Blind, Three Doors Down, Seven Mary Three, Matchbox Twenty, Temple of the Dog…
Sure, Matchbox Twenty’s success endured the other aforementioned but still valid in the overall category.
I prefer bands that actually live up to their funny names,Hey, Tiny, who’s playing tonight?
Jolly Green Giants, Shitty Beatles.
The Shitty Beatles? Are they any good?
They suck.
Then it’s not just a clever name?
My favorite clever name may be the Smiths cover group called This Charming Band.
Nothing cryptic about the name Seven Mary Three. That was Ponch and Jon’s call # on CHIPS.
Too cryptic, too clear
Not sure everyone got it, oh well, my dear.
oh well whatever, nevermind
Ah yes, that obscure minor numeric act, Temple of the Dog, as in “one two three four dog six seven…”
Temple of the Dog isn’t really like those other names listed? there’s no cryptic numeric component, and in fact the name was a straightforward reference to a Mother Love Bone lyric, considering the album was dedicated to Andrew Wood of MLB after his death…
Also, Temple of the Dog was in 1990, and only recorded 1 album, so it fits neither the timeframe nor the convention.
Heyseed Dixie started off as a Bluegrass AC/DC cover band , before turning into a we just cover freaking everything bluegrass band.
Just to be clear, Temple of the Dog was a one-off album There was never a band called Temple of the Dog.
There’s an all-female Zeppelin cover band in the area known as “Lez Zeppelin.” Might be my favorite band name of all time.
Was Lead Zeppelin the first Zeppelin?
STRFKR is just a shortened version of the name which was Starfucker
Hey, making a name from celebrity portmanteau is the job of a commenter! Seriously though, there were users here in 2010 with better names than most of the examples here.
Not saying I’m in that category of being better, but once on another website the author John Crowley himself noticed my username, which really made my day.
I think my favorite was Ayatollah Colm Meaney.
I enjoyed “Dark Passengerside Airbag”
He still posts at the TI: https://tolerabilityindex.freeforums.net/
That one and Queef Latina were perfection.
Fucking AV club hacks being ignorant of the great Ron Hitler Barassi and Humphrey B. Flaubert and Eugen de la Hot-Croix Bun.Wankers.
Thank you.
My favorite old school celebrity commenter name I can remember is It Takes A Nathan Of Fillions To Hold Us Back.
Also I’ve decided I should register on some other forum somewhere as Cannabis Collins (influenced by watching Dark Shadows, reading this article, then going to work, which happens to be near a dispensary). Alternately, Barnabas Rollins.
Did someone call my name?
Oh, such witty takes on celebrity names! Pass(é)!
On second thought, I should have named myself Jennifer Greyed.
Pacé, you mean?
The Brian Jonestown Massacre is my favorite example.
And one of the few decent bands with this type of name.
I actually dig them.
Yooooooo, RYM shout out! I’m online friends with Mookid, solid dude.I gotta say, I’m somewhat put off by the way social media has begun encouraging these weirdly intense parasocial relationships between artists and fans.
Meanwhile, Arnold George Dorsey and Declan McManus play pinochle in Vegas, waiting to be mentioned in the article.Yes, Englebert Humperdinck and Elvis Costello are both currently playing Vegas. Don’t look it up. They’re on a triple bill with Elvis Hitler.
Not a mention of Gnarls Barkley from 2006?
Not if we’re lucky.
1982 Vince Neil vs 2021 Vince Neil
brb, starting a band called Wince Neil.
The ravages of time. It’ll happen to you! Of course, I was never like the image to the left, so my ravages are less extreme.
It’s true. We’re all getting there or got there. Time is the enemy.
In Vince’s case, the bigger enemy was cheeseburgers.
Shout At The Menu
To be fair, he doesn’t look any less ridiculous on the left.
He’s not exactly a poster-boy for clean living.
2021 Vince Neil looks like he runs a fan club in 1982 for 1982 Vince Neil.
Is he the one we call “Dr. Feelgood”?
He’s radiant. I wonder when he’s due.
My favorite celebrity band name ever was Bruno Gerussi’s Gold Medallion. I assume they got a cease and desist letter like Dale Earnhardt JR JR, because it didn’t last too long. Speaking of which, I think it’s odd that you mention the change to JR JR, but not the reason.
I could have mentioned it… except it wouldn’t have been factual. Those guys never received anything but a thumbs up from the real life Mr. Jrhttps://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-why-dale-earnhardt-jr-jr-changed-its-name-to-jr-jr
Just out of curiousity, why TF are you greyed on your own article? Aside from Kinja just being trash, that is.
Dunno! Would love for everyone to click on me and feel an immediate disappointment that this is my only article
If a band with a silly name gets really successful (or even have cult success) we forget that the name is silly. The Beatles are a bad pun, but nobody ever thinks about that. I assume that Elvis Costello was to some extent meant as a joke. The Who, The Guess Who and The The are all basically jokey riffs on band-naming conventions. Dead Kennedys was originally considered something of a tasteless joke. The Minutemen was supposed to be an ironic name, since they’re politics were pretty left-wing and the name was generally associated with reactionaries (in fact, they were previously called The Reactionaries). Joy Division was a reference to women who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese military in World War II. I think naming a band something like that could be considered a dark joke, a laugh at the expense of those who don’t get the reference. But like I said, all these bands were successful, to some extent, so we forget the jokes and are able to discuss them without even being conscious of their weird names. Elvis Depressedly or whatever did not achieve that level of success, so people will never be able to forget the goofy name. So, I’m sorry Michael Cera Palin; your name may be no sillier than The Flaming Lips or Limp Bizkit or The Flying Burrito Brothers, but until you can get people who hear your name to associate it with something else, then the name is going to be all they think about.
Agree, but a minor point — “Joy Division” is actually a reference to the Nazi brothels in concentration camps. Well, sort of. The name is actually taken from the English translation of a novel about the women in the brothels, K. Tzetnik’s House of Dolls.
My mistake. I guess I combined “joy division” with “comfort women” in my head.
Also, even after having success the name Limp Bizkit is still incredibly stupid.
Not to mention pretty terrible.
I wonder (and could research I guess, but not tonight) when clever band names became a thing. Was it the real life equivalent of the Soggy Bottom Boys in early 20th century America? Were there Renaissance minstrel troupes with wacky names? The mind reels, briefly.
I was wondering the same thing today, thanks to this article. Not even clever band names, but band names at all, besides basic descriptors like “The Glen Miller Orchestra” or “The Andrews Sisters” or someone’s name followed by “and his band.” The earliest I know of are country/western/bluegrass bands with names like “The Singing Cowboys.” I have no idea if it goes back any further than that. The earliest ones with genuinely goofy names that I can think of are at least a few years into the rock and roll era. Prior to that it’s always just “The” followed by a common noun. Although, now that I think about it, I assume “Bill Haley and His Comets” is intended to reference Halley’s Comet, so I guess that counts, and that was about as early as you can get.
Did you know that there’s a Sheffield mathcore band that shares your username, give or take an “l”?I assume you took your name from LA Confidential like they did, rather than from the band, at any rate.
I didn’t know that, but I’m not surprised. When I picked the name, I thought it was pretty clever, but I’ve discovered since then that a lot of people have decided to use it, including a fairly prominent MRA, unfortunately. I’ve been considering starting a new account under the name Bart Savagewood, which is also a pop culture reference, but one that I think only a tiny percentage of people would get.
We’ll always have The Butthole Surfers.
…AND that band with Gibby Haynes!
I say that about the Beatles all the time. The best band ever literally has the worst name ever. What are the odds of that?
I think Led Zeppelin is a dumber name than The Beatles, but to each his own.
In terms of inverse proportion of laziness/bad punnery to commercial success, it’s hard to top “96 Tears”
Why? Cause they’re largely talentless and unoriginal with nothing really to say.
All possible variations of single-word band names were taken by 1996. There was actually a lot of violence towards the end when Shoegaze and Indie Rock bands were battling it out for scraps. For a while it became viable to add “The …” and pluralizing band names, (eg “The Killers”, “The Strokes”) but all possibilities were quickly expended this way too, especially considering Doo Wop bands had pre-existing claims to millions of possible options. So what could a band do but either go for random combinations of words (eg “Arcade Fire”, “Smash Mouth”), abject nonsense (“Hoobastank”) or stupid portmanteaus? The only other option was to follow the lead of the app world and drop vowels (eg “MGMT”).
Can you imagine the problems bands in Russia and China have? They have no word for “The”!
Apparently, in the early days of Amazon, a query for “The The” CD would melt their sever.
So it’s Jeffersky Samolet, not The Jeffersky Samolet?
Can’t speak to the others, but “smash mouth” is a common football term that Al Michaels will say at least once every Sunday Night Football broadcast.
I am reminded of the 80’s when new actors had to use a middle initial, and then in the nineties a full middle name.These days, they are forced to use whatever dull thing their parents gave them.
Funny you should mention that considering The Managment was forced to devowelise because the name was already taken.
Nobody’s taken The Dog Eggs yet.
I might copyright it.
I think “Arcade Fire” was from a headline about a fire at an arcade.
Arcade Fire were named after… a fire in an arcade. Smash Mouth was a reference to something a hockey announcer said or something.
Makes sense. Oddly, Panic At The Disco was inspired by a yoga session at Oki Dog.
The best band names are just a funky made-up word that makes for a cool logo, like Sebadoh.Or a badass-sounding last name, like Danzig.Random word combinations have been tacky since Strawberry Alarm Clock, but they did give us the greatest band name ever: the Afghan Whigs.
“Funky made-up word”, so like Chumbawamba?
the best one is the 80s punk band Jodie’s Foster Army
“How are you gonna make a serious album with a name like Salvia Plath?”Tough talk from someone who chooses to be called “Mookid”.
This article has an unintentional undertone of “did you know there are some very irritating people in Indy music?”
There does seem to be some more leeway for DJ’s with stupid names.
BTS’s Marines! Lincoln D. Script Shun
Den Home ElliotThis is why I never get asked for band names.
Chet Faker renounced and then re-pronounced the name over the last few years as he realised no one could bother to learn his real name.
This is still a thing—the unfortunately named Ritt Momney has a recent hit cover of “Put Your Records On”
…and was prominently featured in the first 9 drafts of this article! Talked to him, nice kid, name came from wanting to endear himself to the kids at his all mormon high school
During the recent pandemic, some of us decided to organize a Covid-safe outdoor movie screening event at a campsite. The idea was that you’d come, bring some snacks, pitch a tent so the entrance faces the big screen, and be able to watch a series of classic 90s movies on a giant screen from the comfort of your tent in a safe, isolated, socially-distanced way. We called it…Tentin’ Quarantino.
This hardly started in the 00’s. The Dandy Warhols, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Elvis Costello, Dead Kennedys, Buckcherry, Eve’s Plum,
Holy shit, only just now did I realize Buckcherry is a reference to Chuck Berry.
And I needed your comment to clue me in, so I’m even worse off, I think.
I have an irrational hatred of the name Joy Orbison.
You misspelled “rational.”
How ‘bout Roy Behar?
Now this fad has spread to Left Twitter / TV writer Twitter / wannabe TV writer Twitter.
This article reminds me of the Scottish pop band from the 80s, Danny Wilson, who named themselves after a Frank Sinatra movie after the estate of a classic Hollywood actor raised objections to their original band name, Spencer Tracy…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Wilson_(band)#Background_and_early_history
“As much as we’d like to deny it, when our worth pivots around disclosing these aspects of our private lives…”We become narcissists. Don’t do that.Also Illuminati Hotties rule.
How ‘bout Rad Pitt?