POSTCARD FROM CONNECTICUT

Every week when the arts section arrives with the local paper, I am always tickled by the list of musical groups scheduled to perform in Connecticut. Perhaps a recent listing that promised shows this summer by three groups--named Leaf Jumpers, Two Ton Shoe and Gargantua Soul--shows you why.

Obviously, the music of these lesser-known alternative groups does not really interest me all that much. Instead, it is their zany band names that I find especially intriguing. For, in an effort to outdo others in the industry, fledgling music groups continue to come up with stranger and stranger names, providing ample diversion to pass those lazy nights of summer.

These bizarre names reflect a relatively new trend in music. Though it is always easy to compare today's culture to the ostensibly "simpler" times of years past, it is undeniable that the groups on the music scene of the 1980s had a much more intelligible system of nomenclature.

Gone are those days when many groups' titles actually reflected the identities of the various lead singers. Groups with names like Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, Lisa and Cult Jam and D. J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were all staples of the '80s music arena. And although we never knew who actually made up the Miami Sound Machine, we at least knew a little bit about the band just from the name. In those days, if George Michael was singing, the casual listener generally knew it.

But nowadays, it's hard to glean much information at all from these bizarre band names--like Sneaker Pimps, Counting Crows or even Thrifty Spackle--that seem to be so popular among a new sect of music listeners.

Does this trend in naming reflect originality gone awry or is it an effort on the part of musical groups to distance themselves from anything that is traditional? My money is on the former.

This trend in the naming process, as it would seem to me, goes something like this: typical Alternative Band X decides it needs a name--and a good one at that. After surveying the names of similar groups that have been commercially successful, its members realize that a catchy and quirky name is vital to the group if it ever hopes to wins a spot on Casey's Top 40 or even a gig on "Late Night With Conan O'Brian." So, following the lead of groups like Green Day, Barenaked Ladies, Smashing Pumpkins and Foo Fighters, the band members brainstorm for two or three of the most random words they can think of. And I would imagine that after a few hours, they formally name the group.

A quick search on the Internet yielded a long list of alternative bands for which it would be plausible to believe that this naming method was used. The Alternative Rock World home page named top groups like Tragically Hip, Econoline Crush, Gravity Kills, Searching for 13, Sprung Monkey and Marcy Playground.

And perhaps even more interesting is the fact that many of these band names even follow a similar grammatical pattern. That is, the first of the pair of words tends to describe the second word in some way or another. This is the case with aforementioned bands (both big and small), like Green Day, Barenaked Ladies, Tragically Hip and Thrifty Spackle, among others.

How humorous, then, that in a genre known for its attempts to be anything but traditional, the band names seem to be easily created from a very simple formula.

In fact, these bizarre names have provided my social group with an endless source of diversion. For the past few summers now, we have been playing the informal "alternative band name" game whenever we get together. To play is simple. Listen closely to everything you and your friends say. If you're quick enough, you'll pick out odd phrases that put genuine alternative band names--like Perfect Thyroid, Infamous Gnomosexuals, Accidental Groove and Burning Spear--to shame. Our list of outtakes from purely casual speech includes classics like Extraneous Stomach, Sneaky Bucket, Vomitous Swan and, my personal favorite, El Nino Lips.

But I was amazed to hear that my friends and I are not alone in this admittedly odd--but fun--game. A friend who I had not seen for a while just shared with me that she too had been playing this game with some of her friends. Her favorite Alternative band name creation, she said, was Sinister Fish. What fun.

When Gladys Knight decided to name her group, there were undoubtedly a few people who raised their eyebrows at the decision to call her backup singers the Pips. The same probably goes for Chubby Checker or the Fifth Dimension. But never have musical names been so bizarre as they are today.

And as the music industry continues to ride the wave of alternative music, there will be ample reasons for us to keep playing our own game of "Name the Grunge Band."

Scott A. Resnick '01 is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House. He is interning in the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development in Hartford.