Step One: Determine your mindset
The first thing you have to do when you’re deciding on the brutal band name that best suits you is decide where you’re going. Will you and your buddies-in-brutality be taking yourselves seriously? If you will, then a number of avenues of thought are dedicated to your cause. If not, then your avenue options are a bit more limited, but they’ll still take you to the incubators of some of the ripest newborn brain children you’ll ever find.
But, before you make any crazy decisions regarding your direction as a metal band (“Metallica” or “Cannibal Corpse”), sit down, have a bottle of Jack Daniels and close your eyes. Still awake? Then your mind’s clear and you’re ready for a mental hurricane—forget brainstorming. I’m about to grant you access to the three main categories from which all metal bands draw their inspiration for their names, song titles, album titles and general life philosophies. Behold…
Step Two: Hold a mental name hurricane
Using the table above as an ideation tool, you’re sure to churn out some of the most spellbindingly offensive band names any mortal mind can imagine. I hear you: What about the immortal minds? They don’t care what you have to say, so you’ll have to make do with what you’ve got when you spread your seeds of corruption.
Here’s how it works: Gore and Sacrilege are what traditional death metal and his brother genres are all about. The difference between the two is that if you and your band won’t be taking yourselves seriously as death-mongering demon spawn from the abyss, you must confine your mental hurricane to the bounds of the Gore theme. Social themes, on the other hand, tend to turn up in the hardcore-punk-influenced forms of death metal. You’ll therefore need to be harboring tremendous amounts of anger and resentment if you wish to delve into the Social themes. Some real-life examples of this ideation tool in use follow.
V = Deicide
3+D = Cattle Decapitation
I = Judas Priest
3+A = Marilyn Manson
B = Shadows Fall
1 = 3 Inches of Blood
C = Pestilence
Many real-life death metal bands use only one theme when they choose their name. Dual-themed naming is most-frequent with song- and album titles—we’ll get to that later. You should also note that not all of the bands used as examples above are death metal acts. They do, however, share a similar mentality, so they’re legitimate for demonstration.
Step Three: Pick your name, already.
Remember why you’re doing this: to get women and plug some righteous social cause, right? If there’s one thing that women love and society respect, it’s things that offend their sensibilities. Let’s keep that in mind when we put our name together. In my example, which is included here free of charge, we’ll be taking our band seriously—if we’re going to offend people on a daily basis, we’ll earn much more street cred by acting like we know what we’re talking about. This also means we have free reign over our thematic direction. Since hardcore-punk-influenced metal is for principled sissies, let’s take some bits from Gore and Sacrilege.
The final question we must ask ourselves before we choose our name is based on the type of impact our name will have on all of those fortunate enough to feel the icy touch of its utterance on their souls. One school of thought says that a “thought-provoking” name will have the most impact. This school claim that for any death metal act to truly defile the moral and spiritual well-beings of its admirers, it must make them process their message at all points of interaction. This entails sporting a name that tells the audience exactly what we feel we should always be telling them. The second school of thought, on the other hand, propose that a death metal act’s success is measured in street riots, televangelist marathons and Oprah specials. They, therefore, claim that a band’s name must evoke mental imagery so horrific, so grotesque and so altogether unholy that its mere mention can bring about the falls of certain major societies. Here’s where you realize that you love me: we’re going to conjure up two band names so that we may explore both schools of thought.
School one: We want them to think. We want them to think so hard that the shock they experience when they finally decipher our “mission statement” gives them birth defects. So far, we know we’ll be playing with Sacrilege and Gore. So, what else do we need to know? We need to know our message. Let’s just say that we’re atheists on a mission to verbally sacrifice the notion of divinity in order to free our listeners from the mental chains of organized religion. Easy. Which subthemes below Sacrilege can help us capture the idea of divinity in general? “Blatant Anti-God” would be too easy and, in fact, a bit cliché. Let’s go with “Devil-Jesus Dichotomy.” If we can use the ideas of a religious good guy and a bad guy in harmony, we could probably convey the idea that we don’t believe in anything, right? Thinking in synonyms gives us Lucifer Christ. Okay—that’s a start. It’s not quite “atheist” enough, though. We still need to convey the idea of sacrifice for the good of humanity. The obvious solution here is “crucifixion,” so we can put them together and end up with The Crucifixion of Lucifer Christ. Bravo.
School two: You’ve always wanted to meet Johnny Cochran, so school “shock-and-awe” might be the perfect school for you. Remember, our goal here is to offend the will to live out of mass society, so always keep your eye on that Oprah special. Once again, we’ll be conveying the Gore and Sacrilege themes with our band name. Since two themes are involved and shock value is the key, pun and word combination are our two favorite devices here. Let’s try a few religious word permutations first—that’s the best way to highlight your sacrilegious lust for blasphemy.
Tabernacle => Stabernacle
Crucifix => Crucifixiation
Altar (pray) => Altar (sacrifice)
Televangelism => Hellevangelism
That’s a great start (if I do say so, myself). Now, we need to add a little gore. This part is so easy, it should be taught to kindergarteners. However, nobody’s immune to writer’s block, so if you need some inspiration, just turn on the news or watch an episode of South Park or something. I’m going to help us out by throwing in the first bit of gory imagery that comes to mind. For some reason, I feel like “self mutilation” will do the trick for this exercise, so we’ll use it. Our final step merely entails combining the notion of self mutilation with any of the sacrilegious concepts we listed in the first step. I like the Hellevangelist idea, so we can come up with Slit-Wrist Hellevangelist. That’s decent enough—it’s pretty shocking, and it doesn’t mean a thing. One word of warning for those who choose to attend this school of thought: so that your audience don’t get confused and start trying to decipher some stupid message from your band name, you’ll have to make sure that you constantly strive to make your audience sick with your lyrics, song titles and general stage presence. Everyone knows that a band that appears so obsessed with gore and controversy that it seems to pervade every facet of their existence is just in it for the ladies. And let’s face it—we are just in it for the ladies.
No comments:
Post a Comment