Watching New Celebs

It used to be that band names fell neatly into a few categories:
The [adjective][noun(s)]
The [noun(s)]
[Adjective][noun]
The [name] Band
[Name] [# of members in the band]
[Noun], [noun], & [noun] (could also be [name], [name], & [name]
[Name] and the [adjective noun] Band
and the simplest, [Noun]
Examples of the above include The Rolling Stones, The BeeGees, The Police, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship, Pink Floyd, Buffalo Springfield, The Dave Matthews Band, Ben Folds Five, Earth Wind & Fire, Peter Paul & Mary, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, Bruce Springstien & the E Street Band, Genesis, Chicago, and Journey.

Now, however, we’re seeing an influx of oddly-named bands - most often comprised completely of young men wearing black eyeliner in excess - and they’re taking off like wildfire.
Panic!At the Disco
Fallout Boy (technically this is an [adjective] [noun] construction, but fallout is also a noun so it’s [noun] [noun] and that’s what makes the name odd)
My Chemical Romance
and the one I saw for the first time today while in an unnamed big box store (had to get cat food. It wasn’t the evil blue big box store with the insufferable smiley face mascot, for those of you ready to fire up the e-hate): Thirty Seconds to Mars.

Eh? Thirty Seconds to Mars? What kind of a name is that? But the CD cover said they’d won an MTV video music award in 2006, so I figured why not blog about them?

Ugh. They suck. I was really hoping that they’d be good, because I want cool bands with cool names to infiltrate this over-produced ridiculousness that we’ve got on radio, but they’re dead awful. The art on the CD (and their website) is stylized in a way that made me think they were a metal band, but really they’re just another Creed/Nickleback “modern rock” pile. Damn. And what’s with them ripping off a KT Tunstall lyric? “On his face is a map of the world” isn’t anything approaching original, guys. Their one redeeming quality is the guitar riff at the beginning of “From Yesterday,” the single that’s being hailed & whatever. It’s good, and if the album were a guitar instrumental (a la some of the tracks from Santana’s Havana Moon), it would be great, but they add in the synthesizer and the crashing drums and it ruins it. The drummer sounds like a four-year-old hyped up on red bull & twizzlers, the singer’s voice is obviously corrected in post-production, and the lyrics are a 13-year-old’s angsty ripoff of already established artists. Like Hinder, they need to take their money and their award and disappear.

bands that shouldn’t exist, modern rock, music, mtv video awards, thirty seconds to mars, bands