What's in a Name? The Decade in Rock Monikers Part 1

A rose is a rose is a rose, wrote Gertrude Stein, but in 2009, "A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose" sounds a bit like the name of an indie-rock band you're likely to find listed on the lineup of CMJ.

Band names felt more potent than ever this decade—less like traditional monikers than runic incantations, code words almost uncannily attuned to the zeitgeist. As the circulation of information sped up in the '00s, band names still felt like brands, but they also often felt like memes, supercharged flashes of the collective unconscious. What else could explain the recent emergence of both Memory Cassette and Memory Tapes, not to mention Tapes 'n Tapes, the Music Tapes, Library Tapes, Eats Tapes, War Tapes, Tapes, and plain ol' Tape?

If you look back over the past decade in popular music, you'll find all kinds of patterns forming around the names of musical projects. They're not just expressions of identity, they're tropes, little kernels of meaning as important for what they suggest as what they actually say. If, decades or centuries down the line, future historians have nothing but our era's band names to go by, they'll still be able to piece together a remarkably nuanced picture of the '00s, as the following examples attest.

Click here for The Decade in Rock Monikers Part 2