#25: The story of Diarrhea Planet

The benefits of having a terrible name.

Diarrhea Planet made what can only be described as anticlimactic debut in the 2010 edition of the Year in Band Names, tucked way down at the end of the story under a category called “Yum!” (The other two bands in it: Colostomy Bong and Syphilis Sauna.) I’m disappointed in myself for not making more out of such a terrible-yet-YIBN-perfect name, but then again, Diarrhea Planet had only been around for a year, and maybe there wasn’t much material to work with.

These things are generally hard to gauge, but I definitely wouldn’t have predicted the acclaim that awaited Diarrhea Planet. I mean, it’s all relative. Your average person on the street has no idea who Diarrhea Planet was—the group disbanded in 2018—and they’d probably be put off by the very mention of a planet covered in diarrhea. Yet in the cozy confines of the Indie World, Diarrhea Planet generated some (brown) waves.

There was a lengthy, GIF-laden feature in Buzzfeed, for one. And lots of glowing write-ups in other places. Even a big, heartfelt eulogy in Pitchfork for the band’s final shows.

That’s the end of the story, but it begins in Nashville 2009, when Belmont University students Jordan Smith (vocals/guitar) and original member and guitarist Evan Donohue formed a band with a blatantly, undeniably stupid name.

“Their whole thing was they were going to be a noise band that played at parties and got wasted,” guitarist Emmett Miller said in Buzzfeed.

Now that checks out, because Diarrhea Planet is totally the name of a noise band that exists only for its members to fuck with people. Long-time readers know I have a soft spot for bands who not only have zero interest in “making it,” but also exist solely to amuse themselves (often at the expense of the listening public). You know, bands like My Penis is Made of Dogshit.

Despite the name, Diarrhea Planet caught on quickly in Nashville, eventually coming to the attention of Bob Orrall, who runs indie label Infinity Cat Recordings. When introduced to the band by his sons Jake and Jamin—a.k.a. JEFF the Brotherhood—his response, according to Buzzfeed: “I said that is absolutely my most hated word in the English language. Like there is no word that I hate more.”

That Buzzfeed story is interesting, and not just because it reads like a piece from ’90s-era Spin instead of a website whose lead story today is You Have To Pass All These Quizzes Before You Say You’re A Millennial. The story is from 2016, coinciding with the release of Turn to Gold, the album that would be Diarrhea Planet’s swan song. But in March 2016, it was all blue skies ahead, and the band’s good fortune seemed like a genuine surprise to everyone involved. As guitarist Evan Bird—the band had at least three guitarists—said in the story:

“I truly believed that this was something funny that I’d do in college, and now I have to write that on my tax forms for the next 8 to 20 years, best-case scenario. I was telling my mom and dad that I’m going to drop out of school to play in a band called Diarrhea Planet. This is maybe the worst idea I’ve ever had. But you know, if things keep going the way that they’re going, this might be the best idea I’ve ever had.”

As a parent myself, I try to picture my daughter telling me the same thing. How would I be able to judge such a decision? She’d point to this newsletter and say, “You, all right?! I learned it by watching you!”

Yet for all of the references made to Diarrhea Planet’s terrible name in literally every single bit of press about them, there isn’t much about how the sextet actually chose it. Bird tells it this way, which is 100% bullshit:

“We knew we needed fourteen letters,” says Bird. “Fourteen was just right. We settled on ‘All Cyclops Wept.’ That sounded like a bad metal band. As it were, ‘All Cyclops Wept’ is a perfect anagram of ‘OTLCCSPLAWLYPE!’ Crazy, right? We knew we were getting close. We rolled two dice: 11. Great. We used a simple Caesar cipher with a shift of 11 on ‘OTLCCSPLAWLYPE’ which yielded ‘DIARRHEAPLANET.’”

True, if you use a Caesar cipher with those settings and letters, you get that answer, but finding no other mention of this origin story elsewhere, I can assure you it’s nonsense. Reality is much more mundane and in line with how these things work. Here’s what Jordan Smith told Prefix:

“We were joking about making a really ridiculous noise band that would just be super irritating to every single person, and we tried to think of the most irritating band name that we could think of. I knew it had to have the word diarrhea in it, because it can’t have any real cuss words in it. That’s too obvious. We were trying to be annoying, so we came up with something immature. It was Diarrhea Planet, and we thought it was really funny.”

That Diarrhea Planet’s origin story involves a dorm room could not be more perfect, because dorms are the oort clouds of questionable ideas, from “What if we called our band Diarrhea Planet?” to “Hey devil sticks do look pretty cool.” Presumably the song “Ghost With a Boner” originated in the same dorm room.

In a lot of ways, Diarrhea Planet was the ideal Band Name Bureau band. They had what we can all agree is a preposterous name, yet they were a good enough band that they were successful. The name presumably kept their egos in check to some degree. How egotistical can you be with a name like Diarrhea Planet? “I’m an artist. Perhaps you’ve heard of my band, Diarrhea Planet?”

Some of music’s most notorious egotists could learn something from that. Maybe Billy Corgan would be a chiller dude if Smashing Pumpkins were called Gruesome Toilet. Maybe Eagles would’ve been nicer guys if their name had been Vomit Bomb.

More bands should be like Diarrhea Planet. There’s a sentence that only makes sense in Band Name Bureau.

POST-SCRIPTS

• Apologies for the tardiness of this bonus edition. I’m utterly slammed at the moment, but the next issue should arrive right around the first of the month.