#38: I'm pissed off and I wanna start swingin'
1 800 PAIN; Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum; Cumgirl8; Black Country, New Road; Infernal Diatribe
1 800 PAIN
The person in a giant, sad Hello Kitty head carrying a sparkly cross along the side of the road is probably the least weird thing about the video for “Hurt,” which has an astounding 878,902 views as of this writing. Why astounding? Oh, take a look.
The comments are almost better than the video. Some of my favorites:
“I just don’t understand, how did my music taste go all the way to this.”
“This man looks looks like he has commited [sic] multiple felonies.”
“This literally sounds like what it would feel like to eat a cigarette. I like it.”
“this literally slaps help”
“I could watch that guy aggressively sing at me for hours”
1st listen- this is garbage. 2nd listen- only wanna hear it again because it's so garbage. 3rd- I'M PISSED OFF AND I WANNA START SWINGIN
song: *literally pain and hurt* me: haha hello kitty carrying a cross lol
As for the nonsensical name? It’s only nonsensical on its own. Paired with video, it totally makes sense.
Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum
Famous actors in bands can go one of two ways: play it up, or play it down. Lean into your fame so the band gets attention it wouldn’t receive otherwise, or keep the focus elsewhere so the band can succeed on its own merits (or not). Yet whichever route they choose doesn’t really matter, because fame is a black hole—neither light nor good intentions can escape it. It always becomes the famous person’s band, whether they want it that way or not.
Dexter and Six Feet Under star Michael C. Hall is one-third of the Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, and his bandmates aren’t slouches: Drummer Peter Yanowitz played in the Wallflowers and Morningwood, and keyboardist Matt Katz-Bohen played in Blondie. Interviews tend to be with all three of them, and they come across as equal partners in their creative endeavor.
And yet… the band’s Spotify bio (which they submitted) manages 15 words before ticking off Hall’s credits:
Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum is a trio comprised of vocalist, lyricist, musician and Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning and Emmy nominated actor Michael C. Hall (Dexter, Six Feet Under, Hedwig and the Angry Inch).
So Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum would fall squarely into the “play it up” category, yet a different bio on the band’s website flips the script. It opens with a quote from Yanowitz and goes 141 words before mentioning Hall—and only as “Hall,” not even “Michael C. Hall” on the first reference. But even that feels calculated: If you’re coming to the band’s website, you know who he is.
It also feels appropriate for the band to have a long, ridiculous name, because some level of pretentiousness is to be expected with a famous actor’s band. In this case, the name is the product of child whimsy:
Cumgirl8
Not to be confused with Super 8 Cumshot, as featured in a previous edition of Band Name Bureau. Cumgirl8 is “a sex-positive alien amoeba entity,” per Vogue, “that expresses itself through various artistic media—music, films, a zine.” Wait, Vogue? Yes, members Veronika Vilim and Lida Fox are models, and Cumgirl8’s modus operandi is almost cartoonishly NYC scenester chic. Instead of merch, they have a handmade “clothing line” of “fashion pieces,” according to Fox, and their influences include, “John Galliano’s couture collections for Dior, anime, drag, and early 2000s club kids.” Speaking of the early ’00s, it plays into their band name, per drummer Chase Noelle:
“Cumgirl8; it sounds like a screen name, right?” asks Noelle. “It’s an homage or whatever to the early 2000s, which is when we were growing up; it’s when we got onto the internet right as we were hitting puberty, right as we were discovering ourselves sexually.” The number eight in the name, she explains, is the sum of the “duality of male in female energies” in each of the three members, which is six, plus that of the fourth entity, which is the computer.
I’ve never heard of a computer being a member of the band, but it feels appropriately dystopian.
Black Country, New Road
On the other end of the spectrum from Cumgirl8’s artful fucking is the chilly British remove of Black Country, New Road. With some of their top Spotify tracks clocking in at 9:50, 6:21, and 6:22, the septet plays slow-burning, Slint-indebted post-rock (or “eastern Mediterranean rave music,” according to The Guardian). You know, the kind where a song may have no discernible time signature. Says frontman Isaac Wood of “Bread Song,” the group’s latest “single”:
“I went to see Steve Reich do Music For 18 Musicians and there’s a piece where a bar length is determined by the breath of the clarinet player, they just play until they run out of breath. I wanted to try that with the whole band, where we don’t look at each other, we don’t make too many cues, we just try and play without time—but together.”
The name comes from Black Country New Road, a road in England’s West Midlands. Wood says the name “symbolizes a ‘good way out of a bad place.’” Take that, West Midlands!
Infernal Diatribe
Something about this name screams high school to me. The word “diatribe” shows up on a vocab test, and in English class you’re reading Paradise Lost—where Satan is described as the “infernal serpent.” Then, while spacing out in sixth-period chemistry, it hits you: INFERNAL DIATRIBE. Just wait till you tell the guys at band practice! Oh wait, shit, there’s no practice tonight because Ben has a stupid soccer game. Fucking Ben.
POST-SCRIPTS
Yanowitz quit the Wallflowers before they became huge. Why? Because he fell in love with Natalie Merchant and moved to New York. Sure, Bringing Down the Horse was huge, but he co-produced Merchant’s Tigerlily, which sold 5 million copies. Eh, probably a good call.