#85: @TheJacobGivens: 'What is this, Emily Dickinson’s band?'
Talking band names and peculiar internet fame with TikTok's foremost '90s rocker
Decades into the existence of social media and YouTube, the phenomenon of internet fame is no longer novel, but it can still be pretty peculiar. Sure, legions of people aspire to be influencers—57 percent of Gen Z would be up for it, per a recent survey—but it’s the accidental celebrities that best reflect our strange digital ecosystem. They’ve proliferated on TikTok, whose algorithm can make anyone go viral, regardless of how many followers they have.
Jacob Givens can attest to that. He had just 23 when a video he made recreating what it was like to hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time in 1991 blew up on TikTok. The former actor/comedian unenthusiastically started a TikTok account in the early days of the pandemic, using it to make the occasional silly video for his own amusement. But with the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, Jacob stumbled into a potent mix of comedy, nostalgia, and sincerity that immediately found traction on a platform that was also surging in popularity.
It’s a decidedly modern story, one that has opened lots of doors for Givens—meeting/collaborating with artists, festival trips, free stuff—even though it doesn’t pay his bills. But for a guy who loves music, it’s been a dream. And, as a music nerd who stays current, he has a lot of thoughts about band names.
This has been condensed and edited for clarity blah blah blah.
Band Name Bureau: How did you come to be doing this? It feels so unexpected.
Jacob Givens: I know, “content creator/influencer” often sounds like a dirty word to most of us. You’re like, “Gross.” I don’t want to be that, especially at my age. But it was a strange turn of events that I never expected or planned for. Often when you move to LA to try to make it in the “biz,” you begin by the auditions, the headshots, or then you screen write, you try to do a myriad of things to try to make it into show business, which I did all of those things. I tried to act and sell scripts and standup comedy and everything. It wasn’t until around 2019, 2020—before the pandemic—that I really became so disillusioned with the whole process. I had made a film with my friends that gathered a nice small cult following. We’d made YouTube series. I had done everything under the sun to try to break in and spent years doing standup comedy.
And it was around this time that I started a new job in environmental education, and I had felt a sense of letting go. I no longer need to chase whatever that thing is that I thought, when I arrived in LA 20-plus years before, that I was going to get. I let go of it, walked away, focused on my job, was happy to just make short films on my phone in my free time.
One day I was sitting there and I was reminiscing about watching MTV and that feeling I got when I first saw “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and that turning point from Nirvana, which we all remember. It’s been talked about ad nauseam. But I was remembering that specific moment.
I didn’t even really know how to use the app. I’d only done the very basic things, but what I didn’t know was you choose an audio file from what they’ve provided for you, the snippets of 30 seconds or one minute. So I chose the 30 seconds of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and I’m talking as if I’m talking back and forth to myself. I record the whole thing, and then once I play the video back, I see that my audio of my voice has not been recorded because I chose the [song] audio first. If you use the app, you have to record your dialogue, and then you can add in the track later. But at this stage of the game, I didn’t know how to use it. I had this video of me just mouthing words to myself, so I just started typing captions.
It was like a silent film with this soundtrack. It was all very accidental. I got to the end of the video, and it was the 30 seconds of “Smells like Teen Spirit” that TikTok had chosen for me. It wasn’t even the opening of the song; it was just in the middle of the song. I don’t publish it and put my phone in my pocket. I wake up the next morning, and I open up TikTok and it says, “You haven’t published this video. Would you like to now?” My finger hovered over “delete.” I was like, “It’s kind of a dumb video, but eh, 23 followers, who cares?" I hit “publish,” put my phone in my pocket and didn’t think about it. I went to lunch at work on a Monday morning, and I looked at my phone and it was a couple hundred thousand views, which was a massive, massive jump.
And then by the evening it was 300,000 to 500,000, and by the next morning it had crossed a million, I believe. And my followers were going through the roof. I remember coming and looking at my wife and going, “I think I’m going viral? I don’t know what’s happening.”
It’s been a weird journey since. It hasn’t become my day job. I think a lot of people who follow me on Instagram and TikTok think that this is my career and that I’m making money, and I’m definitely not. We’re talking chump change—I’m just not monetizing correctly. I’m not taking advantage of the TikTok shop, or the limited promotional deals that I’ve gotten have not been enough to provide for two children in Southern California. Through all the ups and downs, I’ve just promised myself that the moment it was no longer fun, I wouldn’t do it anymore. It’s still fun, and I still love doing it. [Laughs.]
BNB: I think it not being your job helps keep it that way.
JG: I think so too. I’m not reliant upon it.
BNB: You started with these reaction videos, for lack of a better word, but you also talk about “buried treasure” albums, records that got you through the ’90s, and stuff like that.
JG: I knew early on with the success on TikTok, the app was boosting people because they wanted their user base to explode. So they were letting people like me really experience this huge gold rush. I think once they started getting more and more users, they knew, “Well, we have to inflate new users too. Now that the old guard is kind of already in here, it doesn’t matter if we push their stuff to the algorithm. We need to make it appealing for everybody.”
I would meet other TikTokers, and [they’d say] you have to do the same thing over and over again. That was the rule: Every video should be the exact same thing. It should just be me going down a ’90s hit list, and every single video is me sitting in front of my couch reacting to hearing a song. And I was like, “No, I’m not doing that because there’s only some songs that warrant that level of reaction.”
So I was like, “I have to fill the content with other things.” It was a lot of experimentation with ideas that would pop into my head. That’s where I started Buried Treasures. That came to me because I remember that Sunday nights, that’s when 120 Minutes aired. When I moved to LA, that’s when Rodney on the ROQ was. Even when I was a teenager, there was this college radio station and they would do the weirdest shit on Sunday nights. It was like somebody was raised in church and they were like, “Let’s do the opposite. Let’s get weird on Sunday.” So I was like, “What if I use Sundays to be the days that I spotlight artists from the ’90s that have kind of been forgotten?”
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BNB: As you scroll through your videos—especially the Buried Treasure ones—you see the naming conventions that were happening in those days. Especially the one-word, frequently monosyllabic names.
JG: It was really to the point, and that was definitely a trend that was going on back then: Belly, Far, Dig, Paw, Hum, Whale, Self.
BNB: What other naming trends have you noticed over the years?
JG: Yeah, in the garage band revival of the early 2000s, everybody had to have “the” + pluralized, right? The Cans, the Glasses, the Sheets, whatever. It really felt like everybody was tall, skinny with a leather jacket, and they were from the East Coast and everybody was trying to be the Ramones. That was a naming convention—the Killers—it happened all at that same time. Then somewhere along the way, people got really comfortable with, “Let’s make this band name an excerpt from a poem or something.” You’re like, what is this, Emily Dickinson’s band?
BNB: Like …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.
JG: Yes, exactly. That’s a perfect example. I think that the purpose of a band name is, it has to convey a little bit of the energy of what you’re about to experience. I feel like if you don’t get that in your name, then it’s really a missed opportunity because you have such a short amount of time to win somebody over with your sound. But if you really nail the name, you’re like, “Totally, this is the band.” Examples of that would be Radiohead, chef’s kiss. It was perfect. When you hear Radiohead and then you hear the band, you’re like, “Yeah, that sounds like that’s what that band would sound like.” And Soundgarden, I feel like that’s another one that they really, really locked it in perfectly with the sound of the band.
BNB: What about names that don’t capture it?
JG: Yeah, Alice in Chains sounds like a glam metal band. They really went on to be so much more sonically in the grunge world, with their darker tones and the harmonies and everything. That name, while I accept it, I don’t think that name really ever communicated how they sounded. Same with Faith No More. It’s just an odd choice. I don’t know the story behind it, but again, I’ve accepted it. But it doesn’t quite communicate what you're going to hear from that band.
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BNB: Has a name ever induced you to check out a band on its own or kept you away because it was so bad?
JG: Yeah, Rage Against the Machine made me want to hear them more. That’s a great name. It really took me by surprise back then. And I would say the inverse of that would be, and this isn’t even that unique, but Butthole Surfers. My first concert I ever went to was the Flaming Lips, Butthole Surfers, and Stone Temple Pilots in 1993 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in Mohawk Park. I knew of the band and that they were kind of more underground and more respected in that way, but I never bought the album because I was just kind of annoyed at the name. That’s not a good name. And it turned me off.
It’s funny because I’m a big metalhead. I love heavy metal and that world of names is ridiculous. Literally bands will go out of their way to have the most offensive, messed-up name, and the majority of the time it really makes me not want to listen to them. Look, I can have a good laugh at the Diarrhea Planets of the world, but—now this is a very offensive one—Anal Cunt, you just kind of go, “Oh come on.”
But then there’s funny ones. I love this band called the Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza. I wouldn’t say that that’s a great name, but it makes me laugh every time I tell somebody. And then there’s another band that I have the T-shirt for, Sanguisugabogg.
BNB: I wrote about them.
JG: Did you really? That name is ridiculous, but I find joy in it. I bought the T-shirt and it literally looks like the tip of broccoli on my shirt because it’s so illegible and impossible to read that it looks like I just spilled on myself. And I love wearing it because it’s so fun to say to somebody like, “Oh, this? This thing says Sanguisugabogg.”
There’s a level of nonsense in metal and naming bands that sometimes I can appreciate how silly it is, but sometimes when it seems to be just going to offend or shock, it turns me off.
Cattle Decapitation, I like their music. The name I think is dumb. Pig Destroyer, Aborted Fetus, Dying Fetus. I have kids, for God’s sake. If the name of your band is so disturbing, I’m not going to wear [the T-shirt].
One of my favorite metal bands of all time is the Black Dahlia murder. I absolutely love and adore that band. I have the T-shirt, and I don’t feel weird about walking around with the Black Dahlia Murder [on it]. That’s the dark subject matter. It has the word “murder.” Definitely my 9-year-old has been like, “Huh.” But I am more comfortable in that. I’m not going to go to my kid’s play with a Black Dahlia Murder T-shirt on.
BNB: I always ask this question in these interviews: Do you think it’s better to have a bad name that’s memorable or a name that just is kind of there and eases into the background?
JG: That’s a great question. I actually think there’s two band names that I don’t think are good band names, but they’re in my top rotation of bands: Jimmy Eat World and Death Cab for Cutie. I think both of those band names are kind of lousy, but they’re not easy to forget.
Jimmy World, the first time you hear that, it’s not a name that I was able to lose quickly. Neither is Death Cab for Cutie. So in that regard, it’s just forgivable because you’re like, “Well, it’s not my favorite name in the world, but it’s something.” Whereas if you had a name that wasn’t very good, there was nothing memorable about it at all, then I think that would be a lot harder.
BNB: I find that the longer a band has been around, the less weird the name sounds to me.
JG: Totally. It’s like if we say it to our kids, or we say it to somebody who’s younger and they haven’t lived with it for as many years as we have, it’s lost that impact. Smashing Pumpkins, my favorite band, that being told to somebody new now would be like, “Oh, that’s a weird choice.” But I can’t think of that band as any other thing than Smashing Pumpkins.
BNB: What are some favorites?
JG: Radiohead, Soundgarden, Sonic Youth I think is a great name. I love the band name Explosions in the Sky. I think those are really great names that describe perfectly what the band is—like I said, Rage Against the Machine. Those are some of the ones that have always stayed with me.
I think I even include that when I do the reaction videos. I always have the first guy watching the video and the second guy always comes in and asks, “Who are you listening to?” When the artist is one of those band names, that really made me go, “Wow.” I’ve included that in the re-enactment Soundgarden. Whoa, Radiohead, whoa. Rage Against the Machine, Explosions in the Sky. These are names that I think just crush it.
And then I would say, before we get out of here, I was going to say there were some of the worst band names from our era from the ’90s. I thought Bush, I thought Puddle of Mudd. And then one of the worst ones that I remembered from the era was probably Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. That is a pretty terrible name. And then I think the famously bad Hoobastank.
I think people talk about that all the time being one of the worst. I remember hearing that on the radio and being like, “Hoobastank?” Talk about dating your band in a specific pocket of time forever.
POST-SCRIPTS
Jacob also hosts a thematically related podcast, Waterproof Records. You can find his film, I Had a Bloody Good Time at House Harker, on Prime Video.
I can barely muster the effort to deal with TikTok, though I’m trying to be more active with @BandNameBureau. No promises.
Next up in Band Name Bureau: our annual dispatch from festival season. It’s gonna be a doozy.