#98: They came from 2005
Cute is What We Aim For; Five Finger Death Punch; Bongripper; The Good, the Bad & the Queen; Ringo Deathstarr; and more.
The year is 2005.
YouTube debuts. Hurricane Katrina pummels New Orleans. London endures a horrific terror attack. Brangelina is a thing. Enough people think, “Okay, maybe this will be the good prequel,” to make Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith the year’s top-grossing film. American Idol rules TV, and Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi is the year’s top-selling album.
It’s also my first year at The A.V. Club, where I joined as Chicago city editor. Back in those days, we didn’t compile staff picks for a single “best music of the year” list, but published each writer’s favorites.1
2005 was also the first time I created a list of notable band names I encountered that year. Surprisingly, this became my “thing” at The A.V. Club and, apparently, my professional calling.
Let’s look at some of the artists who debuted during this momentous year.
Cute is What We Aim For
In May 2006, I published an in-progress list2 on the A.V. Club blog, again dividing it into bad and good-bad categories. Unsurprisingly, Cute is What We Aim For landed in the former. I don’t know of any scenario where “cute” works in a name,3 and the early-aughts emo these guys peddled only made the moniker more annoying. As did singer Shaant Hacikyan’s hair.
Also not helping things was this Emo Mötley Crüe album cover.
The Chicago Tribune underlined the crappiness of the name in a November 2006 article, first in the headline—“The band Cute Is What We Aim For achieves success in spite of its name”—and then in the lede. “Before you lift a hand to smack the latest emo buzz band for its nauseous name,” you should let Hacikyan explain. “Dude. We hate it. We hate the name with a passion,” he said.
“We started this band in my bedroom with a computer. We didn’t expect anything to come of it. I didn’t expect to be a signed band, let alone put out a record and tour the world. Hopefully, we’ll change the name down the road.”
Narrator: They didn’t.
Hacikyan didn’t explain the origin of the name he ostensibly hated, but guitarist Jeff Czum did in a 2008 interview:
“The name was actually just us making fun of local bands in the scene and how wrapped up in everything they can get. It was just us being sarcastic and being ourselves. We never expected things to take off like they did, and now we’re just kind of stuck with it.”
For some reason, Indianapolis venue the Vogue has a bio page for CIWWAF—even though the group has never played there (?)—and it goes into more detail, albeit without any attribution.
The Cute Is What We Aim For moniker was adopted as a ‘homage to a friend’. It is also said that the term “cute” was used by Shaant in high school as another word for “gay”, and in a phone conversation between himself and guitarist Jeff, Shaant stated “Cute is what we aim for.”
So was “cute,” like, his pejorative euphemism for gay, or part of the goofy vocabulary shared among friends? Who knows, but Hacikyan has said some dumb shit over the years.
There was this gem from 2016, which he posted a few days before the tour commemorating the 10th anniversary of CIWWAF’s debut:
Rape culture isn’t a thing. For real. Playing the victim seems to fit the narrative. In my 29 years I’ve yet to encounter a human who is looking to rape someone. Everyone loves sex but I have never met a dude who is going out into the world to commit rape.
He apologized, then had a similar thought in 2017:
Hey, most claims of sexism/racism are total bullshit. This isn’t the 1960’s. Please get a grip.
It’s never a good look for a straight, cisgender white dude to pontificate about how rape, sexism, and racism concerns are overblown. Unsurprisingly, Shaant Hacikyan stopped posting on Instagram not long after—several “hmm”-worthy posts remain4—and deleted his Twitter.
In the years since, have people come around on the band’s name? At least one person on Reddit has, saying it was “such a good name for a pop punk band.”
CIWWAF as a name sounds like a [Taking Back Sunday] sideproject. Or as a song name. Or maybe it sounds like a twin for Death Cab For Cutie. So many fitting things for their band name.
“I Shaant be agreeing with you on this,” responded someone. That comment has 58 much-deserved upvotes.
Five Finger Death Punch
Take the name Five Finger Death Punch with the title of their 2007 debut, The Way of the Fist, and you’ll guess the origin.
Just in case, guitarist and founder Zoltan Bathory spelled it out in Blabbermouth last spring.
“I’m a martial artist since I was a little kid. So all the Bruce Lee movies and all the martial arts movies were my favorites. I loved underground Hong Kong cinema, those old, old movies. And there was a movie of Five Fingers Of Death, so that was a classic. And then when Kill Bill came out, they had this five-finger exploding heart, whatever, technique. And so we were sitting in movie theater, I’m, like, ‘Man, that sounds so stupid, that should be a band name.’”
Bathory shortened it to Five Finger Death Punch “because five-finger exploding lotus technique wouldn’t be a good-sounding name.”
In that interview, Bathory went on to talk band-name theory, which I appreciated. He usually waits a while before naming a project, because “the musical content and your lyrics and how the band or the artist looks and all those things together has to be a complete picture.”
Five Finger Death Punch was one of many options on a list of potential names, and as the group’s sound came together, it felt the most simpatico. Also the URL was available.
“But you have to pick a name that sticks out, a name that when you say to somebody, people take a second and look, like, ‘What?’ If it’s too average or it’s too simple, it’s really difficult to remember.”
Bathory learned from his past. He once played in a band called U.P.O., whose letters didn’t stand for anything. The other guys in the band had picked them semi-randomly and decided to figure it out later. They didn’t, and U.P.O. didn’t last long.
Band Name Bureau: Man, That Sounds So Stupid, That Should Be a Name.
Bongripper
On one hand, you have Zoltan Bathory thoughtfully considering naming conventions, and on the other… Bongripper.
The Chicago doom-metal quartet looked to its doom forefathers while searching for a name. As guitarist Dennis Pleckham told It’s Psychedelic Baby back in 2014:
“Nick [Dellacroce, guitarist] came up with the name Bongripper as a joke one day after we decided that Sleep wasted 17 minutes of CD time with ‘Dopesmoker.’ The name stuck since.”
He’s not blaspheming the titans of doom/stoner metal. “Dopesmoker” is an astounding 63 minutes long, and CDs can hold 80 minutes of music. Dellacroce et al. thought Sleep should’ve used all 80 available minutes for “Dopesmoker.”
That’s what Bongripper did on The Great Barrier Reefer, the group’s 2006 debut. The song clocks in at 79:23.
Subsequent releases have trimmed song lengths, though they still range from a few minutes to nearly 20. Bongripper has also ditched sillier titles for more conceptual ones. 2014’s Miserable has three songs: “Endless,” “Descent” “Into Ruin.” Last year’s Empty had four: “Nothing,” “Remains,” “Forever,” “Empty.”
On Spotify, 2018’s Terminal has 10 tracks: “S,” “L,” “O,” “W,” “Interlude,” “D,” “E,” “A,” “T,” “H,” though on Bandcamp, it’s just two: “Slow” and “Death.” Spotify says 2007’s Heroin has 12 songs: “Medical,” “Consequences,” “Of,” “Chronic,” “Injection,” “Use,” “Include,” “Scarred,” “And/,” “Or,” “Collapsed,” “Veins.” But Bandcamp lists them as Track 1, Track 2, etc.
I suspect Bongripper is just screwing with Spotify. The band has always self-released its music, and maybe splitting Terminal up into 10 songs juices those 28,062 monthly Spotify listens. They could be making up to $90 a month!
The Good, the Bad & the Queen
Technically, the supergroup of Damon Albarn (Blur), Paul Simonon (the Clash), Simon Tong (Verve), and Tony Allen (Africa ’70) didn’t have a name. “We haven’t got a name at all—we’re nameless!” Simonon told NME after the group played its first gig in 2006. Their planned one-off album was called The Good, the Bad & the Queen, which Albarn had described to Mojo as “a song cycle that’s also a mystery play about London.” The title purportedly references different aspects of the city: the good, the bad, and monarch who called the city home. Even that’s speculation, because Albarn hasn’t really explained it.
Ringo Deathstarr
It’s a classic construct to slightly tweak and/or portmanteau-ify celebrity names, and this Austin shoegaze band followed a trail blazed by its forebears. Frontman Elliott Frazier told The Line of Best Fit back in 2010:
“I don’t know, it seemed like kind of an obvious name and it was totally unique; making it easy to find us on the internet and all that. Also it is a little nod to The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and weeds out those without a sense of humour.”
Ah yes, the Gay for Johnny Depp approach. I’m not sure how much it weeds out the humorless, because you can find plenty of them squawking about it online. When something called Revolt of the Apes asked Frazier if he ever had qualms about keeping the name, he was dismissive.
Don’t put too much emphasis on a band name. I mean, there are people who told us to change our name but they don’t know what they’re talking about. Maybe we should have been called “Black Wolvvves”?
Exactly. Nobody likes a skipthong.
Other bands that formed in 2005
The Fucking Wrath. This is a great name, full stop.
Throw Me the Statue. Frontman Scott Reitherman says he took the name from the title of a mixtape he made for a friend. Did that friend pedantically correct Reitherman that the line is actually “Throw me the idol”?
Sunset Rubdown. Band name or title of a ’70s porno?
The Wonder Years and The Devil Wears Prada. Because why try to think of something on your own?
The Kazoo Funk Orchestra. No.
The Fratellis. Solid Goonies reference.
Shout Out Out Out Out. Oh, the early aughts.
Care Bears on Fire. Formed by a trio of Brooklyn fifth graders who are now all in their 30s!
And So I Watch You From Afar. Inspired by a misheard lyric from a song by a side project of Deftones’ Chino Moreno. Now that’s specific.
POST-SCRIPTS
Behold this time capsule of a line from that Chicago Tribune interview with CIWWAF: “If Hacikyan didn’t sound so sincere, it would be easy to dismiss his response as coy public relations aimed at clueless adults who don’t have MySpace friends and LiveJournal accounts.”
I still agree with mine for the most part, though I overrated Neil Diamond’s 12 Songs and Foo Fighters’ In Your Honor.
Lots of classics that year: Brutal Dildos, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, the Tony Danza Trap Dance Extravaganza, You Ruined Christmas, Jehovah’s Shit List, Here Comes Old Vodka Tits.
Others I’ve covered over the years: Steve E. Nix and the Cute Lepers, SUPERCUTE!, and the Cutest Puppy in the World. Meh x3.
Let’s just say he probably listens to a lot of Joe Rogan.