Making The Hypothetical Band

well well well, where have i been. i got mad sick and i had mad work and it all made me very mad and i had no time to tend to the blog. which is sad because i've totally missed the boat on making fun of britney's terminal illness–chic makeover. anyways, you live and you learn...

so, moving onwards and upwards, we're going to talk about a favorite past-time (hyphen? wtf spellcheck) of mine. it's no secret that everyone in the world wants to be in a band (just ask hulk hogan). i myself have never been in a real band before, but that has not stopped me from coming up with approximately seven thousand names and album covers for my imaginary band over the past eleven years or so. laugh if you want, but if you don't have at least four hundred hypothetical names under your belt than you are a robot with no soul and please leave me alone. for the rest of you, you know what i'm talking about. you've always wanted to say you were in a band with a sweet name and an iconic album cover, but real bands require things like rehearsing, songwriting, arguing over creative differences, and musical talent. who needs that. here's your one-stop guide to creating everything for your band. minus, you know, the music.

the first step to any hypothetical band is a name. what makes a good band name? is there a science to it? the easiest way to name your fake band is to open a dictionary, encyclopedia or forest survival guide to any random page, pick any random word, and add "the" to it (just trying it now, i got "the moss"...could be worse). if that doesn't work, you can almost always get away with combining an animal with a body part (suggestion- please stick to horses, wolves, frogs, bears, and deer. fish are not allowed.) if you still don't think you've found that genius name that you know is out there, you can always get away with nonsense words, as long as they are not funny sounding, contain some kind of fucked up punctuation and appear to be icelandic.

for the sake of this post, let's call our name...mmm...how about sister wolf. so, the next step is to come up with your album name and cover art. now, this can be an extremely daunting task. you've just spent the last three weeks and most of your pre-calculus notebook space finding the perfect name, and now you have to do it again? and art? you cant draw! well fear not, little ones. in 1979, a team of scientists from around the world got together to create a nearly endless supply of perfect album names, as well as the accompanying cover art, just in case the world faced nuclear apocalypse and only the perfect blend of lofty melodrama and lighthearted nostalgia could save us. the project lasted twenty years, and was titled the "choose your own adventure book covers" (anyone still need a band name?) below are just a few examples of the hypothetical albums waiting to be released by gorilla hand or whatever you're called, and for your convenience, i've summed up what you should tell people you sound like for each choice.


serious drama. your band is mostly strings, organs, and big ass marching drums, preferably recovered from a major war. you record your songs in abandoned caverns behind waterfalls in the woods of canada. your songs are about churches on fire and dying children. you make more than one reference to the game of chess.


you are a solo act that goes on stage with eight machines that nobody has seen before and that all make basically the same noises as a broken nintendo. your songs have no beginings or endings, and you play with your eyes closed. you wear a neon green backpack everywhere you go. your audience desperately tries to figure out if they are supposed to be dancing.


you sound like the strokes.


you play happy, pleasant, unthreatening pop. you whistle in most of your songs, hand clap in all of them, and you have a xylophone player. you are the musical equivalent of lawn games.


you are a sensitive, poetic, acoustic singer-songwriter. you whisper songs into the microphone about the civil war and family members that you saw cry when you were little.

so that's to get you started. for literally hundreds more, go here and waste a perfectly good afternoon. you may never make it to that stage, but who can blame you for meticulous daydreaming. plus, now all of us who never got to be in bands and/or gave them ill-conceived names (i'm an ex-member of radioactive blue jellyfish myself) can name and design our blogs, which is nowhere close to the next best thing.