Non-Indicative Name/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Non-Indicative Names in Music include:

Most band names aren't meant to be taken literally. Please try to limit this section to names which could be legitimately misinterpreted.

  • Barenaked Ladies are actually composed of fully clothed men, though they do reportedly record at least one song per album in the buff... just for luck, you understand. Theories include:
    • They named the band after the one thing they knew would draw in young males such as themselves.
    • They named it after a drink.
      • Possibly coincidentally, colchicums (crocus-like flowers which bloom in autumn without accompanying leaves) are sometimes known as "(bare)naked ladies".
  • 10,000 Maniacs was named for the B-movie Two Thousand Maniacs!, multiplied by the number of members. Which makes the name nonindicative in another way. Since the name was inspired by one of the original gore films, one might expect a death metal or grindcore band, rather than a fairly laid-back alternative group.
  • The band 1910 Fruitgum Company is not a company that makes fruit flavored gum and was actually formed in 1965. There was a real 1910 Fruit Gum Company. What were they known for? Slot machines. Slot machines that dispensed gum. This actually made more sense than you might think, as it helped to evade anti-gambling laws. You would put your money in the "gum dispensing machine," and if you won, you'd be paid in cash, under the table, by the proprietor.
  • Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle ('Little Solemn Mass') isn't particularly small, solemn, or liturgical.
  • Leonard Bernstein's Mass isn't so much sacred music as arguably sacrilegious musical theatre.
  • Of Montreal are not, in fact, of Montreal. They're from Athens, Georgia.
  • Alabama 3 is a British band, and has way more than three members.
  • The Nashville Teens were not from Nashville. They were British and chose their name because they wanted to sound American.
  • The Bay City Rollers were not from Bay City. They were Scottish and were named when their manager threw a dart at a map of America.
  • Mannheim Steamroller is from Omaha.
  • The 1940s R&B group The "5" Royales had six members, which is why the "5" was in quotes.
  • Likewise, Ben Folds Five has three members.
  • Hootie & the Blowfish: Hootie does not refer to the singer. It remains to be seen whether Darius Rucker's country music solo career (under his own name) will lift the curse of being called "Hootie" for the rest of his life.
    • According to Wikipedia, "Hootie" is in fact Rucker; it's an old nickname referring to his owlish appearance. The group still has a Non-Indicative Name, though, because "The Blowfish" was a college friend of Rucker's who was never in the band.
  • The Nineties rap group Young Black Teenagers were all white.
  • The Sisters of Mercy consists of several members, but only one of them was female and she was neither a nun nor a sibling to any other member. (They are named after a Leonard Cohen song.)
  • In the Black Sabbath song "Iron Man," Iron Man seems mis-named. In one lyric states, "He was turned to steel in the great magnetic field" and another describes his "heavy boots of lead." No other lyric but his name suggests that he's pure iron. Of course, being lyrics written by Geezer Butler, the words were obviously selected for rhyme rather than scientific accuracy.
  • The Takeover UK is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
  • The Thompson Twins has three members, but contains neither any twins nor anybody named Thompson.
  • The Led Zeppelin album Houses of the Holy does not have the song "Houses of the Holy" on it. That song would not be released until their next album, two years later.
    • Similarly, Beck's One Foot In The Grave doesn't feature the song "One Foot In The Grave". That was on the same year's Stereopathetic Soul Manure (and was probably written earlier than anything from One Foot In The Grave itself, as Stereopathetic was a collection of outtakes).
    • And Tom Waits' song "Frank's Wild Years" is on the album "Swordfishtrombones", not "Frank's Wild Years". (The entire album sort of expounds on the earlier song.)
    • The Doors' song "Waiting for the Sun" is on Morrison Hotel, not Waiting for the Sun.
    • Def Leppard's first album, On Through the Night does not have the song "On Through the Night." It is on their second album, High 'n' Dry.
    • Queen released the album Sheer Heart Attack in 1974. The song "Sheer Heart Attack" was released three years and three albums later on News of the World.
    • Emerson Lake and Palmer's album Brain Salad Surgery was released in 1973, but the track "Brain Salad Surgery" not until 1976, as the B-side of "Fanfare for the Common Man"; it was first issued on a promotional flexidisc before the release of the album, causing fans who'd heard the promo disc to be surprised by its omission.
    • Julian Cope's album World Shut Your Mouth did not contain the title cut, which showed up on his next album (Saint Julian).
    • Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom was named for a track that was left off the original LP, although it is on the reissue's bonus CD. Also, his song "Almost Blue" is on Imperial Bedroom, not Almost Blue.
    • "The Kids Are Alright" might be the best-known The Who song that is not in the film or on the soundtrack album The Kids Are Alright
  • The Decemberists are not Russian revolutionaries.
  • Jethro Tull are a band, rather than an individual, none of whom are actually called "Jethro Tull". The name is taken from that of an 18th century English agriculturalist. They were so named because in its early days, the band gave many terrible performances, which did not go down well with audiences or club owners. They would constantly have to change their name to ensure getting gigs. One of the band's managers, a well-read man, suggested "Jethro Tull", the name of an author of one of his books. The band finally played a good gig that night, and were booked from then on as Jethro Tull. They were stuck with that name for 42 years and growing!
  • There is nobody in the Marshall Tucker Band named Marshall Tucker. They saw the name on a discarded receipt found on the ground in a bar where they were playing. The real Tucker was a blind piano tuner who had done some previous business there.
  • None of The Ramones were actually named Ramone. The name was inspired by Paul Ramone—a pseudonym used by Paul McCartney during the Beatles' years in Hamburg.
    • They did, however, adopt stage names with "Ramone" as a new surname, zigzagging this trope.
  • "Sing, Sing, Sing" is best remembered as a jazz instrumental, with Gene Krupa's drumming more familiar than the actual tune written by Louis Prima.
  • Brazilian Girls contains no Brazilians and only one girl.
  • Turbonegro consists entirely of white Norwegians. None of them have a reputation for being particularly fast.
  • Nobody in Sleater-Kinney is named Sleater or Kinney. The band was named for a road near where the members grew up.
  • Ween's 12 Golden Country Greats: Surprisingly, the country part is accurate (it was sort of a Something Completely Different turn for them), but the album only has ten songs. The title was generally taken as a joke, but in fact there were two more songs originally intended for the album that ended up becoming b-sides instead.
    • A similar example is Throbbing Gristle's third album, 20 Jazz Funk Greats, which originally has 11 songs, all of which were not jazz or funk, but Industrial.
  • NRBQ's album NRBQ at Yankee Stadium is not a live album. NRBQ has never played at Yankee Stadium.
  • Pink Floyd:
    • A Collection of Great Dance Songs is not especially easy to dance to.
    • The song that uses the title of The Dark Side of the Moon for its refrain is actually named "Brain Damage".
    • The Final Cut is an album of outtakes from The Wall, not an expanded re-release.
  • Phil Ochs' Greatest Hits isn't a Greatest Hits Album, or a compilation of any kind of that matter.
  • In the "band names that sound like solo artists" category: Harvey Danger. They claim they just saw it written in graffiti somewhere and thought it sounded cool.
  • Billy Talent. They named themselves after a character from the book/mock-rockumentary film Hard Core Logo.
  • '80s band Danny Wilson was named after the Frank Sinatra film Meet Danny Wilson. The band was originally named Spencer Tracy, but Tracy's estate threatened to sue.
    • And '70s band Edward Bear was named for a Winnie The Pooh character.
  • They Might Be Giants are all under six feet tall. We're pretty sure of this. (It's a reference to a movie of the same name about a mental patient who thought he was Sherlock Holmes, a movie which contained the reference to Don Quixote):

"Of course, Don Quixote carried it a bit too far. He thought that every windmill was a giant. That's insane. But, thinking that they might be... Well, all the best minds used to think the world was flat. But, what if it isn't? It might be round. And bread mold might be medicine. If we never looked at things and thought of what they might be, why, we'd all still be out there in the tall grass with the apes."

  • The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster are far too good a band to be called a trainwreck.
  • Girls Under Glass, a gothic band from Germany, has an all-male lineup.
  • Metal Church is not a Christian band.
  • The Statler Brothers is not composed of brothers, nor are any of the members surnamed Statler. They were named after a brand of facial tissue.
  • Most recordings of Chopin's "Minute Waltz" are closer to 90 seconds along. Unless you're in The Music Man, in which case you can play the minute waltz in 50 seconds.
  • The Dresden Dolls are not from Dresden, nor are they dolls. (Although the New York Dolls were from New York...)
  • Eagles of Death Metal don't sound like Eagles, nor do they play Death Metal.
  • Jew Harps are not harps, nor are they specifically associated with Jews: the instrument is found in almost all music cultures.
  • The eurobeat song "Too Cool to Fall in Love", judging by the title, sounds like a song about someone who is too cool or badass for love. On listening to the lyrics, it's actually about being "too cool to fall in love with another girl."
  • The Trans-Siberian Orchestra is a band based in and founded by people by New York, composed of just four people. They allegedly chose the name from the Trans-Siberian Railway, 'cause it sounds cool.
  • There is no Lynyrd Skynyrd playing or singing in the band of that name. It refers a high school gym teacher, Leonard Skinner, who was strict about boys having short hair.
  • The French horn is not French. It was named to differentiate it from the English horn, which, in turn, is not English—it most likely originated from Poland and got its name from a mishearing of the French for "angled horn." Furthermore, the English horn is not even a horn or brass instrument. It's a double-reed woodwind most closely related to the oboe. Apparently, the name came from the fact that it resembled the horns of the angels in religious images of the middle ages, and therefore was called engellisches Horn (angelic horn). However, engellisch also meant English back then (vernacular), hence the name stuck.
  • The Lovers' Concerto is not a concerto but a minuet. It's an arrangement of the minuet from J S Bach's Anna Magdelana Suite.
  • Twisted Sister isn't a single woman, but a five-man band. Lampshaded in Flight of the Navigator.
  • The ACDC compilation album Iron Man 2 rather disappointingly doesn't include a cover of the eponymous Black Sabbath song. Also, despite being labeled a soundtrack, only two songs appear in the film.
  • The Beautiful South were from Oop North, specifically Hull.
  • The Utah Saints were not from Utah, but Leeds, England.
  • Manchester Orchestra is in fact a five-piece rock band from Atlanta, Georgia.
  • McCartney II wasn't close to being Paul McCartney's second solo album. It was his second album for Columbia Records, though, and the title of the first Columbia solo album, Back to the Egg, did suggest a franchise reboot.
  • The Pizzicato Five only had five members for a brief period of time.
  • The Queens of the Stone Age are common men from the present day.
  • Scissor Sisters doesn't have any incestuous lesbians in the band or any lesbians at all for that matter. (What they cut things with is a closely-guarded secret.)
  • None of the studio bands that played under the name Ohio Express were from Ohio, and one of the later versions (which would become more famous as 10 C.C.) was British.
  • "The Hip Hop Phenomenon" by BT isn't hip-hop at all; it's breakbeat techno.
  • The Dance Dance Revolution song "Hyper Eurobeat" is neither hyper nor eurobeat.
  • The band Texas are from Scotland and are not a country-western band.
  • The psytrance project Texas Faggott is from Finland, not Texas, and they're not gay. Nor are they dry sticks or very large meatballs. Or bassoons.
  • Nobody in Blondie was officially named or nicknamed Blondie, although Debbie Harry was sometimes called that by fans (to her annoyance).
  • REM's CD Green has an orange and black cover.
  • Old Crow Medicine Show is not a Medicine Show, but an old-time band. Of course, you would often find old-time bands at medicine shows, but that's not really the point.
    • Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show wasn't a Medicine Show, either. Nor was their lead singer a doctor. He was nicknamed because he wore an eye patch that reminded his bandmates of Captain Hook.
  • The 1980s Philadelphia band The Hooters were named after the musical instrument, otherwise known as a melodica. Yeah, right.
  • A free concert headlined by Canadian indie folk band The New Pornographers at a semi-Christian college was canceled because one of the elderly heads of the school thought their name was obscene. They're actually named after an obscure Japanese film.
  • The PDQ Bach instrument known as the "wind breaker."
  • Pure Prarie League is not a temperance union based in North Dakota.
  • Jonathan Coulton's song "You Ruined Everything" is not, in fact, about how the eponymous "you" destroyed the singer's life. Quite the opposite, in fact.
  • Frank Beard is the only member of ZZ Top who does not wear a beard.
  • Barry Manilow did not write "I Write The Songs."
  • The LAME MP3 encoder isn't at all lame—it's renowned for excellence. Also, the name stands for LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder, making it doubly misleading.
  • Synthesisers contain analytic components such as filters, although the way they work is mostly synthetic.
  • The album Octoberon by Barclay James Harvest was their tenth, not their eighth. It should have been called "Decameron".
    • Unless their intention was, you know, a reference to October, the tenth month of the year.
  • Few people would describe Grand Funk Railroad's music as funk. The name was inspired by the Grand Trunk and Western Railroad, which ran through the band's native Flint, Michigan.
  • Technically The Moody Blues albums Seventh Sojourn and Octave are their eight and ninth albums respectively, because their first (unsuccessful) professional era resulted in one album, The Magnificent Moodies. However, most fans regard their true professional life to have started with Days of Future Passed, and thus disregard this album, which may not even still be available.
  • The band Sleepytime Trio was actually a four-piece throughout almost all their existence, though they started out as a trio and added the fourth member shortly after formation making it more of an Artifact Title.
  • Eric Singer is the drummer in Kiss.
  • Violent Femmes, as pointed out in Sabrina the Teenage Witch: "... there aren't even any femmes in the band, let alone violent ones!"
    • Gordon Gano has said that "femme" is, in this case, Wisconsin high school slang for a sissy, which fits the band's nerdish image.
  • Orbital's first album was nicknamed the Green Album, but the cover looks more yellow, and the CD itself is red.
    • The original British sleeve is definitely green. Slightly on the yellow side of green, but definitely green.
  • As someone once pointed out, British DJ Dr. Fox is neither a real doctor nor a real fox. British Conservative politician Dr Liam Fox, by contrast, is a real doctor, but he doesn't live in a burrow with a vixen and cubs either.
  • At full strength, there are more than five members in the current[when?] line-up of gospel greats the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and not all of them are blind Alabamans. Sadly, they're not really boys these days either. Sheer longevity has made the name less indicative than it was originally.
  • "(This Song's Just) Six Words Long" is a lot more than six words long. Even if you go with the intended joke, it's seven words long (The word "is" is clearly enunciated in the lyrics, not as apart of a contraction with "just").
  • Stereolab's "Stunning Debut Album". It's actually a 7" single, and the band's second or third release. Their final album Not Music has more music than advertised.
  • The Talking Heads' concert film/album Stop Making Sense takes its name from the chorus of a song that is actually titled "Girlfriend Is Better".
  • The Warlock song "Three Minute Warning" is only two and half minutes long.
    • Liquid Tension Experiment's "Three Minute Warning" goes the other way and lasts over 27 minutes.
  • 17 Hippies, which is actually comprised of 13 Germans.
  • Acid House Kings have nothing to do with the music genre Acid House. In fact they play indie pop with no traces of electronic dance music whatsoever.
  • In Drake's song "Marvin's Room", Marvin's Room isn't the name of the club he's in and his ex-girlfriend's current boyfriend is not named Marvin. In fact the name Marvin is never mentioned. The name is a reference to Marvin Gaye's music studio, where Drake recorded the song.
    • Similarly, Lil Wayne's "MegaMan" doesn't sample the Mega Man theme; it's just the name of the song's producer. The Young Money camp seems to be sticking with a lot of working titles lately.
  • Alt-country band 5 Chinese Brothers probably takes the cake. Not a quintet, not Chinese and not brothers.
  • A set of humorous Christian album covers making the rounds on the internet included a gospel quartet named "The King's Three," and a sermon by a middle-aged man entitled "Confessions of a Teenage Girl."
  • The story recounted in the Dan Fogelberg song "Same Old Lang Syne" takes place on Christmas Eve, not New Year's Eve.
  • Part Nonindicative Name, part Refrain From Assuming: on Marilyn Manson's album Antichrist Superstar, the title track doesn't feature the line "antichrist superstar"; the following track, "1996", does.
  • Covenant's "Theremin" does not use the instrument of the same name, although named after its inventor.
  • The title track of Roxette's album Crash! Boom! Bang!" is a soft, slowly building ballad with strings.
  • Despite its rather dark title, "That Finger On Your Temple Is The Barrel Of My Raygun" by Stars of the Lid is actually a soothing ambient song.
  • Done deliberately by XTC's "Don't Lose Your Temper", which has the exact opposite premise of what you'd guess of the title: The narrator's girlfriend has a hot temper, which he finds attractive, and he doesn't want her to "lose" it as a trait. Thus "Don't lose your temper / 'cause I'd hate you to grow mild".
  • The Beach Boys' album Shut Down, Volume 2 - The Shut Down it's supposedly a sequel to isn't a Beach Boys album, but a compilation by various artists that included some Beach Boys songs. It can be kind of confusing to look at a Beach Boys discography and see Shut Down, Volume 2 but no Shut Down, Volume 1.
  • Joan Of Arc's Live In Chicago 1999 is not a Live Album. Word of God is that "live" is meant as in the verb (i.e. it rhymes with "give", not "dive"), and it's just a reference to the fact that the band were all living in Chicago in 1999... Though clearly they were also messing with listeners by calling a studio album such a thing.
  • Green Day's song "Good Riddance" sounds like it should be loud and angry, but it is a sad, contemplative song that is often played at events like funerals and high school graduations.
  • "Sunrise" by Alphazone was the trance duo's final single, after which they parted ways and rode off into the sunset, so to speak.
  • Mozart's name derives from two original root words: "motz" and "hart," meaning "stupid" and "tough." It essentially means Dumb Muscle.
  • Slipknot's Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses is the band's fourth album. The name only applies if you discount their 1996 debut Mate, Feed, Kill, Repeat out of being self-released and having a slightly different lineup.
  • Skillet's album Alien Youth has nothing to do with extraterrestrials or ethnic immigrants. The title track and "Earth Invasion" refer to liberal Christian "outsiders" influencing the human race, and even then this concept is exclusive to those two tracks; the rest of the album focuses on spiritual yearning and existential Angst.
  • The name of Viking Metal band Amon Amarth is taken from The Lord of the Rings, yet aside from their self-titled song, none of their material has anything to do with the works of JRR Tolkein. Though they initially formed under the name Scum, they don't appear to have any songs that address politics, misanthropic cynicism or anything else that Napalm Death would use as a lyrical basis.[1]
  • When Billy Corgan named his band Smashing Pumpkins, he specifically intended "Smashing" to be read as an adjective, not a verb. From 1994 onward, all official releases added a "The" prefix to alleviate the constant misreadings.
  1. ↑ Scum is the name of Napalm Death's critically acclaimed 1986 debut album.
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