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From The Desk Of Times New Viking’s Elizabeth Murphy: The Ungoogleable & The Unutterable: Two Trends in Naming

Times New Viking is an Ohio rock trio that delivers raw rock ‘n’ roll. Jumping from different labels over the years including Matador and Merge, the band has released five proper albums in a little more than five years. On its last album, Dance Equired (Merge), Times New Viking dropped the lo-fi fuzz in favor of more melodious songs. These art-school grads from Columbus, Ohio, are still making music, and the band’s Elizabeth Murphy will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with her.

Murphy: Blouse. Woods. Tennis. These aren’t your older boyfriend’s one-word band names: Shellac, Codeine, Scrawl. (These are at least fifth-grade honor-student words, approachable intellect.) Let’s talk Yacht, Girls, Baths. Considering the textual village in which these bands are born (the internet), it is as if they are citing ubiquity in using this device; that they are unnamable even. “Hey. We are (insert pre-k vocabulary word sans article here). We are everywhere and yet nowhere. We are that word you use all the time yet never consider.” In literature (H.P. Lovecraft’s The Unnamable and Samuel Beckett’s work of the same title), the “unnamable” is such because it is too atrocious or too unknown to be given a signifier; we cannot apply these inferences here. What they surely are is ungoogleable. Is the task of coming up with a unique moniker too daunting? With the internet, their homeland, right there as a cross-checking device? Maybe this trend exists as a challenge. After all, Cursive is more popular than cursive (on the internet). Maybe the goal of Girls is to be more popular than girls (on the internet). Okay, now let’s tackle God.

You can’t say it. There is no official pronunciation. You are not supposed to sound it out. It is the unutterable LMFAO: a direct descendent from the language of short message systems and the ineffable YHVH*. This initialism-as-band-name mimics the sacred while couched in an arguably profane treatment of language. Another way around the sacrilege of putting the Lord’s name to paper has been to substitute or omit letters, re: L-rd or Elokim rather than the proper Elohim. In a lovely twist of the uncanny, it is this device that can be used to evade a cease and desist and the burden of the ungoogleable (see T4VEK). Of course this still runs the risk of problematic historical redundancies; the trick goes back to when regular old originality was at stake—the Jaggerz and Ambrose Bierce’s use of the dollar sign being early examples. I am pretty sure using z for s has phased out for now, but clearly $ is the new “wolf,” if you get my drift. In our current economic climate, this is fine to do this out of necessity, like when you are making signs for a garage sale and the packet of letter stickers has run out of an “s.” Otherwise it is unoriginal and nobody is going to think you “get paid” but quite the opposite; they are going to think you ran out of the “s” and can’t afford a new one.

*according to Jewish law, these four letters, also known as the tetragrammaton, represent God’s real name and are only to be pronounced in prayer.

Video after the jump.