BY MIKEY MIGO
There are tons of impactful band names out there. Some of the best band names come from pop culture, a personal experience, a joke, and other inspirations. Some names have nothing to do with a specific hue, but still contain a color in its name. Intentional or not, the selected color gives off a subliminal emotion. Colors, while subjective, have their own significance.
The Color Wheel and its Ideology
RED
Red is normally associated with energy, war, danger, power, blood, love, and fire. It's a very intense color and generally draws your attention to it.
ORANGE
Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, attraction, and success. It has a high visibility, but not as insistent as red.
YELLOW
Yellow is associated with sunshine, joy, happiness, intellect, and energy. Varying into a shade of Yellow loses luster and the color is often seen as a "child's" color.
GREEN
Green is often considered the color of nature. It represents growth, harmony, freshness, and safety. Of course, we all know it's associated with money.
BLUE
Blue is the sky and the sea and symbolizes trust, loyalty, confidence, truth, and cleanliness. It gives a impression of intellect and focus.
PURPLE
Purple is often represented in royalty. It's the impression of power, luxury, drive, and extravagance. An interesting fact is that about 75% of young children prefer purple to any other color.
WHITE
White is associated with light, innocence, purity, and coolness. It's the color of snow and has an overall positive implication.
BLACK
Black is considered to be powerful, elegant, evil, death, formal, and mysterious. It gives off an emotion of perspective and deepness.
The Bands
Now that you've probably skipped the last section, let's get to the music portion of this whole thing. There are tons of bands out there with a color in their name, but I'm going to only take a look at a few. And to push my art nerdiness even farther I'm going to compare the color's meaning with what I perceive the band to represent.
Green Day
I never knew this or used this term in my heyday, but the name is a phrase used to describe an entire day spent smoking marijuana.
Color Relation: Green is connected to nature, which explains the marijuana reference, but it's also about harmony, freshness, and growth. Green Day has harmony and has grown as artists since their heavy punk days. Some say for the better, some argue, but denying their growth would be ignorant.
Black Sabbath
The grandfathers of satanic rock took their name from the 1963 Boris Karloff movie of the same name.
Color Relation: Black is often deemed "evil". For a band that launched "The Prince of Darkness" into the TVs, radios, and hearts of the masses it makes perfect sense.
The White Stripes
The band was named after the peppermint candy, which to members Jack and Meg White symbolizes childhood and innocence
Color Relation: The color white is exactly what they were after, innocence, purity, and coolness. The name may be "The White Stripes", but their normal color schemes tend to be red and black, which is impactful and mysterious. I think they know exactly what they're doing in choosing their color schemes.
Green Jello/ Jellÿ
The name originated due to the fact that the lime-flavored Jell-O was not good. The band accepted and embraced the fact that they also weren't any good. Hence it just made sense. The band's popularity rose so Kraft Food's sued them in 1992 because of trademark infringement. They went with Green Jellÿ and the rest is, how they say, history.
Color Relation: Harmony? Safety? No. Freshness? Yes. Their music and stage show was very fresh.
Blue Oyster Cult
I've been told by a diehard fan (they're out there!) of BOC and was told that it was an anagram of their favorite beer, Cully's Stout Beer. After looking into it all myself, there's also the possibility of their manager was just really into the occult.
Color Relation: Blue is about focus and intellect. If they were smart of enough to include cowbell, then it makes sense. Their music is pretty intricate at times, so the focus part of definitely there. To me though, they have a good dark undertone with their name without having it be a normally "dark" color.
Living Colour
I know there's not technically a "color" in the name, but it's Living Colour for crying out loud. They got their name from the on-air NBC motto, "Brought to you in living color" and rocked hard with hits like "Cult of Personality".
Color Relation: Many would think that "living colour" would be a witty name based on the fact that they're a all African American rock group. Of course, they're better than that.
Pink Floyd
Originally, "The T-Sets" and then "The Pink Floyd Sound" and finally just "Pink Floyd" once the fans abbreviated the name.
Color Relation: The color pink is often claimed as a "girl's color", but one with confidence in their sexuality and an open mind to using any color would argue. Pink is a calming color, much like their music. I'm sure there's more to it, but in terms of color relation it's pretty dead on.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
They started off like many bands without a permanent name. Once they stole the show at a local LA club and were asked to return they confidently dubbed themselves "The Red Hot Chili Peppers".
Color Relation: Red is the most intense color, represents energy and love, and easily draws your attention to it. Isn't that exactly what The Red Hot Chili Peppers can be defined as? Energy, Intensity, Love, and Attention worthy? Yep, this one connects nicely.
There's even more bands that I could cover with this topic like White Zombie, Black Light Burns, and Maroon 5 to name a few. It's pretty interesting when you look at things in an art and psychological type of way.
What's your favorite band with a color in their name? How do you think it represents them?
|
