Today we think of long, zany song titles of the domain of pop-punk and easycore. For example, read the following (made-up) song title to yourself out loud: “But Matt, I Thought You Said You’d Trade Me Those Pogs For My N64 Controller.” You can practically hear the major-key breakdowns and synth leads, right?? But that wasn’t always the case. Back in the day, having excessively long, zany, sarcastic song titles was a metalcore thing– or more specifically, what we called “noisecore” at the time (all those herky-jerky, skronky metalcore bands who copied DEADGUY and COALESCE).
Exhibit 1, Botch “I Wanna Be A Sex Symbol On My Own Terms” (1998)
After extensive research through the metalcore fossil record (ie Discogs.com and Youtube), I have determined that the “patient zero” of the excessively long, zany/sarcastic song titles thing is an obscure Vermont band called DROWNINGMAN, who started back in 1996 or so. They never really went anywhere, but were very ahead of their time– I used to be really into this style, and they were definitely among the first to do it, or at least do it well (in 96, BOTCH were still awful).
Exhibit 2, the tracklist from DROWNINGMAN’s 1998 album. While there were maybe a few other bands doing the sarcastic song titles thing, nobody took length to the same, uh, lengths as they did! Still, not quite what we think of as “zany song titles” by today’s standards. This is like a fossil of some prehistoric fish that a creationist holds up next to a picture of a horse and says, “Wait, am I supposed to believe that THIS turned into THIS?!” and turns the camera with a smug grin on his face. But wait… there’s more!
Exhibit 3, the tracklist from their 2005 album. Could this be the missing link between the “noisecore” style of long, sarcastic titles and the late 2000s easycore zany song titles?? I mean, “Dude Status: Revoked” and “Major Disappointment Reporting For Duty” could be straight off the WONDER YEARS album where they still had breakdowns and wrote songs about Kool-Aid and Captain Crunch.
Set aside for a minute the obvious fact that this subgenre of hardcore has aged horribly and that listening to this stuff makes you want to jam a mechanical pencil into your eardrums. Is it possible that we have found the genesis of zany songs about BMX, Sega Genesis, pizza and friends with suburban white person names like Matt, Ben, and Zack????
