Better Than It Sounds / Music

"The late Bill Nye once said, "˜I have been told that Wagner's music is better than it sounds."

— Mark Twain, in his Autobiography ("Bill Nye" was Edgar Wilson Nye.)

With it being one of the most diverse forms of art in the world, it's only natural that some people come up with ideas for songs, bands or styles of music that sound absolutely insane in hindsight. It's also natural that a lot of these work.

See Trope Names for a Band for a sillier version of the below.

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• 3 Doors Down: A rock band from the rural Mississippi coast who are known for singing about a fictional radioactive gem.
• 10cc: Four guys responsible for faceless bubblegum pop records form their own band, then accidentally score a hit by mixing the drums too loud. Two years later, they decide to ride out the fame by changing their name and making bizarre art rock novelty songs. Then two of the band members leave to compose an ambient classical prog dramedy audioplay triple album to market a guitar accessory that easily disintegrates, and the remaining members go back to making pop.
• ABBA: Two guys and two girls don't know what the hell they're doing for the first two years, are overly cheery for the next six, and finally go emo in the last two. After their career ends, their music finds its way on Broadway and later the big screen.
• AC/DC: From the Land Down Under comes a band named after a label on a sewing machine, led by a guy in a silly outfit. Their first singer drank until death, and was replaced by a Geordie with a funny hat. Their music is simple and monothematic, and their singers squawk like parrots.
  • Back in Black: The first album with the Geordie, featuring nondescript cover art, lyrics rife with obvious puns, and its biggest hits being dedications to the first singer.
• Adele: A pop star that doesn't look like your average pop star sings about a breakup, and sells more than 20 million albums.
• Adelitas Way: Rock band from Las Vegas get a break when one of their songs is put on a pro-wrestling side program.
• Aerosmith: Five musicians from Boston. They have a Roller Coaster at one of the Disney Theme Parks featuring their songs, spent the equivalent of an airplane in drugs, their first #1 was a Disaster Movie theme song, and their leader became a judge on a reality show.
• Afro Celt Sound System: A record producer is inspired by a very tenuous anthropology theory to mix the folk music of two continents together. He starts a band, and Peter Gabriel lets them use his recording studio.
• Alestorm: Drunken Scotsmen somehow manage to write and record album after album of nothing but songs about pirates.
• Alice Cooper: The spirit of a 17th-century heretic lives on inside a skinny 20th-century preacher's son. She compels him to paint his face, buy a pet snake, and repeatedly fake his own death. Under her namesake, he incites children against their educators.
• Alice in Chains: Grunge musicians from The '90s write like it's still The '90s.
• Alien Ant Farm: Nu Metal One-Hit Wonder - with a cover, whose video satirizes the song's original artist.
• Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass: Record producer plays the trumpet in a jazzy brass band.
• Alstroemeria Records: Japanese doujinshi group best known for their song about a poisoned fruit.
• Alter Bridge: Three members of one of the most hated bands of all time join together with a complete unknown on vocals.
• America: Three Brits pick a Non-Indicative Name and sing about horses, roads, and failed relationships.
• American Football: Four white guys from Illinois sing about teenage angst and just so happen to define future EmoMusic and become a beloved music meme thanks to some random internet music forum, despite not releasing a new record for almost two decades. And no, none of the members ever participated in it.
• Tori Amos: Former cocktail lounge pianist who once wrote an ode to the Baltimore Orioles and starred in a cereal commercial becomes a flame-haired feminist artist who writes songs about rape, masturbating to Jesus, and things that seem to have been the result of drug use. Also re-invents rock songs into piano-driven dirges. Has a crazy, obsessive fanbase and is one of the hugest gay icons in Alternative Rock.
• ANBB: A meeting of the minds between Germany's foremost names in Industrial and pure-tone glitch respectively.
• Animal Collective: An indie pop band that shamelessly rips off The Beach Boys. One of Pitchfork's darlings.
• Animusic: Two guys make music videos with no lyrics, people, or actual instruments. Rumors on the origin of their videos are on Snopes.
• Paul Anka: A 1950s Rock & Roll Teen Idol turned 1970s soft rock singer-songwriter whose two most famous songs are about his Precocious Crush and a very awkward Silly Love Song about having his baby and not getting an abortion.
• Anybody Killa: Gangsta rapper with a lisp and clown face paint.
• Apocalyptica: Finns rocking out with cellos.
• The Aquabats!: A ska-punk band from California pretends to be a team of bungling superheroes. They sing about such diverse topics as childhood nostalgia, midget pirates, vindictive shark hunters, giant mechanical primates, and the inability of lobsters to comprehend The Power of Friendship. Halfway through they stopped being a ska band and got a TV show.
• Arcade Fire: A bunch of Canadians, two of whom were raised in Texas, who make songs about neighborhoods in the suburbs. Everybody knows and loves them, despite everybody not knowing them and hating them because of that.
  • Rebellion (Lies): One of their most loved songs is a protest song against sleep.
• Arctic Monkeys: Four boys from Sheffield start a rock band despite having never played an instrument before. The singer sings in a thick Yorkshire accent.
• Area 11: A bunch of nerdy Brits associated with a YouTube network make songs about Anime.
• Art of Noise: A music journalist and a Yes producer and his lackies accidentally make hip-hop music, then the producer and the journalist leave and they release a single with Max Headroom. They break up for ten years, reform to record an album that releases twenty years later, release an opera Drum and Bass album, then break up again.
• Rick Astley: Merseyside guy sings a bunch of love songs while sounding like a truck driver.
  • "Never Gonna Give You Up": His most famous song, commonly called one of the internet's many phenomena, even though it's from The '80s.
• Atonal music: A form of music, written mainly by three Austrians, in which twelve distinct pitches are used in a somewhat dissonant fashion.
• August Burns Red: Everyone THINKS the woman burned the dog, but it turns out the band just made it up.
• Aurora (Singer): Scandinavian girl who hits it big after recording a jingle for a British commercial.
• Emilie Autumn: A bipolar woman writes music with a violin and harpsichord... then accompanies it with screamed lyrics about how men suck.
• The Avalanches: Melbourne DJ trio that started off with six members. They started off as a rock group, and then a rap group, before transitioning into electronic by getting samples from seemingly everywhere, with songs centring around boys needing therapy or someone booking a flight. They went through many different names, and the one they have now was stolen off of a previous band.
• Avantasia: A German decides to write a fantasy story as a giant excuse to show off his connections among Power Metal bands.
• Avenged Sevenfold: A California band whose members have scary stage names and whose mascot is a flying skull. Many of their songs have lines about death. Their lead guitarist's dad opens for a ventriloquist.
• Aviators: A fan of pastiche pastel horses who shares his stage name with a popular brand of sunglasses and writes music ranging from Doctor Who fan music to soundtracks for theoretical video games to painting whole entire planets various colors.
• Avicii: Swedish producer makes a name for himself by remixing an old '60s soul song and indirectly helping a pop-rapper score a hit of his own. Makes it big again with a folkish song sung by a black guy named Egbert.
• Iggy Azalea: White Australian chick pretends to be black while making parodies of classic movies. Thus, she gets accused of racism and homophobia.
• The B-52s: A band from Athens GA, two of which are female and wear beehive hairdos sing songs about aliens, hot pants, lobsters, and other weird stuff while playing toy pianos, glockenspiels, and even conventional instruments. Their guitarist did not know to play his instrument and had to invent his own tunings to compensate.
• Baauer: DJ who becomes an overnight sensation when short clips of people dancing to a song of his pop up on the internet.
• Babymetal: A school-themed idol group (no, not that one) makes three members (including two then eleven-year-olds) perform a combination of metal and Japanese pop music. They then proceed to become more popular than their original group.
• Johann Sebastian Bach: German organist with a coffee addiction whose works were better respected nearly a century after his death.
• Bad Brains: These guys just can't make up their damn minds. They started out as jazz fusion musicians, then became Rastafarian hardcore punks who only occasionally played reggae, before transitioning into funk metal.
• Bad Lip Reading: A musician once decided to teach himself how to lip-read. This is the disastrous result.
• Long John Baldry: Tall English homosexual went from singing blues to MOR ballads to rock. Was instrumental in developing YouTube Poop while lending his voice to a children's cartoon.
• Balkan Beat Box: Some Israeli guys combine Balkan music, klezmer, and hip-hop.
• Bal-Sagoth: A bunch of British guys who love Tolkein and Lovecraft write songs with ridiculously long titles. Half the contents of the lyrics sheets are absent from the songs themselves.
• The Band: A quintet combines multiple rock styles with lyrics about Americana, even though they're four-fifths Canadian. The non-Canadian is a guy from a town called Turkey Scratch, Arkansas. They choose one of the lamest names for themselves.
• The Bangles: Three statuesque altos and one petite soprano from the West Coast aspire to be the Distaff Counterpart to a certain below-mentioned Liverpool act. It doesn't go as well as they planned, but they still make grown men weep with their harmonies.
• Barenaked Ladies: Five Canadian guys who sing an awful lot of songs about failing relationships (though none of them seem to have one of those, at present).
• Barnes & Barnes: A TV scriptwriter starts an industrial band.
• The Beach Boys: Five or six suburban white kids sing songs about a hobby only one of them ever took part in.
  • Or, rock and roll's other greatest soap opera, whose biggest claim to fame was an album they never finished.
• Beach House: Male-female duo that isolates themselves from society by locking themselves into a room to record an album. Sometimes a producer may join them.
• Beastie Boys: Some white punks who bought into an African-American social phenomenon and ripped off many artists along the way. First hit it big when they successfully sued an airline for using one of their songs in a commercial without permission. Most of their hits consist of the band members taking turns bragging about themselves and comparing themselves to obscure pop culture figures. Opened the doors to artists such as Limp Bizkit.
• The Beatles: Four musicians from Northern England have to go all the way to Germany to get nightclub bookings. They manage to get signed to a label mainly known for Jazz and comedy records, then promptly fire their drummer and replace him with a guy who wears an excessive amount of jewelry. They become massively famous doing Silly Love Songs, then suddenly decide to start experimenting with psychoactive substances and meditation. They keep the Punny Name they chose as juveniles even after their music becomes complex and sophisticated. They break up at the height of their popularity. Afterwards, one of them decides to play house instead of writing music, another one married a one-legged woman, the third produced a Monty Python film and the jewelry-loving drummer becomes the star of a TV show for kids.
  • Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: Pop group pretends to be variety band. Includes songs about domestic repairs, a Victorian circus and road problems in Blackburn.
  • The White Album: Pop group tries to be variety band, while eschewing everything in the album cover.
  • Abbey Road: Pop group decides that they want to use Word Salad Lyrics and songs exceeding six minutes. The highlight is a quarter-hour of short tunes strung together.
• Beck: Morose, baby-faced ex-Scientologist who dabbles in more genres than anyone would bother to count, writes decay- and death-obsessed songs (while always presenting a cheerful or at least devil-may-care facade, except on the heavily-indebted-to-Nick Drake Stoic Woobie LP written after ditching his longtime girlfriend); despite a career spanning (roughly) ten full-length releases, still is recognized primarily for one song—yeah, that one! with the line everybody mishears—which had never been intended to be released as a single.
• The Bee Gees: Three brothers (one of whom is a big Attention Whore) from the Isle of Man form a pop band after moving to the Land Down Under, then return to England nearly a decade later. They are most famous for dance music sung with high pitched falsettos, mostly associated with a movie about a hardware store employee.
• Ludwig van Beethoven: A bad-tempered German who wrote his best work when he was deaf.
  • Fidelio: A woman goes Sweet Polly Oliver to save her husband.
  • Symphony No. 5 in C minor: A really long work that people know only because of the first four notes.
  • Symphony No. 9 in D minor: A much longer work that people know only because of one melodic line from the final movement.
• Beirut: Nearly incomprehensible singer leads a brass band and a few other musicians, influenced by Eastern European folk music. Has nothing to do with a city on the Mediterranean.
• Vincenzo Bellini: Rossini wannabe writes ten operas before he dies at thirty-three.
• Best Coast: A hipster chick who's obsessed with her cat and weed.
• Justin Bieber: Girly-voiced teen with an outdated haircut becomes a global superstar despite his bad attitude and lack of respect for Holocaust victims and U.S. presidents. But what hurt his career the most were five British guys.
• The Big Bopper: Texas disc jockey decides to write songs and record them, then is forgotten for fifty-plus years other than being a plane crash victim. His best known song is named after a city in France.
• Big Dumb Face: A guitarist combines Ween and death metal because his old band wouldn't let him.
• Big Pun: An obese man from New York who could rhyme well, but only released one album before dying of a heart attack.
• The Birthday Massacre: Canadian Perky Goths sing Mind Screwy songs and make disturbing videos. They also jump around a lot, and occasionally wear bunny ears. And rock out.
• The Birthday Party: Nick Cave and his friends get drunk on stage.
• Björk: Female singer from a northern European island who is famous for bizarre lyrics, as well as wearing a bird and beating up reporters.
• The Black Keys: Two homely Ohioans sing about relationships, mostly unrequited, and produce for the songs comedic videos filled with women and a dinosaur puppet.
• Black Metal: Angry white guys from the grim, frostbitten and brutal north who wear makeup and sing about Satan, J. R. R. Tolkien (despite The Lord of the Rings being rife with pro-Christian subtext) and dendrophilia.
• Black Moth Super Rainbow: Pennsylvanian musicians with really weird Stage Names play obsolete synthesizers while one of them sings through a vocoder.
  • TOBACCO: One of said members makes solo electronic music which can only be described as Aphex Twin composing the soundtrack for a Troma film after binging late 80's instructional films while high on acid, Surge, and Nickelodeon slime.
• Black Sabbath: After losing two finger-tips in an industrial accident, guitarist loosens the strings a bit, and develops a new playing style. He joins forces with other guys to write horror fanfic disguised as songs.
  • Alternatively: Losers from industrial England start a band and accidentally create a new genre of music.
  • Ozzy Osbourne: Singer from said band writes spooky songs while taking every drug in existence - and somehow surviving. Got a new generation of fans by showing how fucked up he and his family are.
• Black Veil Brides: A group of goth kids who make glam-metal music nearly 20 years after it was last relevant.
• Blaze Ya Dead Homie: His stage persona is a reincarnated gangsta rapper from the 1980s. He wears clown facepaint.
• Blind Guardian: Four Germans who sing about The Silmarillion and a bunch of other books and like to multilayer their vocals 40 times. They have also sung about Peter Pan with a certain pathos.
• blink-182: Three Californians gain fame by being silly and immature, when they aren't singing about teen suicide, children of divorcees and longing for a past lover.
• Blondie: A New York City band whose name is inspired by a hair color, even though only one member has that color.
• Blue Öyster Cult: A music critic assembles a five-piece rock band to adapt his heavily Lovecraft-inspired poems into songs.
• Blur: British boyhood friends writing novelty songs about Upper-Class Twit life, Middle Class Twit life, and Working Class Twit life. Their singer sings in an over-exaggerated Cockney accent. After their first 4 albums, they became more "alternative" (leading to the one song America knows them for). More famous for their vague feud with a pair of troublemaking brothers and the lead singer eventually becoming a pack of animated apes.
• Boondox: His stage persona is a killer scarecrow who haunts the Deep South. His music mixes Country Music, rock and Hip-Hop.
• David Bowie: Androgynous British rockstar who claimed to be a bisexual space alien, appeared in a bunch of movies, and invoked the New Sound Album trope at least nine times. A song he did with a rock band helped a white rapper achieve short-lived stardom.
• Bowling for Soup: A group of guys from Texas who are more famous for their less serious than their rare but beautiful serious ones. Most of their songs are either about beer, relationships, or humorous past incidents.
  • A pop-punk band who write sarcastic and sometimes meaningful songs about friendships, failed relationships, getting drunk, and whatever Phineas and Ferb are doing today.
• Los Bravos: Four Spaniards and a German who sounds like a country singer rip off The Beatles. Their biggest hit, which is also their only American hit, is a highly upbeat Break-Up Song with a color being itself in the title.
• Breaking Benjamin: A man from Pennsylvania names his band after himself and sings about girls' journals, not giving up, and failure, amongst other things.
• Bring Me the Horizon: Highly divisive British band plays American-style Deathcore. Then they disown it and play Metalcore, eventually becoming the codifier and Ensemble Dark Horse of the genre. Then they disown that and ditch it for a radio-friendly Nu Metal electronic rock sound with aspects of Emo and Pop Punk, and becomes even more successful afterwards. They are best known for singing about a fancy chair.
• British India: Angsty Melbournites fronted by a singer who can't decide which note to hit.
• Anton Bruckner: A socially-awkward man who has a big obsession with death and the dead writes massive symphonies.
• Buckethead: Masked KFC-enthusiast plays the guitar.
• BUCK-TICK: The ex-Japanese Delinquent ex-drummer became the singer, fronting a band consisting of two brothers, a Rummage Sale Reject who counts theremin and "noise" among his instruments as well as guitar and has an affinity for LSD, and a mellow, cute bassist. Almost all of their output can be classified as It's Not Porn, It's Art, porn, high art, or some incomprehensible combination of all of the above, and is served up with a huge side of Ho Yay and fanservice of both the straight and Ho Yay kinds.
• Buddy Holly & The Crickets: Three guys from around Texas named after noisy arthropods. Their leader, a big John Wayne fan, is proof that Nerds Are Hardcore.
• Buffalo Springfield: A couple of guys from LA and some Canadians become a One-Hit Wonder with a light Protest Song. One of the Angelinos formed a folk-rock trio while a Canadian goes solo, joining up with said Angelino from time to time.
• Bull of Heaven: Two guys make more music than anyone has the time to listen to. Also, some of it isn't music.
• Burmese: A loud, discordant rock band that compensated for having half the instruments by getting two people on each.
• Kate Bush: Weird lady known for art rock songs about literature and history. Her fans believe that every eccentric female artist post-1978 ripped off of her.
  • Or: Bollywood Bjork Mime.
• Butthole Surfers: A group of Michael Stipe stalkers come down off of their latest acid trip to discover they've recorded twelve albums.
• The Byrds: A bunch of Folk Music guys from LA somehow think they can become the American Beatles by recording rock versions of Bob Dylan songs. Amazingly, it works, but only one of the guys can be bothered to stick around for more than a couple years. Then they start doing Country Music seemingly out of boredom.
• C418: German electronica artist, famous for composing the soundtrack to a game about blocks.
• Cabaret Voltaire: Three guys from Sheffield record music in their attic that sounds like Suicide (Band) with more instruments. The guy who started the band leaves, and the other two guys codify a genre that looks like a typo and then make house music until they split.
• Can: A group of West German modern classical and free jazz musicians decide to start making rock music instead. Their songs are frequently made up of hours of jamming made up entirely on the spot and then edited down to a still-ridiculous length. Their lead singer during their best years is a mush-mouthed Japanese drifter who screams and mumbles over the beat. Their most revered album is named for a Turkish vegetable.
• Captain Beefheart: A Cult Classic whose bandmates have compared him to a cult leader.
  • Trout Mask Replica: An album thought up in a dilapidated house in substandard conditions, while the above ran things with an iron fist. The end result consisted of two LPs worth of discordant instrumentation and some incoherent rambling.
• The Caretaker: Sampled classical and ballroom music become less and less recognizable until it deteriates into pure noise and static.
• Mariah Carey: New Yorker with a deep voice speaking voice finds fame through singing bell whistles, embracing glurge and wearing increasingly skimpy clothing. She makes about $2 million every December from a song about how she doesn't want any presents for Christmas.
• Carpenters: A guy and his younger sister sing Silly Love Songs.
• The Cars: Five more musicians from Boston. Their frontman, well into his 30s when they recorded their debut album, is nerdy and has an uncomfortable voice, and they lost their only Grammy nomination to a Two-Hit Wonder disco band.
• Enrico Caruso: Neapolitan tenor despised by the composer whose works were best suited for him. Survived many problems on and off the stage.
• Johnny Cash: Monotone-voiced singer wearing monochromatic clothing. His most revered performance was in a prison. One of his best known songs was a cover from a band who became famous long after him.
• Catherine Wheel: A band led by a singer with over-expressive eyebrows refuses to be labeled anything.
• The Causey Way: A manic revivalist preacher tries to indoctrinate you.
• Monte Cazazza: A misanthrope who likes to gift his friends with dead cats on fire releases two albums within a 45 year career of avoiding attention. He is credited with naming a genre that no longer resembles his music at all.
• The Chainsmokers: Two New Yorkers make a silly, annoying song about an internet craze and disappear. A few years later, they have one of the biggest hit songs of the 2010s.
• Chavez: A prolific session guitarist who's worked with Johnny Cash and Iggy Pop, a writer for Silicon Valley, Garry Marshall's son and an avant-garde jazz drummer made angular noise rock music in The '90s before sporadically reuniting throughout the next 20 years.
• Cheap Trick: Two Tiger Beat pinups, one vanilla and one chocolate, inexplicably team up with a dour, burnt-out corporate drone and a bow tie-wearing Manchild guitar savant covered in punk pins to play Power Pop to sold-out arenas. Somehow, it works.
• Richard Cheese: Guy plays other people's music as if he was performing in a casino.
• The Chemical Brothers: Two students fiddle around with their record collection, and are so unoriginal they used the same name as another musical duo (which understandably sued).
• Chic: Three classically trained session musicians and two session backup singers get together and play their own variety of disco. Two of them are producers and bring that sound to various projects. Their most famous hit (that their French name was mentioned in) was written after they couldn't get into the most inaccessible discotheque ever to exist. They have (indirectly) been responsible for the growth of rap music with their second most famous song.
• Chicago: A bunch of guys from Northeastern Illinois perform rock with lots of brass instruments. The band was originally named after a bus company.
• Choro Club: Three very boring Japanese men playing the same music over and over. Sometimes they invite someone other and become less boring.
• CHVRCHES: Three Scots seek to resurrect the '80s Synth-Pop sound with upbeat songs that have depressing subject matter. Deliberately put a typo in their name to show up easier on Google.
• Neil Cicierega: It turns out you can play All Star to the tune of everything.
• Kelly Clarkson: A winner from some American talent show constantly whines about her exes.
• The Clash: Four Londoners popularize Three Chords and the Truth, then disown it and try to play every genre ever. They can't even be bothered to list the title of one of their biggest hits on the back cover when they put it on an album.
• Cocteau Twins: A Scottish woman sings words nobody can understand while her boyfriend plays around with a chorus pedal. The band had a bass player, then they didn't, then they had another bass player, and they had some other people play live with them for a while. After the band broke up, the bass player ran a record label.
• Coheed and Cambria:A band with a very high pitched singer that makes songs about a convoluted, Mind Screw space opera that also has a comic book series.
• Leonard Cohen: A nasally-voiced Jewish poet who writes and sings about religion, sex, death, and The Holocaust, occasionally in the same song. Sang like his throat was made of gravel in old age. Outside his native Canada and parts of Europe, he's largely known for one song that's been recorded by over 300 musicians and groups.
• Coil: A pair of gay lovers indulge in black magic and strong psychedelics, whilst almost composing the score to a horror movie in the process.
• Coldplay: British band specialized in writing depressing ballads who is frequently accused of plagiarizing or ripping off other bands.
• John Coltrane: Jazz musician plays tons of notes on his instrument, gets off the junk, and continues to play tons of notes on his instrument before dying of cancer at the age of 40. One of his most famous covers came from a musical associated with Julie Andrews.
• Cormorant: Extreme California Bay Area Progressive Metal band throws in too many genres to keep track of in their Tiberian-Ass Bastard Folk music with a heavy focus on Horrible History Metal lyrics.
• Elvis Costello: The son of a British big band crooner tries his hand at New Wave Music. He named himself after a Tennessee truck driver, but his huge glasses make him look like a plane crash victim. His first TV appearance saw him banned from Saturday Night Live. He almost destroyed his career by dissing an R&B legend, but he recovered to gain a large cult following by experimenting with genres that don't fit his style, like country, jazz, and even classical music.
• Cradle of Filth: A British man an inch taller than Joe Pesci gets nodes on his vocal chords.
• Crank Sturgeon: Musical entertainer known for pretending to be a fish.
• Cream: Three British people get together to play the blues, even though they don't like each other. Because they don't like each other, the band breaks up after only two years.
• Creature Feature: A dark cabaret duo that wish it could be Halloween every day of the year. Their songs are mostly inspired by cheesy horror films and Edgar Allan Poe.
• Creedence Clearwater Revival: Four guys from California named after a beer commercial write songs about the Deep South. Their popular songs are often misunderstood or misheard.
• Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Three or four musicians with massive egos sometimes stop fighting long enough to sing about hippie politics and relationship drama.
• Crowded House: A band from New Zealand... and Australia... and the U.S., which tends to sing about kitchens and meteorology.
• Culture Club: English band led by a man who calls himself a boy but looks like a woman. Their Signature Song is an ode to a reptile.
• The Cure: They're morose, depressing kids from southern England who wear lots of make-up and do up their hair. They started out as happy-go-lucky snot-nosed punks, before making three albums full of depressing music and writing lots of dirges. Then they became poppy and almost gleeful, and started making lots of big hit singles, before returning to their inner child and making another morose album full of angsty music. They sold out stadiums, and are now middle-aged men who still wear make-up and play angsty music.
• Current 93: Former industrial musician, now a Christian folk singer.
• Cypress Hill: A Mexican with a very nasal voice and a deep-voiced Cuban rap about shooting people, smoking pot, and, shooting people while smoking pot.
• Miley Cyrus: A thirteen-year-old girl moves from the country to Hollywood, gets a TV show with her father which resembles her real life (at least, the one she has after the show becomes popular), and sings songs about leading a normal life in Hollywood. Her mistakes become fodder for the tabloids, and growing up in public becomes controversial. She soon dresses like a Winged Humanoid, dates a handsome Australian boy, decides to become a sexualized/insane party animal and rides on construction equipment naked.
• Daft Punk: Two French guys who pretend to be robots cut bits out of good songs, add a beat, and then appear onstage to perform them standing in a pyramid made of incandescent tubes.
• Dick Dale: A man plays the same note on a guitar really fast (occasionally switching to other notes), because he'd rather be in the ocean. His best known song is famous for its association with an avant-garde action film and a sample from a pop-rap act.
• The Dandy Warhols: Band named after a weird painter known for a song about a European region also made famous by an operatic band and another associated with a female TV detective.
• Dead Kennedys: Some Californians form a band with a tasteless name fronted by a guy who doesn't even sing and is named after a popular snack and old African country. Awfully fond of writing songs about Nazis and genocide.
• Death Grips: A man screams over abrasive beats that sound like they're malfunctioning. Their biggest hit involves the man mispronouncing the title repeatedly.
• The Decemberists: Some nerds make music about history and use big words.
  • The Hazards of Love: A rock opera about parenthood causing problems for a bunch of Scottish people, one of whom is made of trees.
• Deep Purple: Five British musicians have a traumatic experience making an album, then write a song about it with a memorable riff.
• Def Leppard: Five guys from Sheffield start out copying Thin Lizzy, then move on to copying Queen and lose (part of) a member in a road accident.
• Deftones: Five guys from California start off making Nu Metal, before meshing Metal with whatever the hell they feel like, and writing albums about the lead singer's drug problems and the bassist's death.
• Lana Del Rey: Indie pop singer who hits the mainstream after a lame performance on TV. Her best known song is actually an EDM-dance remix.
• Mac DeMarco: A weird goofball from Edmonton gets famous, then writes an album about how he's sick of being famous.
• Jason Derulo: Black guy from Louisiana takes over a domestic abuser's role in the music world by sampling the soundtrack to a shooting. He then makes songs based on '50s calypso and Israeli dance music. Also had a tendency to shout his name before every song. A Star Wars video game made a parody of one of his songs.
• Dethklok: Five idiots who don't actually exist play Death Metal.
• Devo: Some college kids from Ohio have an in-joke that turns into a band. A lot of other bands emulate them. They are best known for singing about weapons used to lash people.
• Dexys Midnight Runners: British band named after drugs that started out with a bunch of horns, then switched to more folk-styled music. The latter style netted the group their only American hit.
• DIIV: A group of New Yorkers play sleep-inducing music, fronted by a man with seemingly no sense of fashion, has been busted for heroin, sings as softly as possible, idolises Kurt Cobain and seems to be trying to give every Grammar Nazi on earth a heart attack.
• Dinosaur Jr.: Three guys from Massachusetts play Alternative Rock at ear-splitting volumes while the singer sings in a nasal drawl.
• Ronnie James Dio: A middle-aged New Hampshirite with a heroic tenor fit for Wagner fronts a few metal acts, invents a new hand gesture and sings a lot of songs about rainbows.
• Céline Dion: A Canadian woman becomes famous for recording countless Silly Love Songs. Her most famous song was inspired by a sinking ship.
• Dir en grey: A metal band made up of, of all people, a bunch of Japanese pretty boys. Their singer seems to have 10 voice boxes he turns off and on depending on how he sings.
  • A band manages to create a particularly vitriolic Broken Base by transitioning from poppy glam-rock to death metal in fewer than ten albums.
• Disturbed: A bald guy who was trained to sing in synagogues instead makes monkey noises with two Pantera fans and a David Spade look-alike. Also, they came oh-so-close to having the first rock crossover hit in years with a cover of an old '60s song.
  • Land of Confusion cover music video: A cloaked figure from the stars lands in the middle of "Political Cartoon Nineteen Eighty-Four" and leads a rebellion.
• Donovan: Scottish Dylan wannabe performs psychedelic rock before switching to folk rock. Sings about weird subjects like bananas, street musicians and sinking continents.
• Jason Donovan: A former Neighbours actor sings catchy-sounding Silly Love Songs with a pretty blonde-haired, blue-eyed face and a baritone-sounding tenor voice. He was once famous, but then he went downhill and fell into obscurity in the early '90s because he once unknowingly infuriated his fanbase.
• The Doors: Blues fans write music for the poems of an oversexed Floridian drunk.
• DragonForce: A Multinational Team whose songs consist entirely of fantasy cliches and guitar solos. They are best known for having one song appear in a video game.
• Dragonland: A bunch of Swedes spend their first two albums singing about a fictional Tolkien-esque world, then decide to write about other subjects before returning to said world.
• Drake: A black kid from Degrassi raps about all the money and sex he has. His most famous song is a Word Salad Title about phones.
• Dream Theater: Five guys from New York playing Progressive Rock, doing as many complex notes as they can in the solos while doing even overly complex songs with overly complex parts. One of their live albums had a cover that drew parallels to an event that its release date would become synonymous with.
• Drowning Pool: A nu-metal band who became infamous for a violent song that is symbolic with being overused in YouTube videos and was mired in controversy related to the very event mentioned in the entry right above this one. Notable for replacing their lead singer on a regular basis.
• Paul Dukas: French-Jewish music critic who destroyed most of his works because of Creator Backlash. Almost exclusively known today for an orchestral work popularized by a mouse.
• Duran Duran: A bunch of young guys, mostly from industrial areas of England, form a glam rock band with punk and disco overtones and wildly incomprehensible lyrics. They become massively successful. Later, as they grow older and less successful (and lose and gain band members), they start making solid alt-pop/rock tunes. Their lyrics also make more sense. They sing about Brazilian cities, latter-day Roger Moore Bond films, and starving wild dogs.
  • The Power Station: Two of the guys from the above band join forces with the drummer of the French-named disco group and a singer who would later become known for his backing band. They had two big hits, a cover of an early-70's song and an original song that took its name from a Marilyn Monroe film.
  • Arcadia: The other three guys form a band very briefly during a break in the group's schedule, releasing a grand total of one album with two hits, one of which is an American event that occurs every November.
• Bob Dylan: An ugly man from some podunk town in Minnesota can't sing, but plays his guitar and harmonica (and sings anyway). Later, he developed a liking for drums, bass, and electric equipment, after which his audience booed him. Many people don't know he wrote some of his songs. He still sings to this day, even after his voice got worse.
  • Blonde on Blonde: He goes to Nashville to record an album, but there's almost no Country Music on it.
  • Nashville Skyline: He goes back to Nashville and does a Country Music album, but trolls everyone by singing in a different voice.
• Eagles: A backing band, later one of the most hated bands ever. One of their members starred in a TV show that lasted just one episode, and another only writes songs about the fact that he is aging (and is also a noted opponent of piracy). Sold a lot in their home country, but internationally are a One-Hit Wonder with their song about a travel accommodation.
• Eels. A man with a one letter stage name and a large beard writes songs about his incredibly depressing life, only one of which became a hit.
• Billie Eilish: Californian teen who sings like she took lots of sleeping pills writes moody lyrics which her brother sets to sparse keyboards and acoustic guitars.
• Einstürzende Neubauten: Some Germans confuse the music shoppe with the local hardware store. It takes them around fifteen years to realize their mistake.
• Electric Light Orchestra: A bunch of British guys perform over-the-top Beatles-influenced rock with a bunch of cellos. Started out as a side project of another band in which the original members participated, and they unexpectedly thrived after the frontman of their original group left the side project. Their debut album got issued under the wrong title in America because a record label employee misunderstood a handwritten note on the album's release paperwork.
• Electric Six: Some sleazy-looking men do Affectionate Parody disco-rock about things like fast-food franchises and preferring women who have venereal diseases.
• Emerson, Lake & Palmer: A hyperactive keyboardist, a bassist who sounds like Inuyasha after a stint at philosophy camp and a really good drummer embark on a quest to reinterpret the classics, while pissing off a bunch of rock critics in the process.
• Eminem: A white trailer-trash guy named after chocolate enters a largely black music world and makes songs about drug use, suicide, violence, killing family members who pissed him off, and all sorts of things that piss off the Moral Guardians.
• Enigma: A Romanian producer gets his German wife to fake an orgasm over loops of ethnic singers and Catholic priests.
• Brian Eno: A bald guy without any musical ability plays around with a synthesizer. Other bands pay him a lot of money to play around with a mixing board. He once made an album for people afraid of dying in plane crashes.
• Entity Paradigm: Two bands from Pakistan join forces to combine the styles of two bands with some of the most obnoxious fanbases in music history.
• Epica: A Dutch Symphonic Metal band who mainly releases concept albums with an aesop theme, with their frontwoman also running a fashion blog.
• The Equals: Interracial rock group consisting of twins from Jamaica, a Guyanan, and two white Brits.
  • Eddy Grant: Guyanan starts solo career with protests over riots in London and anti-apartheid music.
• E.S. Posthumus: Symphonic rock with a much bigger emphasis on the "symphonic" part. Also did a few songs with Jay-Z and the fat guy from D12.
• Evanescence: A female-fronted Gothic Nu Metal band from Arkansas whose most famous song got known through a poorly-received superhero movie, while their second-most famous song shares its name with an infamously bad story about teenage wizards. Synonymous with teen wangst, and for having an overly-controlling front man. Often accused to being Christian Rock, though they deny it.
• Evelyn Evelyn: Amanda Palmer pretends that she helped bring Siamese twins out of sexual slavery and get them a record deal. The Siamese Twins are actually Palmer and Jason Webley dressed up in crip drag.
• exist†trace: Japanese women dress like men while Genre Savvy newcomers mistake their token girly girl for a man dressed as a woman.
• Extreme: A late Hair Metal band from Boston inspired by Van Halen, whose frontman eventually joins Van Halen, only for people to forget he ever joins Van Halen. Their only two hits don't represent the band's usual input.
• Faces: The leftover members of a British band whose frontman ditched them for another band team up with a failed soccer player and a guy who once appeared in a horror movie about killer bees.
• Marianne Faithfull: Former convent schoolgirl starts hanging out with shady characters and doing lots of drugs. After a decade being strung out, she gets her act together and starts singing cabaret songs.
• Faith No More: A vocalist with a peculiar voice sings about things like man-on-man fellatio and pedophilia while the band plays rock-genre roulette.
• The Fall: One controlling, slightly megalomaniacal madman from Northern England. A giant cast of supporting chara— er, musicians, including one ex-wife, one ex-girlfriend, and one (as of now) current wife. THEY MAKE MUSIC! What kind of music? All kinds, mostly of the post-punk vein but with other interesting elements rolled in. Famously made an influential radio DJ faint the first time he played one of their singles.
• Fall Out Boy: A pop-punk - but often called emo - band named after a bit character from The Simpsons who mostly sing Anti Love Songs with long titles. Their singer is chubby and their bassist is a walking tabloid headline.
• Fatboy Slim: The ex-bassist from an eighties indie band mixes up songs from his record collection.
• Fetty Wap: One-eyed man raps about his "queen".
• Fifth Harmony: A Cuban girl joins another Cuban-American, two blacks, and another Hispanic on a talent contest. Make highly repetitive and sexual songs with guest rappers.
  • Camila Cabello: Said Cuban girl ditches the others and wants to go back to her Communist home city. Most of the rest of her songs are about her Canadian boyfriend.
• Finger Eleven: Canadian two-hit wonder rock band who have one acoustic hit and one hard-rock hit. Also made a song for a demonic wrestler.
• Finntroll: A bunch of Finns dressed up as trolls blend black metal with polka (complete with accordion) while singing in Swedish about eating Christians.
• Five Finger Death Punch: Four guys from Vegas and a Hungarian make heavy metal music while creating skull-themed album covers. They score hits with old covers, collaborate with the glass-shattering Leatherman mentioned below, and sing about the devil and Robert Louis Stevenson books.
• 5 Seconds of Summer: Australian rock band becomes famous worldwide by leeching onto the popularity of a European vocal group.
• Flaming Lips: A bunch of guys from Oklahoma who make weird psychedelic music. They've made an album with Miley Cyrus and recorded a 24-hour long song that was released via a flash drive inside an actual human skull.
• Fleetwood Mac: The best rock and roll soap opera of all time. Most of their best known hits are the two American singers literally singing about their real-life breakup on stage. Their female singer looks like a goat.
  • Or: A bunch of British blues musicians have a lot of bad luck. They move to the US and hire Americans. Everyone starts sleeping with each other and getting married and then getting divorced. Somehow, the group doesn't break up.
  • Rumours: The above band writes an entire album about how much they irritate one another.
    • Alternatively: Relationship Drama THE ALBUM!
  • Tusk: The band spends a million dollars recording a bunch of songs that sound really weird. The guitar player records songs in his bathroom.
• Florence + the Machine: British redhead sings grandiose songs about death, depression, failed loves and water.
• Flo Rida: Black man names himself after his home state, then creates raps for dance flicks, samples one-hit wonders from the mid '80s and late '90s, and even remaking a Swedish DJ's remake of a '60s soul ballad. Also, this is his house.
• Foghat: Four British guys named after a word the lead singer made up in Scrabble fuse Blues Rock with Hard Rock. Their most famous song is about traveling at a sluggish pace.
• Luis Fonsi: Puerto Rican singer scores many hits in Latin America, then suddenly lands a surprise global hit with a song he did with a formerly girly-voiced Canadian.
• Foo Fighters: Four\five\six musicians, named after ufology, and led by a guy who used to be the all-Washington band's drummer. This guy was once hospitalized due to an overdose on... coffee.
• Foreigner (Band): A nearly broke manager gives a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to a feckless layabout hanging around his office. Said layabout responds by forming a band.
• Foster the People: Jingle writer from Los Angeles forms an indie-rock band, scores a hit about a trigger-happy kid, and proceeds to make music that sounds nothing like said song.
• The Foundations: Three black guys, three white guys and an Asian perform Silly Love Songs. Their most famous song is named after a flower, and other than that only have one other hit.
• Fozzy: A professional wrestler and the guitarist from a rap-metal group form a metal band. They began as a joke cover band, but became a true face in 2005.
• Peter Frampton: A big-haired ginger who became famous for a talking guitar and a car crash.
• Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Six musicians, including a gay lead singer, who emerged from the Liverpool punk scene to write dance-pop songs with Lyrical Dissonance.
  • Band records an album, but their playing gets replaced by studio musicians. Band records another album where they actually do play on it, but they split up partway through, and only finish it out of contractual obligation. Cue Archive Panic. Wait, what?
• Franz Ferdinand: Some Scots start a band because they're bored. They admit all their music kinda sounds the same. They were named after a guy who died long ago.
• fun.: An indie-rock band from the Big Apple scores hits singing about how they'll waste the nights away.
• Nelly Furtado: A Canadian woman who started out making soft pop hits. Her music and image took a Hotter and Sexier turn after she became a mother.
• Futret: Guy remixes Ear Rape-y tracks about gay deer, ponies, and obscure, awful films and posts them over the internet.
• Serge Gainsbourg: French guy writes songs so scandalous, they make Madonna look like a girl scout, even though he predates her.
• Gang of Four: Four guys write lyrics inspired by Karl Marx. One of their most famous songs compares love to bioterrorism.
• Gama Bomb: Five Irishmen write songs either about current issues or cool '80s stuff. They reference A LOT of movies.
• Garbage: Three guys from Wisconsin and a woman from Scotland write cheery songs about obsession and relationships that turn sour.
• Marvin Gaye: A guy who started out as a sideman drummer, did not write many of his own songs, feuded with his record company, and went bankrupt. Also, had really serious conflicts with his father.
• Genesis: Brits compose some weird synth-heavy songs. They have three lead singers, one is a cosplayer, the second one was originally the drummer. After the drummer left, the third was one a singer in another band. The third singer's one album with the band was so bad that they broke up.
  • Peter Gabriel: The singer of this band continues with the weird songs, stops cosplaying, releases many albums with the same name, and scores his greatest hit singing about a tool. Played the flute in a song by the British religious convert below about a city in Nepal.
    • So: The album featuring the song about the tool. Also included are songs about deceased poets, the organs used for sight, the singer's own dreams, and wanting everything to be larger.
    • Solsbury Hill: A stranger gives a man a great offer. Said man tells his friends to fuck off.
  • Phil Collins: The drummer of this band writes and performs Silly Love Songs. Did the soundtrack for kid’s movies about gorillas and bears.
  • Land of Confusion music video: Ronald Reagan has a nightmare. Meanwhile, a "We Are the World" ripoff occurs.
  • Supper's Ready: This really long song starts with someone turning off their TV, and somehow it all turns into a weird tale that seems to have some relation to Biblical events. Meanwhile, a world-renowned politician is revealed to be a crossdresser.
  • Selling England by the Pound: An album filled with puns about British folklore alongside life in modern times.
  • The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway: A street kid searches for his brother, gets castrated, and barely anything that happens on his adventures makes sense.
  • A Trick of the Tail: The charismatic lead departs the band, and the drummer has to fill in.
• Girls' Generation: A big corporation finds 9 pretty girls (one of whom is the CEO's niece) and makes them sing radio-friendly Silly Love Songs. They spend the next decade plus throwing various musical genres at the wall and seeing what sticks.
• Godsmack: Metal band from Boston whose best known song was from a movie with The Rock in it. Often considered the rivals to the monkey-sounds band mentioned above.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor: A group of Canadian anarchists make a bunch of socio-political songs but are too lazy to actually make lyrics to them. Their biggest exposure was when a song of theirs was in some zombie movie, and their first EP is impossible to find.
• Murray Gold: A composer who writes music about time travel.
• Gorillaz: A band consisting of a blue-haired childish Casanova with both eyes pressed into his head, a Satanist who owns Satan's own bass (El Diablo), a 15-year-old Japanese Super-Soldier guitarist, and a drummer who has been possessed by multiple spirits. But they're actually a hyperactive musician and a guy who wrote weird comics.
  • Or, the alternative hip-hop equivalent of Alvin and the Chipmunks.
  • Or, an unhygienic Satan-worshipping pervert hits a guy with a car, giving him severe eye injuries, and then basically Stockholm-syndromes him into being in his band. He then kidnaps a guy possessed by the spirits of his murdered friends, and a child is trafficked to their house and they illegally adopt her. The four make music together while the Satanist becomes progressively more of a pickle.
• Gotye: Belgian-Australian writes weird music, scoring a hit about a breakup by performing naked.
• Ellie Goulding: British singer with a very posh accent, who got her start with a cover of a hit by the fat piano player mentioned below. Had several hits, the biggest of which was made for an erotic romance film.
• Ariana Grande: Tiny Floridian actress from a Nickelodeon TV show that she wasn't even the star of becomes a pop singer, makes songs about sex, break-ups, and herself. Known for yelling nigh-indecipherable lyrics, licking donuts, ending up at the center of a devastating terrorist attack, and trying to be a famous early '90s pop/R&B singer.
• The Grass Roots: Band of nobodies created by a record company executive who gained a ton of success at a time when pop music was usually about sticking it to The Man. Best known today because their guitarist was on an office sitcom as himself.
• Green Day: Band named after pot led by a bisexual man, who started with simple songs about masturbation and insanity, only to shift into long, long songs complaining about how fucked up their country became.
• Greta Van Fleet: Four nice Lutheran boys from an actual fairy-tale village in Michigan are constantly accused, both negatively and positively, of really, really wanting to be a below-mentioned group of British Tolkien-loving sex fiends.
• Christina Grimmie: Genki Girl Gamer wants to be like girly-voiced teen, does not succeed.
• Grinderman: Nick Cave angsts about how he can't get laid.
• Guano Apes: German band fronted by a woman who can't play a single instrument. They play Nu Metal but can't decide exactly what genre they are and mix genres whenever they feel like. Later abandoned their sound to be a pop-rock band.
• Vince Guaraldi: Piano player with a mustache plays tunes for cartoons based on a comic strip.
• David Guetta: French DJ who finally hits the mainstream after his 40th birthday, leeching onto the popularity of better-known singers to score EDM hits.
• Guided by Voices: It's all about quantity; if you write enough songs, some of them are bound to be classics.
• Guns N' Roses: Before: Five, and later six, highly intoxicated musicians led by a troublemaker. Later: Prima donna singer and lots of musicians which he hires and fires at will.
  • Or: A band that kept the sound of the '80s awlive into the '90s. One of their albums took a decade and a half to finish (they only spent a small fraction of that time actually working on it).
  • Slash: Brown guitarist with long hair and a top hat goes on a solo career, eventually collaborating with the no-name singer who joined the once-massively hated band above.
• Guster: Jews from the East Coast play banjos and sing about Jesus. The drummer doesn't use drumsticks.
• The Hafler Trio: Sound research organization whose research is unclear, whose personnel was made up, and whose sources cited don't exist.
• Haim: Californian sister trio co-opted by indie rock fans so they don't have to admit they like a pop band. Bass player probably has a facial muscle disorder.
• Halestorm: A band featuring a female singer who sings about being in love with someone else and a song about getting off while being watched by a peeping tom who is doing the same.
• Halsey: Biracial alt-pop singer from New Jersey known for having very short hair. Switched over to pop music after she was tapped to sing on the aforementioned big hit from the New York EDM duo.
• Hanson: Three impossibly cute young Oklahoma brothers form a cheery pop band, then decide to become an indie group. Their biggest hit barely has lyrics.
• Calvin Harris: British electronic singer who goes full EDM, and rises to superstardom thanks to a collaboration with the Barbados singer mentioned below.
• PJ Harvey: A weird woman performing alternative rock songs that are both wild and sensual without being sleazy, but are actually lovely to listen to.
• A Hawk and a Hacksaw: The drummer from one of the most acclaimed albums in indie rock decides he'd rather play accordion.
• Hawkwind: Revolving Door Band makes music after reading too many science fiction novels.
• (həd) p.e.: A band which fuses Punk Rock and Gangsta Rap, and often focuses on conspiracy theories. Major influence on Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park.
• Helloween: A band of German guys doing over-the-top, faster and happy songs who are responsible for what the European Power Metal scene is nowadays. They've left a singer and a guitarist, who were key members of their classic lineup, but are still doing music.
  • Gamma Ray: A band formed by the former guitarist of the above band, which talks about life in general, space and science themes and plenty of other themes. Oh, and this same guitarist nowadays is also the singer.
    • Iron Savior: A friend of the same guitarist forms a band which talks about the story of a sentient starship built by the inhabitants of a tribe of the ancient Earth. Later, they'll sing about freedom and perception of reality.
• Hellyeah: A supergroup featuring the singer from a metal band and the drummer from a famous band. They think they're cowboys.
• Jimi Hendrix: Ex-paratrooper who played his guitar upside down. Did covers of the US national anthem and a song from a folk singer that became his only hit. One of his most popular songs was misheard so many times he started singing the wrong lyrics in concerts.
• Hinder/Buckcherry: Guys from Oklahoma City/Anaheim who sing about infidelity and Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll and are emblematic of everything wrong with Post-Grunge, and have a flu.
• Hole: Blonde drug-addict troublemaker who married a rock legend plays with lots of chicks and a dude. After spending years bitching about her husband's co-workers, she hires random guys and calls it a reformation.
• Hot Hot Heat: The singer has been described as a "headlong yelper", the rest of the line-up is constantly changing, and they have lyrics about antioxidants and termites.
• Son House: 1930s blues singer. Had a renaissance in the 60s despite not having touched a guitar in 20 years - he was happy enough to rake in the dough after being retaught to play in his own style by the young white man who discovered him, who learnt it from listening to his records in the goddamn first place.
• James Newton Howard: B-list composer scores a surprise pop hit because it is sung by a superstar actress.
• Hozier: An Irish indie rock musician with long hair whose most famous song compares sex to church.
• Engelbert Humperdinck: Indian-born Pop singer named after a German composer whose most famous song is a cover about ending a love relationship.
• Hüsker Dü: Three punk rockers from Minneapolis get bored with playing loud and fast music all the time, mix hardcore punk with 60s rock influence, and fight over songwriting credits.
  • Zen Arcade: The band records an entire Rock Opera in 40 hours.
• iLiKETRAiNS: Young British men in suits make history sound very depressing.
• Imagine Dragons: Las Vegas indie rock group best known for welcoming people to the new age, shouting about pain developing their mindsets, and self-comparisons to a loud noise.
• Infected Mushroom: An Israeli duo cranks out eldritch noises and Word Salad Lyrics. It sounds like Mind Rape.
• Injury Reserve: A high school basketball player in Arizona begins rapping over beats made by a redhead swimmer from a rival school, before they're joined by a Big Fun employee of the sneaker store his mom managed, each release getting progressively more and more experimental, especially after the latter's death.
• Insane Clown Posse: Two former gangsta rappers in clown makeup rap about horror movie subject matter, and often include humor that is either completely juvenile, dark as hell, or just damn weird, but do talk about some pretty deep subject matter. They were also professional wrestlers for a short time.
• Intestinal Disgorge: Dwindling group of Texans who won't stop screaming.
• IOSYS: Japanese doujinshi group best known for their songs about an idiot teaching math and a witch stealing things.
• Iron Butterfly: A nice little pop group emerges with a really long hit tune after one of the members gets wasted and are mistakenly crowned as heavy metal pioneers. Unfortunately, they had no success aside from said tune.
• Iron Maiden: A lot of British musicians, led by a slightly hyperactive bassist and a very hammy singer. They like to write songs based on books and movies.
• Issues: A band from Atlanta formed by two guys who were kicked out of their previous band. They combine Metalcore with Nu Metal and Top 40 Pop music. They have two singers (neither of whom play instruments), one that screams all the time and one that sounds like a label-manufactured Teen Idol.
• Michael Jackson: Former Child Star from Indiana singing with an impossibly high voice about either dancing and/or paranoid songs, while showing moves that make him appear to walk backwards while walking forwards.
  • Or: Some dude from Indiana sings in a falsetto voice. Eventually fatherhood and various personal problems distract him from music.
• Japan: Two brothers from London who were physically abused by their brutish father channel their dysfunctions and sadness through music, along with some childhood friends who are perfectly fine with the lead singer brother's fixation with an Asian country. One of these friends was born in Cyprus and succumbed to cancer at the beginning of 2011.
• Jean-Michel Jarre: Guy delivers green aesops through electronic music. His most famous album is named after what we breathe.
• Jay-Z: Billionaire raps about how he got rich.
• Jefferson Airplane: A bunch of people from San Francisco, including a failed teen idol, a geeky Science Fiction enthusiast, a tall Finnish-American Blues guitarist and an ex-model who becomes the More Popular Replacement after their original female singer Pete Bests herself and quits the band right before they become famous, get together in The '60s and really trip out. One of their most famous songs, written by the ex-model, is basically Alice in Wonderland set to a vaguely Middle Eastern melody.
  • Jefferson Starship: Several members of the above band stop tripping out in the 70s and try their hand at Soft Rock.
  • Starship: The second band above minus one of its members. Now making pure-'80s pop music.
• Jellyfish: A drummer and a keyboard player, both childhood friends and music students from a town near San Francisco, form a melodic pop/rock band with a revolving lineup which at one time includes the keyboardist's brother on bass. They write and play a lot of music that has their own unique style, but reminiscent of music from The '60s and The '70s. The drummer sings lead in front of the stage while playing drums standing up. They play vintage instruments, can sing nice harmonies and are known to go overboard in the studio. They have an aquatic name and wear colorful, loud, outdated clothes, also from The '60s and The '70s. Once wrote a mini-Rock Opera about Super Mario Bros. for a Nintendo tribute album.
• Carly Rae Jepsen: Canadian girl most known for her song about maybe receiving a phone call. Popularized in America by a massively hated celebrity, she later had a hit duet that was quickly forgotten.
• Jethro Tull: A very hairy, hopping woodwind player in silly clothes forms a band with lots of lineup changes, writes rock operas about disgruntled boy poets pondering the meaning of life and the metaphysical adventures of dead train riders, names homeless people after oxygen tanks, and sings about living in a farm in Scotland. His band's music is eclectic and the lyrics very literary for rock music. He and his band, whose name is often confused with the singer's name itself, play lots of concerts, and they even unexpectedly beat the band of Californians and a Dane mentioned later for a prestigious award in The '80s.
• Elton John: Fat, nearsighted, balding piano player from England with silly clothes and Knight Fever. He writes songs about Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, weird robot rock bands, The Wizard of Oz, dance steps named after reptiles, and children's music from time to time. Loves to shop, throw tantrums, play tennis and cavort with British royalty.
• Robert Johnson: Blues singer who supposedly got his guitar chops from a Faustian pact, but was stuck with his shrill voice and tendency to write songs that all sound the same. His one non-blues song is about Mexican food. You can count his discography in less than a minute.
• Tom Jones: Welsh singer named after an eighteenth-century novel. Famous for singing about mad and/or raunchy love (including some movie womanizers) while not knowing what to do with his hands. Two of his songs make great requests for diner jukeboxes.
• Janis Joplin: A woman from Texas who was better known for her screaming than for her singing. Her two most famous songs were Cover Versions, and one only charted after she died.
• Journey (Band): Five guys from San Francisco get tired of backing a Mexican guitarist. Have their peak period after hiring an overtly dramatic singer. One of their early '80s hits never truly became iconic until the 21st century.
• Joy Electric: A man with keyboards who started recording in the '90s but apparently wishes he was born a decade or two earlier. He has a home studio full of different synthesizer models, but for a significant chunk of his career he refused to use more than one per album. He also enjoys the challenge of writing pop songs without chords.
• Judas Priest: A quintet of Brits fronted by a Leatherman who could probably shatter glass with his voice if he tried.
• Judge Dread: A fat, white British guy who re-writes nursery rhymes, fills them with innuendo and sings them over reggae beats.
• Kaizers Orchestra: Six guys from Norway channel Tom Waits and write rock songs about war, the Mafia, and mental hospitals, adding a pump organ and oil barrels to the standard guitars-bass-drums-vocals setup. One guy wears a gas mask.
• Yuki Kajiura: A Gender Bender Expy of the deaf German man up above, pre-deafness, who even grew up in his hometown despite being originally from another continent.
  • See-Saw: Two Japanese women, one of whom was an Office Lady until she Rage Quit, sing love songs with twisted lyrics for the benefit of Humongous Mecha.
  • FictionJunction: A series of ripoffs of the Svengali/Trilby relationship named after a narratological term and a type of civilian infrastructure.
  • Kalafina: Three Elegant Gothic Lolita singers and one insane pianist. Their breakout hit involves screaming the word "oblivious" in Gratuitous English over and over.
• Yoko Kanno: A Japanese musician writes mainly cartoon soundtracks, and is beloved for it.
• Katatonia: One of the trope codifiers for Death-Doom Metal music goes Lighter and Softer with happy-depressing music.
• R. Kelly: A black guy from Chicago once famous for songs about flying and closets lives life above the law for decades and somehow ends up with a massive negative amount of money.
• Wiz Khalifa: Tall, skinny, inked-up stoner from Pennsylvania who raps about all the drugs he does, cars he rides, and sex he has. Had a massive chart-topping hit about a dead person made for a an over-the-top action movie that sounds absolutely nothing like his normal material and knocked a Hawaiian guy and his producer off the top of the charts.
• Elle King: The daughter of a comic actor long past his peak in relevancy scores a guitar-heavy pop hit about having sex with many men at once, despite guitars having been out of fashion ages ago.
• King Crimson: A bunch of Brits combine rock with a bunch of other genres. The cover of their debut album, which has a similar name as a piece in the Peer Gynt suite, was designed by a person who died right after he finished it. The guitar player routinely splits up the band and restarts it with different members.
• King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard: Seven Australians play Genre Roulette. One of their most famous songs consists of nearly 8 minutes of the same groove as the title is sung repeatedly.
• The Kinks: Four British guys headed by two brothers who are aggressive with each other, rip off the "Four Musicians" mentioned above before they switch to a different pop style. The latter of these eras involves the group writing about crossdressers and the downsides of urban life.
• KISS: Three New Yorkers and an Israeli paint their faces and wear weird costumes to play while putting basically everything on stage. They also sell out big time, and everyone loves them for it. Later on, they appear in a comic book that you might want to wash your hands after reading.
• Kitchens of Distinction: A fat, nerdy, balding man with a monotone voice sings about death and how much love sucks.
• Kokusyoku Sumire: Two Elegant Gothic Lolitas play opera-polka-cabaret. One of them sings in an incredibly high voice.
• Kool Keith: A New York rapper with a bizarre and often puerile sense of humor who performs under several thousand aliases, calling his music "Pornocore" and "Horrorcore".
• Korn: A bunch of metalheads who insist on not being tagged as metal, don't use 6-string guitars, and invented one of the most infamous styles of music in music history. Lost a guitarist to religion for 7 years and have problems with their drummer.
  • Korn (album): Their debut album, which features the frontman crying about his Dark and Troubled Past in every song. Uses heavily down-tuned guitars, and invented said infamous genre by playing Alternative Metal completely wrong.
• Kraftwerk: Four German dudes pretend to be robots (when they aren't singing about how they're Autons).
• Kyuss: Several stoners from the California desert, named after a Dungeons & Dragons character. The guitarist was a lanky ginger kid who played his guitar an octave lower because it sounded cool. He later started another band with some nutter who liked to play bass naked.
• Lady Antebellum: Country group most known for their song about a booty call.
• Lady Gaga: Millionaire who gets her clothes from a dumpster is paid to sing about monsters. Has collaborated frequently with a crooner four times her age. Starred in a 1940s movie’s fourth remake.
  • the Alejandro video: In a dystopian future, a Naughty Nun has violent sex with a bunch of gay Nazis. Or does she?
• Mario Lanza: American tenor whose parents were immigrants takes up a common Italian name (predating a plumber by at least thirty years) with his mother's maiden name. Portrayed the Neapolitan tenor above on the silver screen, and somehow becomes an urban legend in The West Midlands.
• Lapfox Trax: Canadian furry makes electronic music using TONS of aliases.
• Led Zeppelin: Four British musicians who wrote lots of songs based on J. R. R. Tolkien, lost a drummer who choked on his own vomit, and won't reform because their singer loathes their most famous song.
  • Or: Four British sex fiends screw up old blues songs, tell people they did it on purpose, and end up inventing one of the most controversial sub-genres of music in history.
  • "Stairway to Heaven": Said tune mentioned above, a nigh incomprehensible song that goes on for 8 minutes and is not welcome to be played at instrument stores.
• Limp Bizkit: Self-deprecating Nu Metal band known for live performances in which the vocalist emerged from a giant toilet and calling themselves "the worst band in the world" in interviews.
• Linkin Park: Five (formerly six) men who can't decide what genre they belong to and go from angsty rock ballads to angsty Nu Metal. Initially had two vocalists; one only raps and the other screamed a lot. Uncomfortable to listen to after the singer was Driven to Suicide in 2017.
  • Fort Minor: The rapper heads out on his own and comes up with a very popular ringtone and a sports anthem. The one that wasn't the actual hit in the day is now the one everyone remembers. Surprisingly, little angst is to be found.
  • Dead by Sunrise: The lead singer removed every hip-hop influence and cried about whatever was itching at him in the past few years instead of his childhood.
  • Mike Shinoda's "Post Traumatic": Rapper finds that angst he’s been missing.
• The Living Tombstone: A guy from Israel who got popular by remixing a children's show, as well as original songs pertaining to various months, cupcakes made from firearms, and lab rats.
• The Lonely Island: That weird guy from Saturday Night Live and Hot Rod gets together with his two buddies that wrote and produced for both of those works to create weird joke songs about ejaculation, being a boss and being on a boat.
• Lorde: Weird-looking teenage girl from New Zealand who doesn't know how to play an instrument. Became a worldwide Indie Pop superstar for making a song that bastardizes the rich, which became the biggest hit by a female the year it was released. Is known for constantly insulting other musicians (including herself), sympathizing with Muslims over Jews, and for dancing like she's having a seizure on stage. A song she did for a soundtrack was overshadowed by a composer and non-singing actress's collaboration. Also known for being portrayed as a middle-aged mustachioed man dressed in drag (ya, ya, ya).
  • Pure Heroine: An album filled with teen angst, with a cover only containing the artist and album name. Includes the aforementioned "bastardized the rich" song. Sold millions of copies despite its name being a drug pun.
• Lordi: Finnish members of the KISS Army dress like a Nordic version of GWAR, perform catchy hard rock, and win a talent show known for its loud and flashy performances.
• Lords of Acid: Band sings about sex. A lot.
• Lupe Fiasco: Nerdy black poet raps about everything from robots to skateboard to food and liquor. "Hip hop saved his life."
• Lynyrd Skynyrd: Six guys from Florida with Xtreme Kool Letterz write songs about the Deep South and avian liberty. Many of the members were killed in a plane crash.
• Machinae Supremacy: Swedish nerds mix power metal with chiptunes and sing about video games and self-empowerment. They also cover pop songs and make them drastically different.
• Macklemore: A pug-faced nobody from Seattle somehow tops the pop charts by rapping about wearing old people's clothes and homosexuality. Always gives credit to his producer even though nobody cares about him.
• Madness: Seven guys from Camden town who wrote songs about buying condoms and their school uniforms.
• Madonna: A woman from Michigan gets famous from her Moral Guardian-baiting Intercourse with You songs, becomes a gay icon, then makes a comeback with an album inspired by Jewish mysticism.
• MAGIC!: Canadian reggae-band fronted by an Arab, known for a song about an overprotective dad and absolutely nothing else.
• The Magnetic Fields: A moody homosexual with a ukulele snarks about relationships 69 times.
• Gustav Mahler: German-speaking Bohemian Jew writes pieces nearly twice as long as Beethoven's.
• Malice Mizer: Castlevania-influenced Genre Mashup with twin guitars and elaborate synth arrangements made with cheap synths. The songwriters are a Bach-worshiping crossdressing fashion designer and a Bowie-worshiping Cloudcuckoolander.
• The Mamas & the Papas: A man (who will later molest his own daughter) leaves his wife for a bratty teenager. They team up with a fat lady and a drunken Canadian to drop acid and take turns breaking each other's hearts in four-part harmony. They sing about a day of the week and a state.
• Henry Mancini: Jazz pianist-turned-film/TV composer who wrote a driving jazz theme song for TV, a song about jewel thefts depicted by a saxophone, etc.
• Manfred Mann: Four Brits and a South African who named their band after the South African anyway against the drummer's request. Their biggest hit was originally recorded the same year by a forgotten girl group.
  • Manfred Mann's Earth Band: South African forms a band in The '70s that sounds remarkably like their contemporaries. Their biggest hit was a cover of the guy below who sings about cars and New Jersey), and their version is best-remembered for a famous mishearing.
  • The Manfreds: The original band above sans the South African.
• Man or Astro-man?: Some guys from Alabama pretend to be aliens and play instrumental songs.
• Marillion: An '80s band performs progressive rock, singing about mythological monsters and crying clowns, among other things. After the departure of their aquatically-named lead singer, they get a new lead singer and make songs about subjects like depression and small colorful spheres. However, the general public only knows them for writing a song named after a girl.
• Marilyn Manson: Outcast from Florida randomly decides he wants to be a shock rocker, is successful, and then has his intelligence and art belittled because he's too weird for his own good.
  • Or a scary androgynous white guy (and some others) piss off Moral Guardians through the power of rock music.
• Mark Stewart and the Maffia: Terribly mixed recordings of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's session musicians playing behind an angsty post-punk vocalist.
  • Man screams about dystopia and the military, over samples of a heroin addict in his 60s and cut-up versions of songs his bandmates made.
• Maroon 5: Californians named after a crayon (and previously, garden work) sing about sex. After a hit single about a sexagenarian's dance moves, ditch instruments for a poppier sound. Also kept a global viral phenomenon from reaching #1 in America.
  • Adam Levine: The band's egotistical lead singer, with the voice of a frog, a penchant for taking his clothes off, and a job as a talent judge.
  • The Payphone music video: Lead singer get caught in bank shooting. Singer get mistaken for shooter by the police. He later steals a car from a rapper.
• Bruno Mars: Hawaiian guy can't decide what genre he should stick to. Most of his hits sound like they should've been made 30-40 years ago.
• The Mars Volta: Texan Progressive Rock band with Latin music influences write music and lyrics that invoke Surreal Horror, with focus on surreal. Mind Screw: The Band if there ever was one.
• Melanie Martinez: Cutesy-looking young woman crafts disturbing kids' songs.
• Mastodon: Four guys from Atlanta with unusual voices play metal songs about Moby-Dick, Rasputin, and drug-addicted woodcutters.
• Material Issue: A horrifically skinny Genki Guy from Chicago and two of his college buddies sing charming throwback power-pop tunes about various girls at a culturally unfortunate time to do so and are often mistaken for Brits. Said Genki Guy later converts his garage into a gas chamber.
• Hideto Matsumoto: An openly bisexual member of Japan's biggest Visual Kei band known best for wild hair and costuming, drinking, and fighting goes solo, with performances combining celebrating being The Alcoholic, Cyberpunk Techno Babble, Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll, and general batshit insanity with a band named after a vulgar reference to a vagina, then dies in what is likely either a drunk suicide or attempt at autoerotic asphyxiation - and becomes canonized as the epitome of Visual Kei with ongoing performances and interest even after his death.
• Maxibacon: Two full-grown men wave Wii remotes at a computer and blabber incoherently.
• Mazelna Kiken: A zebra-headed street performer who talks way too fast.
• Dan McBride: A southern Baptist writes filk songs to talk about problems in the church (and sometimes reprove his fellow believers).
• Meat Loaf: Fat guy from Texas sings ten minute long mini-operas with silly lyrics about sex, cars, having sex in cars, crashing cars and occasionally motorcycles.
• The Megas: Four guys from LA remix songs from an NES game using rock instruments and give personalities to fictional characters that previously had little to no personality through their songs. Sometime they pretend to be another band who does the same thing but with a different NES game.
• Melt-Banana: A hyperactive Japanese girl yelps out random words while her band bashes their instruments.
• Melvins: Two guys who didn't let Kurt Cobain into their band and can't hold on to a bassist name themselves after a grocery store clerk.
• Men at Work: Five guys from the Land Down Under write a song about it.
• Men Without Hats: A group of men from Quebec likes to dance without their friends. Because their friends don't dance and if they don't dance, well, they are no friends of them.
• Metallica: Three Californians and a Dane who got together during The '80s and changed their musical style and haircuts (to the chagrin of the fandom) in The '90s. Their drummer made a total ass of himself about file sharing. Fans are divided as to the exact moment when they Jumped the Shark, but even the band admits that they wish they could just pretend that their ninth album never happened.
  • Megadeth: A fourth Californian, who used to play guitar for the above band, gets into a 20+ year feud with his former bandmates (but especially the Dane) after they literally put him on a bus. His fans and theirs don't really get along very well. Recorded a song just for a video game.
• Giacomo Meyerbeer: German-Jewish composer who sucks at writing operas in his native tongue goes to Italy, changes his name, and rips off Rossini. Later he moves to Paris, where he stages operas in a style for which he is synonymous.
  • Les Huguenots: A bunch of people in France don't get along just because of religious conflicts.
  • L'africaine: A girl from Madagascar who apparently worships Hindu gods poisons herself after falling in love with a famous explorer. Spent nearly three decades in Development Hell, only to be completed because of the composer's death.
• M.I.A.: Sri Lankan musician who raps over drum machines and drops anvils about politics. Her most famous song's title refers to a popular form of origami.
• Midori: A Japanese girl wearing a schoolgirl uniform screams while her band plays jazz-punk fusion.
• Midnight Oil: Some angry Australians shout a lot about environmental and aboriginal issues, and use lots of big words.
• Midnight Riders: Four guys from Texas who certainly didn't murder anyone from Love Supply make hard rock. They did win the Grammy for Most Pyrotechnics in a Single Concert, though.
• Mindless Self Indulgence: A quartet from New York who can't decide what genre they're playing. The original bassist left and was replaced by Gerard Way's wife.
• Moby Grape: Five guys from San Francisco sing about girls on two-wheel road vehicles, characters from French literature, and other weird stuff, including naming a song after a city in Nebraska but not saying anything about it in the lyrics. They manage to attract a cult following of stoners.
• Modest Mouse: An indie rock band fronted by a guy who has the same name as a British army officer who died in the War Of 1812, sings like Brak with a lisp, and tends to write Word Salad Lyrics. Kidz Bop covered their most famous song (which shares its name with a one-hit wonder song from 1977), and their most famous member joined pretty late in their career and is known for playing guitar in some British band from the eighties.
• The Monkees: Fake Band formed for a TV show that consists of a Former Child Star who was on a show about a circus, a British guy who gave up horse racing for the musical stage, the folk-singing son of an economist, and a Texas hillbilly who wears a thick green piece of winter clothing.
• The Monks: American ex-GIs in Germany start a rock band and try to become the antithesis of their contemporaries, the Beatles. Only recorded one album before they broke up, and they only got away with that album because their German audience didn't know or care what they were actually singing about.
• Alanis Morissette: Woman who lost her dictionary writes angsty songs, most about an ex (widely considered to be a former Full House star). Used to be a Teen Idol.
• Mötley Crüe: Four Californians sing about their hedonistic and borderline unbelievable lives.
• Motörhead: A group of Mean Brits led by a singer who despite disadvantaged looks holds the record of groupies banged. Their biggest hit revolves around cards. Also the official soundtrack to a legendary athlete from Connecticut.
• Mott the Hoople: Five Brits who had their first album's title changed by their record company, then almost broke up before the androgynous rock star above gave them one of his songs.
• TheMove: A band from the Midlands dresses in gangster costumes and sings about insanity, then decides to add a string section and morph into another band.
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A boy flirts with an ill-fated princess while his father takes him on tour. When he grows up, he writes about harems, seducers, and birdcatchers.
• Mr. Bungle: The singer from the band that sings about fellatio and pedophilia and his high school buddies start a band; they somehow manage to sign to a big label despite making really uncommercial music. Their songs go on for over 6 minutes, mix genres like death metal, jazz, and Creepy Circus Music with no rhyme or reason, and have lyrics about pornography, masturbation, and John Travolta. Also, they really don't like their band name.
• Mungo Jerry: Several British guys who are mainly known as a One-Hit Wonder for a song about an extremely hot time of the year.
• Muse: A British guitarist with an interest in space and the paranormal writes over-the-top alternative/progressive rock and plays it with two of his friends.
• Modest Mussorgsky: Russian alcoholic whose most famous works include a musical depiction of a witches' Sabbath, a museum exhibit, and Russian history.
• Mudhoney: Northwest punk band becomes Trope Codifier for a musical genre by writing songs about being sick.
• My Bloody Valentine: Two Irish guys, one with an unpronounceable name, and two British girls form a band. They play at ear-shattering volumes, mix everything into a huge wall of sound, and stare at their own shoes.
• My Chemical Romance: Four guys from New Jersey create music tangentially related to their LARP campaigns.
• My Darkest Days: Canadian rock band fronted by a well-known bassist's brother who collaborate with a legendary metal guitarist and the frontman of a rock band who crosses over regularly to pop to make a sleazy song about a stripper, then kick it up a notch by adding a rapper to the mix.
• "My Jeans": A song by a 12-year-old girl who feels a great urge to buy a pair of pants. The video features her driving a car even though she isn't the right age to do so.
• The National: Five guys from Ohio, 4/5ths of which are two sets of brothers move to Brooklyn and make somber, melancholic rock music.
• The Neptunes: Two childhood friends from Virginia Beach with interests ranging from skateboarding to Star Trek become hip-hop producers. They then dominate radiowaves with their sound that consists mostly of polyrhythmic bucket drums, spacey synths, and Korg Triton presets. The internet loves pointing out that one member is Filipino, and assuming that therefore the other member is also Filipino.
  • N.E.R.D: The two aforementioned friends form a band with a someone who used to be a part of the aforementioned musical group. In said band they dabble in various different musical genres, often fusing many genres into one song or album. No one knows what the third friend does, and at times it seems like he doesn’t know either. The whole setup is as confusing as it sounds.
• Neutral Milk Hotel: A bunch of weirdos sing about the vocalist's love for Anne Frank. Worshipped by other weirdos.
  • In the Aeroplane Over the Sea: Anne Frank Is Mai Waifu: The Musical.
• Anthony Newley: One of the first British Rock Stars, except he was barely even a rockstar so much as a Stuffy British crooner who got into it by accident, and as a result, wrote a bunch of musicals whose songs became pop standards. His own recordings of his songs were barely successful, and he was also an actor who starred in one of the worst movies ever made, and also directed and starred in an X-Rated musical Vanity Project. He was a huge influence on the above-mentioned androgynous guy who claimed to be a bisexual space alien.
• New Order: Four nightclub owners from Manchester. They were in a band with a really charismatic singer, but he killed himself. The drummer asked his girlfriend to play the keyboards, and they decided to keep playing since they weren't qualified to do anything else.
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: A stick-figure man angsts about God and love for 27 years while musicians constantly join and leave his backing band.
• Nickelback: Canadian hard-rock group named after an obscure football position who make milquetoast pop songs and get heavy promotion in the wrestling world.
• Nico & Vinz: Two black Norwegians who have a hit where they question if they are incorrect.
• Nightwish: Opera singer joins Finnish heavy metal band, writes Gothic Word Salad Lyrics filled with Faux Symbolism and Disney references.
• Nine Inch Nails: Janitor from Pennsylvania and former junkie gets mad and decides to play lots of instruments in a way that makes them sound like factory machines. He wins a Grammy for saying "fist fuck" and an Oscar for composing about a geek who got sued a lot (and another for a Disney cartoon!). One of his songs is now more associated with a guy much older than him. Later joined by a quiet British guy.
  • The Downward Spiral: Concept Album by said former junkie about a severely messed up guy who becomes everything he hates. May or may not have committed suicide. He also wants to fuck you like an animal.
  • Year Zero: Former junkie gets pissed off at Republicans and writes a concept album about a giant hand from space(?) destroying humanity
  • How to Destroy Angels: Former junkie, quiet British guy, former junkie's younger wife, and their art director make glitchy music and light shows.
• Dinosaur Laser Fight by Ninja Sex Party: A narcissistic Jewish pervert and his sociopathic mute friend serenade a class with a happy, upbeat song about Earth's first school shooting.
• Nirvana: Three guys from Washington (two from the state, one from DC) who wrote noisy, simple music with weird lyrics and even weirder titles. The lead singer denied ownership of a firearm, a claim that turned out to be somewhat inaccurate.
• Noise Music: An atonal, dissonant racket made of whatever can be found that somehow gets passed off as music.
• The Notorious B.I.G.: An obese man from New York who could rhyme well, but only released one album before somebody killed him.
• Ted Nugent: A very conservative guitarist with a cowboy hat who spends a big part of his concerts talking about politics. Despite being a rocker, he has never taken drugs in his life. He is known to piss off his own fans. He was a member of a one-hit wonder band in the 60s and another popular band from the early 90s.
• Oasis: Five British musicians, led by two brothers who fight with everyone, including themselves. Have an unhealthy obsession with the "Four musicians from Northern England".
• Sinéad O'Connor: Bald Irish woman scores big covering the small Mid-Westerner, only to ruin her career by destroying a picture of an old man.
• The Offspring: Californian with an MD in biology gets along with three other guys to write angry and snarky music. A part of their fandom met them driving dangerously.
• Oingo Boingo: Eight Southern Californians spin paranoid, often psychedelic musical fantasies in a vaguely multicultural style. Their leader later becomes a movie composer often collaborating with a specific director.
• Mike Oldfield: Young British guitar prodigy sells a progressive rock album to an eccentric British salesman where he plays a lot of instruments. The album becomes a worldwide hit and part of it gets used in a legendary horror film, then the prodigy shelters himself from society. But he puts together many more albums of similar flavor before deciding he's going to write in almost every other genre imaginable. After appearing at the Olympics, he decided he really is a rocker after all.
• Omi: Reggae singer who shares his name with a cartoon monk, scoring a hit with a dance remix of a 3-year-old song about a popular high school activity that is almost exclusively female, and then vanished.
• One Direction: Four (later three) British guys and an Irishman that are known for singing Silly Love Songs replicate Beatlemania nearly 50 years later, steal riffs from other songs, and discover a cure to a horrible plague. Broke up because they kept being pressured to kiss each other.
  • Harry Styles: Group's most famous member continues to copy older singers and writes about fruit.
• The Only Ones: A squeaky-voiced heroin addict, a balding punk rocker, a relic from the sixties and a man who looks like a vulture perform songs about love, drugs, a love of drugs and drug-addled love.
• Oomph!: An industrial metal band of 40-something Germans. They wear lots of dark make-up and write songs about hide-and-go-seek and jumping off the roof while sleepwalking. Their music videos are often either fairy tales or obscure with no relation to the lyrics see the music video for "Traumst du".
• Operation Re-Information / Wizard Master: A programmer and his friends play music using computer keyboards with straps so they can be worn like guitars.
• Opeth: Five Swedes decide that what death metal really needs is more Hammond Organ and jazz guitar and make many music videos that appear to be set in abandoned Victorian mansions.
• The Outfield: A British band with the exact same style of music as the above-mentioned Boston guys who lost their only Grammy to a two-hit wonder Disco group, that has only one remembered hit among their many from the 1980s, and no hits in their homeland. Oh, and they lipped a lot during their prime.
• Owl City: A Manchild and his synthesizer create Word Salad Lyrics, usually for animated movie credits. He becomes a huge Two-Hit Wonder with a song about insects, then a duet with another two-hit wonder who in her other hit, maybe got called. Both artists on the duet are remembered mostly for their one solo hit rather than the duet.
• P : A guy who can't sing recruits Johnny Depp to play guitar and Flea to play bass. Only remembered for an actor dying of drugs outside their concert.
• Pairs : An Australian singer who can barely carry a tune and a Chinese guitarist who's still learning how to play. Their recordings sound cheaply done and their videos, even cheaper.
• Panic! at the Disco: A quartet from Las Vegas who can't decide if it wants to be the "Simpsons"-named emo band or the "Four musicians from Northern England" and are heavily known for looking very feminine and enacting in lots of Faux Yay. Their biggest hit was about etiquette at weddings and featured the singer dressed as a Johnny Depp character. Half the band left after the (completely different sounding from the first) second album, and the only remaining original member sings about sex, how famous he is and the fact that he lives in Vegas. Got a mainstream hit after a failed presidential candidate used one of their songs in his campaign.
• Pantera: A group of former hair metal guys who hired a manly singer and changed entirely in The '90s, creating the Groove Metal genre at the same time. Their best known song is about a form of transportation.
• Paramore: Tiny Fiery Redhead (at times) and some guys, a few of whom she dated, sings about how her relationships and her life tend to go south.
• Passenger of Shit: Hardcore electronica's Garbage Post Kid.
• Pavement: Five slackers from California make noisy indie rock that gradually gets less abrasive. The lead singer is known for singing slightly out of tune.
• Pearl Jam: A bunch of Washington musicians, led by a singer with a distinctive and at times incomprehensible style. At a certain point, decided to alienate their fanbase. They had a number 2 hit covering a one-hit wonder the singer found in a garage sale.
• John Peel: Radio DJ, and Liverpool Football Club supporter, who often played records at the wrong speed, and used a fancy stage name, and began his radio career by convincing some Dallas natives he knew the most famous band in Liverpool. Also helped to break said band in Texas and covered the JFK assassination before moving onto Oklahoma City, then back to England and pirate radio before becoming one of the first BBC Radio 1 DJs.
• The Penis (Eek!): Despite the weirdly phallic cover art, this music has nothing to do with male genitalia.
• Pentatonix: A cappella band explodes in popularity by incorporating electronica, dubstep and other styles.
• Katy Perry: A failed white heterosexual gospel singer kisses a girl while drunk and writes a song about it, and uses weird stuff as lingerie.
• Tom Petty: Heartland rocker who sings about not backing down, accelerated drops, America, and how you don't have to live like a refugee. Died the day after a deadly shooting at a music festival for a genre that influenced him.
• Liz Phair: Indie artist whose beloved debut included songs about fellatio and sexual promiscuity. Later hated by critics and indie kids for making a pop-rock album.
• Wilson Pickett: Poor man's Otis Redding. Kept a meticulous sex schedule and had a habit of telling women how to drive.
• The Pillows: Three Japanese guys try really hard to make '90s grunge sound upbeat, although before that they made jazzy lounge-pop.
• Pink Floyd: First: British musician gets stoned and writes songs. Then: Another British musician thinks about past and present annoyances and writes songs. Finally: A third British musician tries writing happier songs.
  • The Piper at the Gates of Dawn: An eccentric, high as fuck musician sings songs about the solar system, cats and bikes while the rest of his band plays trippy music. They swipe the album's title from an old children's book.
  • A Saucerful of Secrets: The above-mentioned high-as-a-kite musician manages to write one last trippy song. After that, his now-former bandmates noodle around on instruments and start writing even more trippy songs about playground equipment and corporals.
  • The Dark Side of the Moon: An album where sound effects and screaming women replace music and lyrics at certain points. Fans like to hear it while watching a late-1930s movie musical.
  • Wish You Were Here (1975): An album where Epic Rocking is abundant, although three of the songs were added to complain about Executive Meddling. Half of it's occupied by a single song noting how the first musician is a mad genius.
  • Animals: Animal Farm set in the UK during the mid-to-late 1970s.
  • The Wall: A man dies in World War II, so his son decides to whine about it.
  • The Final Cut: The son whines some more about his father dying in World War II, and also politicians. Then a nuclear war happens.
• Pitbull: Cuban-Miami rapper with an egotistical nickname appears on every other pop song on the radio.
• Pixies: A balding guy who keeps rearranging his stage name screams - and occasionally sings - about Squick.
• A Place to Bury Strangers: 3-piece band turns off the lights and plays nightmarish music at ear-shattering volumes.
• Rachel Platten: Jewish woman from Massachusetts who sings typical Adult Contemporary pop hits, scoring an unexpected smash thanks to a song about fighting that later becomes the anthem to a 68-year-old woman.
• P.O.D.: Christian rap-rockers who are best known for a Columbine-inspired song. Their lead singer also helped to popularize a baby name.
• The Police: A drummer with a large ego forms a three-piece, recruiting a bassist with an even larger ego, and a quiet but nice guitarist. They make songs about prostitutes, social inequality and Soviet Russia. And their biggest hit is a love song that really isn't.
  • Stewart Copeland: The drummer from the said band goes on to make soundtracks with a synthesizer. Made a lot of gamers happy.
  • Sting: Said bassist with a huge ego writes weird music and decides to give his money to other people.
• Pond: A band stuck in the 60s who go through a constant change in lineup.
• Porcupine Tree: A British guy who really likes Pink Floyd starts recording psychedelic rock and attributing it to a forgotten psychedelic band from the 70s on his own, hires a few other musicians, who end up deciding they like Radiohead and Opeth and start playing a strange mix of psychedelic rock, alternative rock, prog metal, with the occasional electronica/post-rock influence. Rush and King Crimson members appear sometimes.
• Mike Posner: One-Hit Wonder gets so desperate for attention in later years he does drugs just to impress a younger DJ. Later gets stung by scorpion going for a walk.
• Elvis Presley: A Mississippi-born truck driver who knew how to sing and dance. Who in his first appearance on TV was shown only from waist up. Became famous with songs about hotels, shoes, dogs and prison. He practically took ownership of his first name.
• The Pretty Reckless: Hard rock/metal songs sung by Cindy Lou Who.
• Primus: Two guys from California team up with a drummer from North Carolina to play discordant funk metal (mostly) with complex slap-bass and bizarre lyrical content. A clear influence from The Residents is audible.
• Prince: A short guy from the Midwest writes and performs songs about sex in a falsetto voice all the while wearing feminine outfits. Later changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, forcing the media to resort to referring to him by an extremely long name.
  • Prince's Associates: Same guy releases songs with different lead singers while not crediting himself anywhere on the record.
• The Prodigy: Bunch of ex-acid house ravers from Essex fronted by two men called Keith. Their biggest hits are about arson, exhaling and beatings.
• The Protomen: A group of musicians from Nashville, Tennessee join forces to create a Dystopian Rock Opera based off of a series of NES games that originally contain virtually no storyline whatsoever. They then proceed to act out as if it was real and they're a handful of the few rebelling citizens. A ten-piece group, half of which changed out between the first and second albums and one of which is a robot.
• Psalms: An ancient hymnal sometimes praising God, sometimes calling for help, sometimes being all My God, What Have I Done And Can You Please Forgive Me, and sometimes just being honest about the sheer anger they feel. A few of the original tunes have been decoded, while other new tunes have since been written (most of them for translations into other languages).
• Psy: K-Pop star becomes world famous with a silly YouTube song about a Seoul neighborhood that has a silly dance.
• Puddle of Mudd: Guys from Kansas City who name themselves after some dirt on the ground. Their frontman looks like a legendary wrestler.
• Charlie Puth: Pop singer from the Jersey Shore whose career explodes when he is chosen to sing the chorus to a song about a dead actor. He follows it up with a song about a dead singer.
• Queen: A guy with an ABD in astrophysics joins forces with a flamboyantly gay singer to write mini-rock operas about riding a bicycle. Over 30 years later he gets that PhD.
  • "Bohemian Rhapsody": One of their songs, wherein a condemned murderer who feels no remorse for his crime wangsts about not being a Karma Houdini. Also well known for random Italian words thrown around in the middle.
• Radiohead: Angsty British band, broke out after a song of theirs became a hit in Israel, at a certain point decided to shift into weird music, and later got into a feud with Miley Cyrus.
• Rage Against the Machine/ Street Sweeper Social Club: A political rapper joins forces with a guitarist who sometimes mistakes his axe for a turntable.
• Rainbow: The guitarist from an aforementioned band leaves to start a solo project, and ends up recruiting one of the greatest metal singers of all time. They sing about castles, knights, the band's namesake, and the like. The guitarist became jealous over the singer's popularity, firing him, and from the fourth album until the end they played generic arena rock.
• Rammstein: Six Germans with a fire fetish.
• The Ramones: An authoritarian Republican, baseball card collector and horror movies fan, a left-wing six-feet-ten Jewish geek with OCD, a bipolar German heroin addict and their Hungarian high-school friend become models for generations to come (by making two-minute songs about sniffing glue and hitting people with bats) while not achieving commercial success until the band broke up... 20 years later.
• Red Hot Chili Peppers: Four shirtless Californians who like to sing about sex and their state.
• Red House Painters: A bunch of guys play long, drawn out, slow songs about how much life sucks. Known to cause depression in listeners.
• Relient K: A rock band that sings Silly Love Songs and the occasional Christian rock song. They've lost all but two of the original members over the years, but every time someone quits, they're quickly replaced.
• R.E.M.: Band formed by four college dropouts from Georgia named after a type of sleep. Took their most famous album name from the sign on a local restaurant. Has a hit where nobody understands the lyrics. Sang songs about a radio station, rivers, train drivers, a dead comedian, and were generally so melancholy that the singer in another band had one of their CDs in his stereo when he shot himself. After a while, they were three college dropouts from Georgia and whoever they could find to play drums. They hated one of their most popular songs.
• REO Speedwagon: A bunch of college students from Illinois get together to make power-ballads.
• The Replacements: Four guys from Minneapolis start a noisy punk band, frequently get drunk on stage and perform shoddy cover versions of classic rock songs, and make music videos where nothing happens in them.
• The Residents: Four anonymous guys from Louisiana wearing eyeball masks and making music that is both funny and a test to your endurance.
  • Alternatively: A group of people nobody knows make music so obscure even they sometimes forget it exists.
• Rhapsody of Fire: Italian band tells an Epic Fantasy saga through Symphonic Metal.
• Rihanna: A chick from Barbados sings songs about sex and love while wearing very little and making some weird music videos.
• Rilo Kiley: Pinsky from Salute Your Shorts and the girl from Troop Beverly Hills and The Wizard become indie darlings.
• Olivia Rodrigo: Teenage actress records a whole album crying and\or shouting about how her life and dates are terrible.
• The Rolling Stones: A bunch of white British men, completely obsessed with American Blues and Soul music, led by a big-lipped former accounting student and a Made of Iron guitarist, invent the entire genre of Hard Rock, and keep playing it well into their old age.
• Mark Ronson: British man scores a massive hit in 2015 only because a famous Hawaiian was involved. Thus, he never has another popular song (other than an older one recorded with a late alcoholic).
• Gioachino Rossini: A lazy genius of an Italian connoisseur born on the twenty-ninth of February constantly reuses his music for his operas, the best-known of which is about a jack-of-all-trades barber who helps a young nobleman obtain the woman he has become enamored with and was written thirty years after its sequel premiered. His other well-known works, most of which are five- to eleven-minute extracts from his other operas, usually get stuck in people's heads.
• The Royal Guardsmen: Six guys from Florida write songs about a dog from a comic strip battling a World War I personality, then make another about the dog celebrating a popular holiday.
• The Runaways: A Dirty Old Man writes creepy songs about teenage girls having lots of sex and assembles a band of actual teens to perform them in their underwear.
• Running Wild: A bunch of German guys singing songs about pirates and history in general. Trope Makers for "Pirate Metal".
• Rush: Two high school dropouts and a long-haired man with an incredibly high voice perform songs about philosophy and Mark Twain books. Then they get a fanmade musical made in their name.
• Sabaton: Swedish men turn historical events into heavy metal, often about how tough various Nazi military units were.
  • Alternatively: Educational music from Sweden.
  • Carolus Rex: Sweden attempts to take over the world. It doesn't work out.
• Saliva: Memphis-based rockers who are named after a mouth fluid. Their music is known for being all over the world of sports entertainment. The lead singer collaborated with a Canadian for a superhero movie song.
• Santana: Mexican goes around hiring people to sing for him.
• Erik Satie: Batshit crazy Bohemian classical musician who tried to alienate his friends and supporters and mostly succeeded. Wrote a piano piece consisting of a few bars repeated over and over for 18 hours.
• Taiji Sawada: A Japanese bassist fuses Badass Biker, The Western cowboy style, and Visual Kei. He's kicked out of the first band he goes major with, goes Off the Wagon, has an awful life - but all along the way creates Awesome Music and is one of the best slap bassists in the world. He dies of suspicious causes in a third-world backwater of The United States, and only after his death is some of his work truly recognized to be as awesome as it is.
• Schoolyard Heroes: High school buddies write horror-themed songs. Once responded to a Moral Guardian by blaming their behavior on fast food.
• Franz Schubert: Austrian choral singer only lives to be 31 but somehow writes over a thousand works before his death.
• Scooter: Techno with singing chipmunks and a German guy screaming random English phrases.
• Seether: South African band led by a man who married the Gothic girl mentioned above. Get a black sheep hit from a John Travolta superhero movie, then start scoring hits about faking and living the same life over again. Also scored hits by covering and ripping off '80s music and deceiving their audience with a title indicating the wrong genre.
• Bob Seger: Bearded man from Detroit whose songs reveal him as a man living in his own past. One of his most famous songs was used in a movie scene showing a man dancing without his pants.
• The Servotron Robot Allegiance: A group of robots hate you and are afraid of Radio Shack.
• Sex Pistols: Band managed by a London shopkeeper, who hired the singer because he liked his t-shirt. Had a hit with a song named after the British National Anthem. The only reason that song never became a number one hit was to avoid controversy, so the chart was rigged to keep them out of that position. Bassist couldn't play at all and tended to have his amps turned down. Toured America but it was a bit of a disaster so they broke up.
• The Shaggs: Four sisters with no musical talent whatsoever somehow become a Cult Classic.
• Ed Sheeran: British redhead starts by making folk ballads, then decides to play Genre Roulette while making albums all named after mathematical functions.
• Akiko Shikata: Japanese woman who sings in whatever genre she wants.
• Shinedown: Guys from Jacksonville who make it big by covering Lynyrd Skynyrd and singing about a gun. Also had the last ever hard rock crossover hit before the genre went extinct on pop radio.
• Howard Shore: A composer best known for writing about jewelry wars.
• Showbread: Two brothers form a worship band for their church youth group as an excuse to play terrible Nirvana covers, get way into weird punk and theology and change their sound so much they alienate all the fans who thought they were a Metalcore band, along with most of their members. Had two lead vocalists for a time, one of whom was a black guy named Ivory.
• Sia: Weird Australian woman known for hiding her face and featuring a tween dance sensation in her music videos. Sings about giant hanging lamps and nightclub shootings, and got her break thanks to a state-loving rapper and 40-year old French guy.
• Sick Puppies: An Australian trio with a female bassist whose name refer to ill little dogs. Got their start thanks to a campaign by a man who gave out free hugs to others and a popular video game series. Scored a very minor hard rock crossover hit a year after the genre's extinction on pop radio.
• Sigur Rós: Four (later three) Icelanders play really slow music as the lead singer sings gibberish.
• SiIvaGunner: Hundreds of different users pull together to make Bait-and-Switch video game remixes.
• The Sisters of Mercy: A snarky British polyglot with a leather fetish implies at length that he really likes drugs, girls, and guns.
• Skillet: Christian rock band from Memphis who named themselves after a pan.
• Skrillex: A long-haired, bespectacled, pale man who performs for entire stadiums with nothing but a MacBook and a drum pad, and is somehow famous.
• Skyclad: British man who sounds like an orc barks out generally angry, misanthropic lyrics that somehow resembles Shakespearian poetry to thrash metal with violins. Also had to cancel tours once because guitarist felt like it was a good idea to jump over the nearest fence while wearing sunglasses.
• Slade: A low-key, classically-trained bassist and an equally low-key drummer team up with a Fashion Victim guitarist and a frontman who looks like a Loveable Rogue from a Charles Dickens novel. They show flagrant disregard for the eardrums of their audiences and proper English language spelling conventions and somehow become massively popular in their home country, but have to wait a decade to score a hit in America, and only after a Cover Version of their Signature Song becomes a big hit for another band.
• Slayer: Four Californians go on about Satan despite one of them being Catholic. May be useful in ridding your town of unwanted hippies.
• Sleigh Bells: A former girl group singer and a former Post-Hardcore guitarist get together to play dance music that abuses dynamic range compression.
• Slint: Four kids from Kentucky make a creepy, depressing album about carnivals and shipwrecks, which left one member sick and another institutionalised after recording, and was barely noticed until it was used in a film four years later.
• Slipknot: An eight-person band from Iowa that believes Halloween should be celebrated all year long. Met their lead singer in a porn shop.
  • Stone Sour: The lead vocals and one of the guitarists wear normal clothes occasionally.
• The Smashing Pumpkins: Bald former Jerk Jock from The Windy City plays angsty songs with a bunch of guys and possibly a chick.
• Sam Smith: Gender-fluid Brit sings love songs, rips off heartland rockers, and makes Bond themes.
• Snoop Dogg: Tall, skinny west coast rapper who's smoked a mansion's worth of weed. Changed his name numerous times throughout his career, and is willing to work with just about anyone.
• Songs to Wear Pants To: Asian guy asks people what his songs should be about.
• Sonic Youth: Three guys and a girl from New York who can't sing and can't play music don't tune their guitars before playing and get really popular amongst hipsters.
• Soundgarden: Rock band named after a sculpture in a Seattle park. Were very popular but not quite as much as two other bands from the same city. Their biggest hit, named after two different astronomical concepts, is melancholic, nonsensical and unlike their other work. The lead singer probably helped kill his best friend.
  • Audioslave: Said singer joins forces with the band of the turntable-guitarist after the rapper ditches them. High point is performing on a country ravaged by a dictatorship.
• Space: A group of film-savvy Liverpudlians compensate for their generic name by writing songs about psychopaths and the mentally ill that disregard genre completely.
• Spandau Ballet: Five guys dress up in kilts and spend their entire career trying to decide what their style should be. Their biggest hit has a name commonly found on tests with two answer choices.
• Spawn of Possession: Swedish Technical Death Metal band with a Motor Mouth singer with lyrics about Demonic Possession.
• Britney Spears: Disney star decides to bare her midriff and show how she's Ready for Lovemaking. Later has a breakdown, shaves her head and adds shots at dissers to her resume. Fans went wild when she sued her own dad.
• Regina Spektor: Russian girl who sings songs about lost wallets, whacks her piano bench with a drum stick, and pronounces 'better' as 'betow'. Recently known for singing about women's prisons.
• Spiritualized: Psychedelic shoegaze complete with trumpets, a gospel choir, and lyrics about life, love, and heavy usage of drugs.
• DustySpringfield: British woman who likes hair and makeup flies to the American South to make an album that people don't appreciate until decades later.
• Bruce Springsteen: A guy sings about cars, New Jersey, poor people, and people driving cars to deal with the fact that they're poor and in New Jersey. For almost 40 years and counting.
• Starflyer59: A truck driver lives his dream of starting a rock band, then fails to become a famous rock band. The music is melancholy because the truck driver can't sing fast enough to make happy music. After four albums, he ran out of stuff to write about, so he's been singing about his own life ever since. He's currently up to album number 13.
• Starset: A nerd and three space men from Ohio scream about science and sing about demons, carnivores, and monsters, among other things while also telling a multi-media Sci-Fi narrative. You may have heard of them from a gacha game.
  • MNQN: Aforementioned nerd goes full electronic as part of a collab with an AI that used his face at one point.
  • Downplay: The first band the nerd and one of the space men took part in that had a good start but went nowhere.
• Jack Stauber: A bearded Pittsburgh man who's Younger Than He Looks makes songs and videos with obsolete technology and unintelligible vocals.
• Steeleye Span: Folk rockers make music so upbeat nobody notices how gory and raunchy the lyrics are.
• Steely Dan: Two New Yorkers name their band after a fictional sex toy and hire session musicians to make jazz-infused Soft Rock about unpleasant themes, one song of which involving showing pornography to minors.
• Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam: The British son of a Greek man and a Swedish woman starts off writing pop songs in his teens, then gets sick and becomes a folk singer, making his comeback with an album bearing a phrase used to refer to his penis. In his late twenties he converts to a religion that he takes up as his surname, taking nearly thirty years off in doing so while devoting himself mainly to his faith.
• Sufjan Stevens: Effete Christian starts absurdly ambitious projects he has no intention of finishing.
• Rod Stewart: A hard rocker makes increasingly mellow music until he becomes a standards singer full-time, before going back to soft rock. His three biggest hits are songs about an Age-Gap Romance, a girl losing her virginity and strangers who hook up sexually. Married a woman much younger than him and (according to an urban legend) had semen pumped from his stomach.
• Stone Temple Pilots: Four guys from Southern California initially try to ride the coattails of bands up north, but once that ship sails they stoop to psychedelia. The first singer was a strung-out asshole, the second usually sounded nothing like the first, and after both of them died they got a guy from The X Factor.
• Igor Stravinsky: Russian musician forced to become a lawyer flees to Paris to stage his ballets, many of which scare its listeners.
  • Petrushka: A clown does bizarre stuff, then gets killed by a black man.
  • The Rite of Spring: A ballet depicting pagan Russia in spring. Caused a massive riot at its premiere and is shown in an animated film from 1940 where it is performed with dinosaurs.
• The Strokes: Five New Yorkers form a Garage Band and tour with it worldwide.
• The Struts: A flamboyant frontman from Bristol who, depending on whom you ask, strongly resembles any one of several flamboyant frontmen of the past brings Glam Rock back with the help of his best mates.
• Stryper: Four guys dress in tight yellow and black spandex and rock out about how much they love Jesus.
• Styx: Five guys from Chicago take their name from Greek mythology and sing songs about robots and sailing away.
• Suicide: Two New Yorkers play music vastly unpopular for their time and subsequently get an axe thrown at them.
• Donna Summer: A woman records 17 minutes of heavy breathing and becomes famous for it.
• Supertramp: A bunch of Brits, whose first two albums sold so poorly they fired most of the band, sing cynical songs about school, the mental health system, growing up, and each other.
• Swans: Band that's been around on and off for over 40 years and has embraced a number of styles, from intense cowboy yelling over glacially slow no wave backing, to intense cowboy yelling over goth backing to intense cowboy yelling over trance-like Epic Rocking backing.
• Taylor Swift:
  • Taylor Swift (2006): Pennsylvanian blonde sings lyrics seemingly out of a high school diary, either about wanting a boy or wanting to get rid of him.
  • All Too Well: A girl sings for more than 10 minutes about a guy who stole her scarf.
  • reputation: An album that is part edgy lyrics about revenge and everybody hating you and part sweet love declarations to the singer's boyfriend.
  • Lover: An album that mostly consists of love songs, but also includes several songs criticizing conservative politicians including the US president. One song even combines these two things.
• The Sword: A bunch of Texans turn fantasy novels into songs.
  • Warp Riders: An album based on an idea that wasn't good enough to be an actual science fiction novel.
• Symphony of Science: Autotuned scientists.
• System of a Down: Four Armenian guys write political music with nigh Indecipherable Lyrics.
• Talking Heads: Three guys and a girl from New York. The lead singer, whose suit doesn't fit, wrote a song about a piece of paper and once sang a song to a lamp during a concert.
• Tally Hall: Five men wearing colourful ties sing about yellow fruit.
  • Stop Making Sense: The lead singer plays a tape.
• Tame Impala: Some Australian kid's home-recording project becomes a band of five people who play music that nobody has listened to in nearly fifty years. They mostly sing about losers.
• TAS-1000: Canadians find cassette full of messages in their answering machine and decide to make music with it.
• t.A.T.u.: Russian child psychologist hired two fourteen-year-old girls to masquerade as lesbians and make out in the rain.
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Russian homosexual whose most famous works involve fairy-tale settings and cannons.
• Tears for Fears: A pair of emo British teenagers write synthesizer-heavy political songs. One of their most popular songs is more known via its cover version from a dark early 2000s movie.
• Tenacious D: Well-known Hollywood actor and his bald friend play pastiche rock'n'roll songs, mostly on acoustic guitars.
• Theory of a Deadman: Canadian rockers who are fronted by a Ross Geller lookalike and leech onto their football-named friends. Known for singing about bad girlfriends, nursery rhymes, and hurricanes.
• The Traveling Wilburys: Man mainly noted for being the quietest member of a group gets stuck writing songs so invites his producer, a man who he happened to have lent his guitar to, the owner of the cheap home studio he was using and a bloke who hadn't had a hit in years to help him so he can finish an album. When they finish writing and recording an album, apparently they are so ashamed by the results they all insist on using pseudonyms.
• They Might Be Giants: A rock band consisting entirely of nerds named either John or Daniel, except for the one guy named Marty. They've got an accordion, a guitar, and a drum machine. Their songs make no sense. It's awesome. Eventually, they start making kids music.
  • Two coffee-addicted nerds write intentionally cryptic, catchy songs, a majority of the narrators of which are probably insane. They leave the meanings of their songs up to the fanbase to argue about. Their biggest hit is about a nightlight.
• This Heat: Three men with a fear of getting nuked make strange noises in a freezer.
• Three Days Grace: Canadian band led by an angry guy who sings about how he hates everything about his audience, turning into animals, chalk outlines, and encouraging riots. Then he leaves and is replaced by a guy who sang about a stripper.
• Throbbing Gristle: A bunch of art students try to repulse and alienate absolutely everybody. Somehow other artists latch onto what they were doing.
• Justin Timberlake: One of the boys from a famous boy band gets famous by his many songs about sexing women up and later has a hit about dancing trolls.
• tool: A bald man, a long-haired drug addict, a man interested in the occult, and another long-haired man who likes to play crotch-bass get together to perform songs about such topics as drug abuse, child abuse, and transcendence. They also make insanely disturbing and mind-screwy stop-motion music videos for some of the songs.
  • Or: Four talented musicians spend most of their career not releasing albums or doing interviews.
  • A Perfect Circle The aforementioned bald guy starts a new band with his other band's guitar tech. They're Lighter and Softer than the other band, but still have a whole album about drug abuse. The current lineup also includes a drummer who will play with absolutely anybody, a guitarist who was a founding member of a famous nineties rock band but barely played anything on their commercial breakthrough album, and a bassist no one's ever heard of with the word "Junk" in his last name.
  • In both cases, the bald guy also had a wrestler take his stage name from part of his.
• The Tornados: A bunch of British guys, one of whom is the father of the alternative/progressive rock guitarist above, and a German perform songs without words. Their most famous song, which is named after a satellite, was written by a gay record producer who had no real talent for music.
• Toto: A band that played on hundreds of hit records, some of which were their own. They are named after a famous dog and are best known for singing about a continent with mostly black people.
• Devin Townsend: Bald Canadian makes many various types of metal. Coffee and bald aliens may or may not be involved.
• T-Pain: A nerdy black guy dresses up like a circus ringleader, turns his Auto-Tune up to eleven, and raps/sings about having Intercourse with You In Da Club. Also once celebrated being on a boat.
• The Tragically Hip: A sexually ambiguous Canadian Michael Stipe lookalike and his friends from college sing about love, hockey cards, Brother–Sister Incest, mass jailbreaks, political kidnapping and Mushroom Sambas caused by insect stings. They continued having incredible success in their home country for over 30 years despite bombing on Saturday Night Live. They once renamed one of their albums to a synonym for horseshit after their label rejected their initial name. Oh, and their bassist violates the One-Steve Limit.
  • Man Machine Poem tour: The band decides to go on a cross-country tour to promote their latest album, despite the Michael Stipe lookalike being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The fans and the media assume this is their Grand Finale, even though God Never Said That. The tour's last concert, where they played in their hometown, was viewed on television by almost a third of the entire country.
• Meghan Trainor: Fat girl from a small island near Cape Cod sings doo-wop songs about her weight and sex. The name of one of her hits later became that of an anti-sexual harassment social movement.
• T. Rex: A band fronted by a guy in a top hat and glitter. Its style devolved over the course of its career, going backwards from long psychedelic songs to Chuck Berry-esque three-minute pop songs. The band is considered to be one of the main influences of Hair Metal. Their biggest hit was revived by a mid-'80s supergroup.
• Twenty One Pilots: Columbus duo makes indie-alternative-rock songs. They are best known for singing about "the good old days" and a religious song for a dark comic book movie.
• Twiztid: Two guys who love horror movies, comics, toys, marijuana and cigarettes rap about being serial killers and wear face paint.
• Two Steps from Hell: Two composers start an orchestral group after having an argument about VSTs over the internet. Abuse the Ominous Latin Chanting trope.
• U2: Four musicians from Ireland that promote awareness for the Environment.
• Ultravox: English art students perform a quirky mixture of glam and proto-punk rock in the mid - late 1970s. They lose their leader and are directionless for a spell before picking up a former member of a Scottish boy band. They become a cool Synth-Pop/New Romantic quartet who make iconic music videos and symbolize The '80s.
  • Alternatively: British band with no definite genre, led most famously by a short, moustached Scotsman who shares his name with an insect. Their most famous discography includes a song about a nuclear meltdown, a hymn about looking for answers, and a song that has the accolade of being Britain's favourite number two. Their leader also co-wrote the Ur-Example of the Charity Motivation Song.
• UGK: A bespectacled Bunny-Ears Lawyer with a thick drawl and his nerdy best friend from a small town in Texas make so-called "country rap tunes" that aren't actually influenced by country music whatsoever.
• Upskirts: Sydney band whose name makes looking them up on the internet a fairly tedious process. They sing about how suburban life sucks despite coming from arguably the nicest part of Sydney.
• Uriah Heep: British band named after a character in David Copperfield who's had only one Top 40 hit, a bassist who became a member of The 27 Club, and a bunch of people coming and going over the years.
• Ritchie Valens: Teenager from California combines rock 'n' roll with Latino music, recording one of his most famous songs, originally the B side of a single with another song about his then-girlfriend, entirely in Spanish. Was the youngest person killed in a plane crash that took two other musicians' lives.
• Vampire Weekend: 4 men, 2 of which no one cares about, sing various songs with indecipherable lyrics. The band is named after a movie that the lead singer produced in college and then gave up on, in which a delusional man believes that vampires are invading Cape Cod. One of the members that people care about leaves.
  • Vampire Weekend (the album): A man sings about punctuation, how racism is wrong, and intercourse.
  • Contra: The band have decided to go experimental, which apparently involves singing about Spanish milk beverages.
  • Modern Vampires Of The City: Most songs on the album are about relationships. The ones that aren’t have become even more cryptic.
  • Father Of The Bride: 1 out of 2 of the members that matter are gone. The remaining people ditch the grunge theme and decide to start singing about nature instead.
• van Canto: 5 people make guitar sounds with their mouths instead of playing instruments.
• Van der Graaf Generator: Four British people decide to make scary-sounding music, despite having no guitarist or bassist in the band. Then they break up. Then they reform. Then they change their name. Then they break up again. Then they reform again.
• Van Halen: A pouty-lipped Jew, a Polish-American, and two biracial immigrant brothers revolutionize pop music with watered-down heavy metal. Their guitarist channels Johann Sebastian Bach by twiddling his fingers really fast. Later on, the pouty Jew is replaced by a guy who doesn't mind getting speeding tickets (but never a third guy). Also, the Polish-American's eventual replacement was a teenager.
• The Velvet Underground: East Coast band that performs songs about drugs and other nonsense. Famously discovered by Andy Warhol.
  • Lou Reed: Their frontman, who once made an album which only consisted of 64 minutes of white noise. Despite starting his career in a band that made a lot of noise, this made people very angry. Along with a guy listed near the bottom of this page, contributes inspiration for the peaceful overthrow of Communism in Czechoslovakia. Fans of the three Californians and a Dane prefer to forget he once collaborated with them.
• Giuseppe Verdi: Opera's greatest composer who tried retiring three times — the first after his second opera failed — and just came back. His operas include cursed jesters, replications of famous assassinations and Ancient Egypt.
• Versailles: Japanese Power Metal band full of pretty boys formed by a singer obsessed with Lestat and a guitarist with a penchant for ballgowns. Known for wearing ridiculously elaborate costumes reminiscent of French aristocracy and having roses literally everywhere. Their first bassist claimed to be an alien until he died of mysterious causes, and he was eventually replaced with a guy who really loves his cat. Also includes a midriff-baring guitarist and a drummer who loves booze a lot.
• Village People: Interracial disco group (four white, two black) that has each member dressing as a different everyman occupation and a Native American. They sing about the armed forces, masculinity, and Christian organizations.
• Vocaloid: A group consisting of people who don't actually exist.
  • Alternatively: A text-to-speech program with cool box-art. They can sing.
  • Hatsune Miku: A non-existent girl known for waving around vegetables while repeating a scat-singing portion from a Nordic folk song.
  • mothy: Someone who writes songs using computer programs, most of which are about horrible people, people dying, or horrible people dying.
    • Alternately (at least one song series: Various horrible things happen in what is beginning to not count as a Rock Opera anymore. Satan is the most sane character. It actually happened, sort of.
  • Night ∞ Series: A girl goes into a mansion full of mildly creepy people, and promptly winds up in a mind-screwy "Groundhog Day" Loop with them that is very unpleasant for all involved.
• Volbeat: Danish metal band who share their name with a fictional firefly. They sing about outlaws, boxers, and dancers, among other things.
• Richard Wagner: German writer heavily in debt takes opera to the extreme, being embraced by the wrong guys and forbidden in Israel. You may frequently hear his works at weddings and in old cartoons.
• Rufus Wainwright: The gay, bilingual Marty Stu son of two folksingers, with a flair for the dramatic (or more specifically, the operatic). Possesses a voice that could either wreck ships or peel paint, depending on whom you ask. Sings about beverages and vices in his Signature Song.
• Tom Waits: An empty soup-can full of wet, rusty nails gets behind a piano and sings.
  • Ol' 55: A man annoys busy morning freeway traffic by driving way too slow.
• Wall of Voodoo: First line-up: Henry Mancini meets New Wave. Second line up toned down the Mancini aspect, and added more Country. Their only hit was probably a number one hit in the country south of the United States.
• The Wanted: British-Irish boy band whose only American hit was about being happy that a girl orgasmed. Once their rivals arrived Stateside, it was all over for them, and said hit was reduced to a fast food jingle.
• Weather Report: An Austrian gypsy and an African-American jazzman break with their boss and form a Revolving Door Band. One of their most famous members was a mentally disturbed man from Florida. Their Signature Song is about an old nightclub.
• The Weeknd: A Canadian internet personality with an impossible hairstyle sings about having Intercourse with You in just about every song and became popular through a contribution to a widely hated yet highly successful erotic Film of the Book. His two first #1 hits were a love song about cocaine and a spooky sex song named after an old horror movie, his next one was a collaboration with the French robots mentioned above.
• Ween: Two misogynistic, homophobic, racist middle-school buddies get high off household cleaning products and use an 8-track to record songs about tropical fruit and fellatio.
• Weezer: Four musicians, one of whom is a soccer-loving geek who took 10 years to graduate from Harvard and the other three of whom nobody knows. Made their name by singing about another geek who died in a plane crash. Originally opened for a band led by Keanu Reeves. Their music videos are mostly famous due to the celebrities in them. Nobody can agree which albums are worth listening to. Their biggest recent hit is a note-for-note cover of a Soft Rock song from The '80s that they were pestered into recording by a teenage girl.
  • Pinkerton: An album where the lead singer takes a vow of celibacy, goes to college, grows sexually frustrated, and starts fantasizing about random women he meets, like a student that turns out to be a lesbian and an 18-year-old Japanese girl who sends him a fan letter.
• Kanye West: A college drop-out with an ego bigger than Antarctica and a loose screw in his head. Embarrassed himself talking about a major disaster, and even more expressing himself about an Award Snub. May or may not be a gay fish.
• Whitehouse: Three Englishmen make loud noises and shout offensive things. The frontman cited Yoko Ono as his primary influence.
  • Sutcliffe Jügend: A spinoff group lead by a man whose biggest claim to fame was being in the above band for about three years.
• The White Stripes: This rock band has two band members (any rock band worth its salt would have at least three) who were married until 2000. Their last name takes the name of the band. The main singer and instrumentalist does almost all the work, with the girl just bashing drums loudly. They enjoy butchering songs done by other artists. Their most famous song's title can refer to an international military alliance.
  • They had a major resurface in the UK in 2017... because people used one of their song riffs to chant a politician's name at rallies. And music festivals. And sports events. And just about everywhere.
• The Who: British musicians famous for a habit of breaking instruments, and a drummer who couldn't keep time. The guitar player once wrote a song about a deodorant, and their bass player sang a song about killing a spider.
  • Tommy: Kid becomes Inspirationally Disadvantaged and goes to the arcade. The Movie has his mother rolling around in soap suds, chocolate and baked beans.
  • Quadrophenia: A man goes to the seaside to find himself after completely ruining his own life.
• Wilco: A guy from a loud country band decides to start his own band after fighting with the guitarist. Their most famous album gets the band dropped from their record label.
• John Williams: Henry Mancini's piano player goes on to write music inspired by space battles, adventurers, weird-looking aliens and sharks with a taste for raw soylent.
• Wesley Willis: A diagnosed schizophrenic backed by a Casio drum machine wails nonsense.
• Amy Winehouse: British girl writes album of jazz songs that sound about 40 years out of style, yet it does pretty well at the Grammys. In response, she gets a big haircut, does a metric ton of drugs, becomes a laughingstock, and drinks herself to death before her 30th birthday. Her biggest hit is her boasting how she'll never get help.
• Wintersun: Absolutely epic and high-energy album follows the musings of a man lost in the wilderness as he slowly freezes to death.
• Wire: Four English art students have fun noodling around with musical instruments, making all kinds of tuneful noise in the process. Suffered a disgraceful pop music period in the late 1980s. A female-led alternative band from The '90s famously ripped off their sound.
• Andrew W.K.: Pop-metal musician with the diversity and subtlety of a 2-by-4, who may or may not be a corporate fabrication.
• Stevie Wonder: Blind black kid with an awesome name gets an even more awesome name by becoming a child star. His sound changed as he grew older, making his fanbase dwindle until he reached adulthood.
• WoodenToaster: A guy from Great Britain makes songs about surprisingly eerie weather factories, waking up, and Halloween analogues. These songs are based on a children's show.
• The World/Inferno Friendship Society: A bunch of drunk anarchists play all kinds of instruments in songs about dead people, Psychic Powers, and getting into fistfights.
• Wu-Tang Clan: Nine guys rap about kung fu.
• X (US Band): A couple of poets, a rockabilly musician, and a drummer form a punk band. The poets get married. The band plays songs about their hometown, being broke, and being married. The poets then break up. The band makes a metal record now considered Canon Discontinuity, the rockabilly musician leaves, the rockabilly musician returns, and the band keeps playing live shows and the occasional new album.
• Xiu Xiu: A bipolar homosexual makes recordings of his many psychotic episodes and sticks some weird electronic noise over the top of it.
• X Japan: An effeminate pianist writes speed metal songs about drugs, sex, and murder, sometimes all three at once. The band spent 29 minutes singing about the drummer's Heroic BSoD, and that was before the lead guitarist killed himself in a bizarre incident involving a towel and a doorknob.
• XTC: An English fan of The Monkees teams up with a diabetic guitarist, a guy who taught himself bass on the logic that a four-stringed instrument would be easier than a six-stringed one, plus a grocery store stocker on drums. They borrow their name from a Jimmy Durante comedy routine. They can't decide whether they're a Post-Punk band, a British Invasion band a couple decades too late, or one of the first Alternative Rock bands. Their second album has a cover that's just a huge wall of text. They suddenly stop touring after their leader has a nervous breakdown on the road. Then the drummer quits and they never bother to replace him. Their American label flat out rejected one of their albums. One of their hits is best-known now from a Cover Version used in a Jim Carrey movie.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic: A man known primarily for parodies of other people's music. His Top 40 hits are from the perspectives of (in order): A parent trying to get the kid to eat, a grunge rocker who'd rather not enunciate, a card-carrying nerd, and a grammarian who's letting off some steam.
• The Yardbirds: A bunch of guys from London, although most people only remember three guitarists, one of whom formed a band named after a milky substance while another formed the band who screwed up old blues songs, and the other of who launched the career of the semen-stomach guy and was mistaken as such. The bassist produced several albums by the British religious convert, and their frontman was killed by his own guitar.
• Justice Yeldham: Australian beans self with plate glass hooked up to contact mic.
• Yellowcard: Some guys from Florida form a Pop Punk band with elements of violin.
• Yes: Five Englishmen write songs about vaguely religious gibberish that never end, best known for having a keyboard player who wore a cape and eventually wrote music about dead kings and their wives.
• Ylvis: Norwegian comedians who become famous for a novelty song about a canine.
• Yoñlu: Brazilian teenage suicide who posted his songs on a gaming forum, where they did not recieve major attention until after he died.
• Neil Young: Canadian Reaganite hippie who too often detours into genres he's terrible at, such as Synth-Pop and Rockabilly. His self-indulgence got so bad at one point that his record company actually tried to sue him for making music that wasn't representative of his usual style. He's only good at acoustic folk and classic rock, but he's been around for so long that he's beaten those into the ground, too. He loves biting the hand that feeds by telling anyone who'll listen how much he hates any musical media invented after the 70s, so much so that he's working on his own.
• Frank Zappa: A weird guy from Southern California creates insane, genre-defying music inspired by early 20th century avant-garde classical music, jazz, blues and doo-wop with outrageously funny lyrics attacking politics in sarcastic satire, while at the same writing songs about groupies, motels and tour buses, who gives his kids weird names, and, despite no significant commercial success, goes on to inspire generations of musicians and the peaceful, intellectual revolution that overthrew the Communist government in Czechoslovakia.
• Rob Zombie: Scary-looking homeless man who makes groove metal music about horror movies, fast cars and monsters. Has also collaborated with other, equally scary looking metal musicians, made his own horror movies (two of which part of a popular slasher series), and defended Japanese girls from crusty old fucks.
• John Zorn/Naked City: A saxophonist can't decide what kind of music he wants to play.
• ZZ Top: Three homely blondes from Texas sing about lower appendages and find a surprising number of metaphors for the deed.
  • Or: A band famous for not shaving. Ironically, the one member you'd expect to have a beard does not have one.

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