Punny Names in music.
- Voltaire's Card-Carrying Villain song "When You're Evil" has this duo: "To the gentlemen I'm Miss Fortune, to the ladies I'm Sir Prize..."
- The Beatles were in equal parts a pun on Buddy Holly's Crickets, and on "beat".
- And they released albums called Rubber Soul and Revolver.
- A housemate of The Doobie Brothers noted the guys' fondness for "doobies" — a slang term for marijuana cigarettes, which gave them the name.
- Bloc Party was named from the term block party, a large public party where everyone in a neighbourhood gets together.
- Extra punny given that a bloc is "a group of persons, businesses, etc., united for a particular purpose", often centered around politics (which is also true of Bloc Party's lyrics).
- A literal translation of Einstürzende Neubauten's name would be "Collapsing New-Buildings". The name isn't meant to conjure up the image of intentionally destroying newly made buildings, however, but rather that of "new buildings" falling over. A Neubauten, for the non-German tropers, is specifically one of the cheaply-constructed "modern" buildings erected following 1945 in many German cities, which had an unfortunate reputation of being extremely unsound compared to the Altbauten (old-buildings), which were mostly destroyed after WWII. Their name attracted unwanted attention within two months of the band's formation thanks to the roof of Berlin's former city hall (one of the most famous Neubauten) collapsing, killing one person and injuring many others. Think of a hypothetical NYC based band which formed in July 2001 that called themselves "Planes Into Buildings", and you'll get a pretty decent idea of what the band had to deal with.
- The Zarsoff Brothers', whose first names included Rocky and Izzy, among others.
- Sting was named for the yellow and brown striped jumper he used to wear.
- Dusty Hill of ZZ Top, who hails from a state that has quite a few... dusty hills. The band's drummer Frank Beard, who happens to be the only member of the band without said facial hair.
- Not as true today, as Frank does sport more facial hair nowadays (a goatee, to be specific), as seen on ZZ Top's Live From Texas DVD. Not quite a beard (especially compared to his bandmates), so it's not quite averted.
- Coupling this with "X" Makes Anything Cool, the bands INXS - "in excess" - and XTC - "ecstasy".
- One of the many Initial D Eurobeat songs is entitled Express Love, which is a play on the word express. The singer laments that he was suckered into express (quick) love, but he wants his lover to express (show) love.
- Alternative rock band Camper Van Beethoven is a punny portmanteau of the phrases "camper van" and "Ludwig van Beethoven." Camper than Beethoven.
- Autechre's Untilted album, a play on "untitled".
- Vocaloid
- The title of the song Rainbow Girl seems like Word Salad Title, but "rainbow" is niji in Japanese, which is also a shortening of nijigen — literally "2D", it is a slang term for Moe anime and other forms of media (such as video games) that are drawn in similar style, and girls who appear in them.
- Hatsune Miku's name is often referred to in shorthand among Japanese fans as "39". This is because one way to pronounce the number 3 is "mi", and one way to pronounce the number 9 is "ku", hence if you put those numbers together, they can be read as "miku". note
- Kayo Sudō, a Villain Protagonist character in Evillious Chronicles. When written in East Asian order, her name sounds similar to stalker yo - "I am a stalker".
- German example: the stage name of the lead singer of the German punk rock band Die Ärzte is Farin Urlaub, which is a pun on fahr in Urlaub, meaning "go on vacation."
- Rapper Flo Rida's stage name is a pun on his home state of Florida and hip-hop slang ("flow" also referring rap ability.)
- Tribute bands have this approach:
- Beatallica, being The Beatles meets Metallica, have Stage Names crossing members of both bands — with Metallica's penchant for Xtreme Kool Letterz in-between ("Jaymz Lennfield", "Grg Hammetson", "Kliff McBurtney", "Ringo Larz"). Also, the credited Record Producer is "Flemball Rasmartin", mixing George Martin with Flemming Rasmussen.
- The Iron Maidens, an all-female Iron Maiden, have female versions of Maiden's members (Bruce Lee Chickinson, Mini Murray, Adrienne Smith, Steph Harris, and Nikki McBurrain — pun on both Nicko McBrain and Clive Burr).
- And there was the band who specialised in covering Led Zeppelin songs in a reggae style: Dread Zeppelin. Their lead singer is an Elvis Presley impersonator.
- The Red Hot Chili Peppers album Californication.
- They've been on the receiving end of a pun, too: there's a fairly popular folk-pop crossover band using bagpipes called the Red Hot Chilli Pipers.
- Madonna's album MDNA is either a pun on the abbreviation for mitochondrial DNA or MDMA, the scientific name for the drug Ecstasy, as well as a reference to/pun on her own name, "MaDoNnA"
- What else could the acclaimed folk supergroup which first came together at a Robert Burns themed retreat call themselves but The Burns Unit?
- Perry Farrell picked his Stage Name as a pun on "peripheral".
- 45 Grave vocalist Dinah Cancer ("dying of cancer") — again, obviously a Stage Name.
- Savlonic's Kandee Flaus.
- The "Dragapella" group the Kinsey Sicks. Their name is a play of words on "Kinsey 6", the end of the Kinsey scale defined as exclusively homosexual.
- *NSYNC supposedly got their name from Justin Timberlake's mother, who noted how well "in sync" all five voices blended together when they sang together à cappella for the first time. (The other story they tell about their name involved Fun with Acronyms.)
- Many early synth albums had names which were puns on the name of the most popular synth brand at the time, the Moog, such as Jean-Jacques Perrey's Moog Indigo. These, however, were usually examples of Cowboy BeBop at His Computer (such as the Perrey example), since they assumed that "Moog" is pronounced according to English rules (that is, like "mood" but with a "g"), when in fact anyone even moderately knowledgeable knew that it is actually the inventor's (Dutch) name, and thus pronounced according to Dutch rules; that is, like "rogue" with an M instead of an R.
- Sakanaction's name is a pun on "sakana" (the Japanese word for "fish") and "action". One of their albums, DocumentaLy, is a pun on "documentary" and "mental", doubling as tongue-in-cheek fusion of English and Japanese.
- The Christian Rock group David and the Giants has a reference both to frontman David W. Huff and references TheBible's account of David and Goliath.note
- Apparently, the "real name" of Virtual Celebrity Amber G.
is "Amber Griis". - Korean Pop Music group Mamamoo's fans are known as MooMoos. "Moo (무)" is also Korean for "radish." Fans picked up on this and began bringing radishes to performances to show support. When the group announced their lightsticks, they were, quite unsurprisingly, radishes.
- Carolina Crown's 2011 show was titled "Rach Star". It was a mashup of classic rock tunes and the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff.
- Hip hop producer DJ Mustard, or more recently simply Mustard, has Dijon McFarlane as his real name. Dijon, the real life French town, is well-known for their mustard.
- Nerdcore rapper YTCracker chose an interesting double-meaning stage name. A "cracker" is someone who exploits the weaknesses in a computer or a network, perfect for the artist's nerdy and subversive image. But "cracker" is also a derogatory term for a white person used by black people: combined with YT (pronounced "Whitey") it adds some self-deprecating humor for being a white man who decided to be a rapper.
- There's an Indian female rapper called Hard Kaur. ("Kaur" is the traditional Sikh second name for women, equivalent to the male Singh, and it's pronounced very closely to "core" in English.)
- Hip hop label Pillage Roadshow milked similarities to the Village Roadshow name for all it's worth, depicting as its own logo a finger pushing the second, third, and fourth (from the outside) segments of the Village Roadshow V logo.
- Spike Jones' version of the "William Tell Overture" features a parody of a horse race with puns made from the names of the horses. "Cabbage is second by a head, Apartment house is third with plenty of room, Banana is coming up to the bunch, Assault is passing Battery, and there's Girdle in the stretch and Mother-in-Law nagging in the rear, and there goes the WINNER......BEETLEBAUM!!
- There's a Frank Zappa album titled Sheik Yerbouti.
- Folk group Deaf Shepherd are an obvious pun on Def Leppard. They're actually a serious group, despite the silly name.
- Ai Miyashita of Nijigasaki Highschool Club is a typical pungeon master. Therefore it is not surprising, that their second solo song "Yuu&Ai" which translates to "Friends and Love" is obviously a pun to "You and I".
- But this got exaggerated, when the anime came out and the character Yu Takasaki (A punny name itself) got introduced. note Now the title references Yu & Ai (Miyashita) too.
- Punk rock band The Dwarves seem to have a tradition of members picking punny stage names, especially risque ones: Aside from Blag Dahlia note who arguably is The Dwarves, members have included The Fresh Prince of Darkness, Rex Everything, Wreck Tom, and Clint Torres. Nick Oliveri is apparently pretty fond of the Rex Everything pseudonym, and has used it for other projects - even the album Leave Me Alone by Nick Oliveri's Uncontrollable lists Rex Everything as a special guest performer as though he were a separate person from Nick for a Credits Gag.
- Paul McCartney: The 1973 Wings single "Helen Wheels", which sounds like "hell on wheels", and even includes it in the lyrics.
- Songwriter Alan Tuck leaned into potential puns about his birth name by calling his group Al Tuck and No Action.
- The Dirt Poor Robin song, "Babylon" has a narration talking about a man named Oliver Graves ("All of our graves").
