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How 30 Pop Groups Came Up With Their Mysterious Names
How 30 Pop Groups Came Up With Their Mysterious Names
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Twenty One Pilots

The rock duo’s name stems from the Arthur Miller play All My Sons, which Tyler Joseph read at Ohio State. The play’s about a World War II contractor who sends messed-up airplane parts to Europe, rather than admit he’s made a mistake. As a result, 21 airplane pilots die. “I could relate to the fact that making the right decision in life sometimes takes more work,” Joseph told Rolling Stone. “It takes more time, and it can feel like you’re going backward.”

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98 Degrees

“Everybody put their two cents in [and came up with] 98 Degrees, which is our body temperature in Fahrenheit,” Drew Lachey told Lime magazine, according to the book 98 Degrees and Getting Hotter. “We wanted a name that would represent the atmosphere our music creates—think heat, love, and passion.” Note for anyone with a science test still in their future: body temperature is actually generally accepted as 98.6 degrees

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Panic! At the Disco

The band ironically took their name from a song by the California rock band, Name Taken. Name Taken’s song “Panic” includes the lyric, “Panic at the disco, sat back and took it slow.” “[It] makes no sense. There’s really no connection or relevance to the song itself,” frontman Brendon Urie told the Georgia Voice. “For whatever reason, we just thought Panic! At the Disco just sounded kind of cool.”

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Foster the People

The trio responsible for Pumped Up Kicks is led by Mark Foster, and he originally called the band Foster & The People. But enough people misheard the name, that he decided to change it. “’Foster the People’ — that’s like ‘Take Care of the People,’ ‘Do Something for the People,'” he told USA Today. “The first few shows that we played were for charities. It kind of clicked: Foster the People, that’s us.”

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The Roots

The band that now calls the The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon home originally went by The Square Roots, a name explained on their track “Anti-circle.” “Yo, I’m the anti-circle… Never comin’ twice in one form… so hip that I’m square,” raps Black Thought. Once the guys discovered there was a Philadelphia folk group with the same name, they shortened theirs to just The Roots.

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Why Don’t We

“We were all super excited about starting the group and were like, ‘Well, why don’t we do it?!’” member Corbyn Besson told the website Sweety High of the boy band’s name. “I think it just stuck because it applies to so many spontaneous situations we’ve experienced as a band.”

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The Beatles

The iconic band was inspired to name themselves after an insect because of Buddy Holly’s group, The Crickets. The misspelling of “beetles” is a portmanteau of the insect and musical beats.

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BTS

The K-pop group’s name is an acronym for Bangtan Sonyeondan, which translates roughly to “Bulletproof Boy Scouts.” However, last summer the boys announced that the letters now also stand for the slogan, “Beyond the Scene.” Their agency said this new branding, as well as a door-shaped logo, “symbolizes youth who don’t settle for their current reality and instead open the door and go forward to achieve growth.”

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*NSYNC

You can thank Justin Timberlake’s mom for the name. “The first time we sang together, she goes, ‘Man, you guys sound really in sync,’” Timberlake told Larry King. “And we were like, ding, ding, ding.” The spelling came from using the last letter of each original member’s name: JustiN, ChriS, JoeY, JasoN, and JC. When Jason Galasso left the group, he was replaced with Lance Bass, who initially became Lansten “for promotion’s sake,” according to Rolling Stone. As for the star, Joey Fatone says it came at the suggestion of magician Uri Geller.

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Fifth Harmony

When the ladies of Fifth Harmony first teamed up on The X Factor, they were known as LYLAS, an acronym for “love you like a sister.” But that was already the name of a girl group comprised of Bruno Mars’s sisters, so the new group’s name was changed to 1432, text speak for “I love you too.” Judges Simon Cowell, Britney Spears, and L.A. Reid all hated the name, so a vote was put to the public, which chose “Fifth Harmony” for the girls’ five-part harmonies. As for why the foursome has stuck with the name following Camila Cabello’s exit, Ally Brooke told Billboard, “The fans are our fifth member.”

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Mumford & Sons

The band’s lead vocalist is named Marcus Mumford, but none of the other members are his spawn. So what’s the deal? “It just made sense as an antiquated family-business name,” keyboardist Ben Lovett told Entertainment Weekly, adding that Marcus got top billing because he was the one “making the phone calls and getting the gigs.”

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Green Day

Billie Joe Armstrong recalled the 4/20-friendly origin of the punk band’s name to Time: “….Our drummer put Green Day on his jacket and said, ‘Maybe we should call the band that.’ And I said, ‘That’s a good idea.’”

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Red Hot Chili Peppers

Frontman Anthony Kiedis revealed the story behind the band’s name in his 2004 memoir, Scar Tissue. “We started going through these huge laundry lists of idiotic, meaningless, boring names,” he wrote. “To this day both [former member Keith “Tree” Barry] and Flea claim they came up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It’s a derivation of a classic old-school American blues or jazz name. There was Louis Armstrong with his Hot Five, and also other bands that had “Red Hot” this or “Chili” that. But no one had ever been the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a name that would forever be a blessing and a curse.”

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Boyz II Men

The R&B vocal group is named after a song from their predecessors, the R&B group New Edition. New Edition’s 1988 album Heart Break concludes with the track, Boys to Men.

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Foo Fighters

The term “foo fighters” was used during World War II for sighted UFOs, and Dave Grohl was reading up on them while he was putting together the Foo Fighters’ first tape. “I had recorded the first record by myself, playing all the instruments, but I wanted people to think that it was a group, [so] I figured that Foo Fighters might lead people to believe that it was more than just one guy,” Grohl told Clash Magazine. “Silly, huh?”

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Spice Girls

Geri Halliwell came up with the name during an aerobics class because the girls were “all really different” and they’d also already recorded a song called Sugar and Spice, according to a timeline on the official Spice Girls website. As for the girls’ individual names (Scary, Sporty, Baby, Ginger, and Posh), Mel B told The Huffington Post they originated in an article in the British magazine Top of the Pops. “It was actually a lazy journalist that couldn’t be bothered to remember all our names, so he just gave us nicknames,” Mel B said. “And we were like, ‘Oh, well, that kind of works. I don’t mind my name. Do you like your name? Baby? Posh?’ We were like, ‘Let’s just go with it.’”

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Backstreet Boys

The “I Want It That Way” singers were named by their creator, Lou Pearlman. He brought them together in Florida and labeled them after an Orlando flea market, according to Vanity Fair.

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Fall Out Boy

Patrick Stump, Pete Wentz, and the gang got their title from The Simpsons. On the show, Fallout Boy was a fictional character within their world, the sidekick to the comic book hero Radioactive Man.

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Walk the Moon

Lead singer Nicholas Petricca told Interview Magazine that the band—known for the smash hit Shut Up and Dance—derived the name from The Police’s song Walking on the Moon. “The Police definitely have a mystery and playfulness that we try to have as well,” he said.

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The Killers

Brandon Flowers confirmed in a 2013 concert that the group took its name from the band New Order’s music video for their song Crystal. In the video, “The Killers” is emblazoned on a bass drum.

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Maroon 5

Adam Levine has vowed never to reveal the name’s meaning. “The origin of the name is so bad,” he told David Letterman. “It’s such a horrendous story that we decided that shrouding it in mystery will make it a better story than the actual story.” One popular theory, though, is that the name is in reference to Long Island’s Five Towns College, which Levine attended, and has the school colors of white and maroon.

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Nickelback

Every music lover’s favorite punching bag got its name from bass player Mike Kroeger’s job at Starbucks. As he gave customers their change, he’d tell them, “Here’s your nickel back.”

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Coldplay

Originally going by the name Starfish, Chris Martin’s band was friends with another band called Coldplay, named after Philip Horky’s poetry collection, Child’s Reflections, Cold Play. When that band gave up the name, Chris Martin’s band asked if they could use it.

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Destiny’s Child

Buzzfeed once speculated that the group was secretly always Tina Knowles’s and that she subliminally got Beyoncé a solo career because Destiny’s Child does sound quite a bit like “Das Tina’s Child.” In reality, the name is biblical. “We got the word destiny out of the bible, but we couldn’t trademark the name, so we added child, which is like a rebirth of destiny,” Bey told CBS in 2002.

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5 Seconds of Summer

There’s not much to this one. “The name came from… I remember, like, we were in science class when we were probably 15 and just writing a bunch of names on a piece of paper. We weren’t paying any attention to anything the teacher was saying,” the group’s Calum Hood told 60 Minutes. Band member “Michael [Clifford] texted us — he was like, ‘How ’bout the name 5 Seconds of Summer? And we were like, ‘Yeah, alright, that’s fun…’ When you’re in a band in school, you never really think it’s going to amount to much.”

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Imagine Dragons

The band members have said the name is an anagram, but they’ve refused to reveal of what words it’s comprised. “We haven’t even told our families,” lead vocalist Dan Reynolds told Radio.com, saying the phrase “had meaning” to the group. “We just thought it would be cool to keep something to ourselves, because you’re always exposing yourself as an artist.”

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Arcade Fire

Frontman Win Butler told Gothamist the name originated from his school bully. “The first kid who beat me up when I was 12, was a high school kid who always used to talk about how the old arcade burned down and all these kids died,” he said.

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DNCE

The name of Joe Jonas’ band, known for the hit Cake by the Ocean, is a play on the word “dance,” despite being pronounced like an acronym. “DNCE is dance without an A, which is not a perfect word, but you don’t have to be a perfect dancer to dance in life,” guitarist JinJoo Lee told InStyle. “Sometimes it is never perfect, but you can still enjoy life.”

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