Your Buzzword Is My Band Name, Part 1

Friedrich Glorian via Flickr

​It's a Google-rific society we be a-living in, and the fastest way to notoriety is to coin a phrase that, when Guantanamo Bayed safely between quotation marks in a search field, will bring up endless debate upon your win or fail.

We have been blessed with some real standout buzzwords of the last several years, and Rocks Offs just couldn't help but dream of how wonderful they would serve as band names. We'll be bringing you our favorites each week until the mid-term election.

TOXIC RED SLUDGE

The Event: Just last week, a Hungarian factory's reservoir became something more akin to a sieve, leaking a toxic red sludge - a waste byproduct of aluminum manufacturing - into the famous Danube. The ooze is being nicely bitch-slapped by the watery pimp hand of the mighty river, but has done some things to local waterways of which Al Gore would definitely not approve.

The Band: Toxic Red Sludge may be the best name from a Nordic country ever. The members could look like the bad guys from Captain Planet, and they could even hand out waivers for their audience to sign that would absolve the band of any fatal radiation sickness or uncool mutation. Hard to imagine anyone suing a band for getting to be Spider-Man out of the ticket, but having a third arm growing out of your fourth testicle might be a bit of a social handicap.

Hit Single: "St. Tumor"

HANGING CHAD

​The Event: Way back in 2000, Al Gore and George W. Bush faced off in an election that, if we're all perfectly honest with ourselves, no one really cared about at the time. Bush Sr. had sensibly kept us out of a quagmire once Kuwait had been liberated, and during the peace that followed, Bill Clinton presided over a fantastic economy.

We just wanted someone to mind the store and keep things going. The election was apathetically dead even, with the results coming down to problems with voting practices in the state of Florida. One of those problems was with hanging bits of punched paper ballots - the punched bit of paper is called a chad, AND when they dangle instead of separating completely it's called a hanging chad. The recount was stopped by a Supreme Court order, and Bush Jr. became the 43rd president.

The Band: There really is one, and they sound exactly like what you think they would sound like. The band is based in North Carolina, and though they aren't exactly active, what few demos they have on their Myspace shows some nice, introspective indie acoustic-pop. Rocks Off would actually like to hear a bit more.

Hit Single: "My Life Has Just Begun"