E.E. Cummings Would Be Proud of This Generation of Indie Artists

A Lesson in How to Punctuate and Capitalize For Bands in the 2020s

Being an all-around jackass, I like to point out things that just kind of slightly annoy me and then over-exaggerate my opinion to the extent it seems that I would die on any hill on which this particular battle is to be fought.

A pattern I’ve noticed exponentially increasing in the past few years is stylization of band names and song titles in all lower case and incorporating weird punctuation or characters.

For example, just in the past 3.5 months we’ve published blogs on lostboy, deepdiver, The LEVIS, GARDEN, BRONCHO, allie, and flipturn. Sipper seems normal until you realize half his songs are all in lower case. deepdiver meanwhile has simply gone full send.

As an honorary member of the Grammar Gestapo, this naturally bothers me, but not actually that much. However, the pure volume eventually gets to me a bit, like at this point do any artists think this is creative or different?

The answer of course is no. It’s impossible that any indie bands on the cutting edge of new music and creativity are that out of touch or not self-aware enough to realize this is extremely overplayed. So there must be some explanation.

Hypotheses

Option 1: they’re simply lazy, don’t use spell-check, and haven’t heard of Grammarly yet. This is the “why capitalize if I don’t have to” argument.

Option 2: Capitalization sounds an awful lot like capitalism and as an artist it’s my duty to stick it to the man.

Option 3: In a world saturated with different bands and songs, and SEO now a formally taught subject in most K-12 schools across the country, bands are clever enough to know that even slight variations will help people find them specifically rather than something not even remotely related.

For example when you google “Lost Boy” you get the following:

And if you google “lostboy” you get…