Musicians and Misspelling.

electronpirate

Axe-Master
So...

There are times I shake my head at musicians. We sort of carve our own language out of the Kings (Queens?) English. Misspelling, or creating new words, and even relentless use of umlauts. Notable examples such as:

'toans'
'brootalz'
(I'll leave the rest as an exercise in amusement for others...)

It seems to me this goes back to the 60's, where brain altering chemicals were the norm. Band names like 'Byrds', Monkees, etc got things running. Feels like in the 70's it sort of went out of vogue, then balls out in the 80's with too many to mention. Motley Crue (unlaut), Trixter, Ratt, Megadeth (again, supply your own sillyness in comments.)

So have at it folks. Supply either Band names, or guitar/amp descriptions of tone, style, whatever..

Weedle, weedle.

R
 
it's also definitely a "spelling on the internet" thing. when there's only text available, people streeeeetch words and do other things to convey emotion or pronunciation, etc. then there's the whole "leet" 1337 speak, which i think stemmed from old-school pagers haha.

but yes, musicians use it a lot to differentiate the toanz and br00talz for whatever r3as0n they ch00se.
 
Okay, back on topic... INXS, Ke$ha, Led Zeppelin, will.i.am, + pretty much every single rapper and hiphop artist.
 
Lynyrd Skynyrd (named after a school PE teacher they had, Leonard Skinner)
Def Leppard (original idea was supposedly Deaf Leopard, but was changed to mimic Led Zeppelin's spelling)

I read somewhere that Led Zeppelin spelled it that way to avoid people pronouncing Lead as "Leed".
 
A lot of the modern things (brootz et all) are not really a musician thing (IMHO). Much more so an internet thing. See the Hacker's Dictionary for an early glimpse into how much word creation was happening in the formative days of the net and in the cutting edge comp sci and engineering communities. Online communities with long standing members foster local language creation...

So in my eyes, these half retarded 'net spellings like toanz, pwns, brootz, are a combo of this pre-existing internet culture meeting and meshing with the text-messaging-since-I-could-talk generation.

Historic, dumb band name spellings facilitate trademarks/branding/promotion and were a tool to that end and a different phenomena. IMHO.

That said. Crystal Lettuce.
 
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Weedle, weedle.

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(bakgrowned)

 
My keyboard won't let me do it, (or I just don't know how to) but the best/funniest use of the umlaut is in Spinal Tap. It's over the N. As the son of an English teacher, this is hilarious to me! (Even though the umlaut's roots lie in Germany)
 
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