The Role of Phonesthemes in Shoegaze Naming Conventions

Abstract

This article focuses on some observed similarities between band names, album titles, and song titles within the shoegazing subgenre of rock music, which is characterized by loud, swirling layers of distorted guitar and droning noise. The onomastic similarities are analyzed in terms of phonesthemes, which are submorphemic sound/meaning pairs, wherein a particular phone or cluster of phones is taken to denote some abstract semantic space. As experiments show that native speaker awareness of phonesthemes influences neologistic production and perception, I argue that the preponderance of band names like Swirl and Swoon within shoegaze is due to an overlap between the genre’s aesthetic characteristics and the semantic space described by a specific set of phonesthemes in English.

Keywords:

• phonesthemes
• branding
• band names
• shoegaze
• rock music
• music genres
• identity
• onomastics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everyone at the Cornell Department of Linguistics for their help and support. Specifically, this article would not have been possible without the critical eye and enthusiasm of Cara DiGirolamo. Thanks also to John Bowers, Wayles Brown, Miloje Despic, Carol-Rose Little, Dave Lutz, Nick and Liz Merillat, Todd Snider, Brent Woo, my wonderful wife Jessica, and all of my Introduction to Linguistics students who had to listen to me ramble on about this during class.

Notes

1. Incidentally, Stereolab, on two separate occasions, has been labeled with terms which would later denote sonically unrelated genres. The first, as noted, is shoegaze. The second comes from Lewis’s (1996) description of their music as “post-rock,” a term now used exclusively to describe mostly instrumental, classically-inspired rock music (Staff 2012).

2. The phonestheme tw– is represented, technically, in the 1992 song Twisterella by Ride, although, compared to the other listed phonesthemes, this is more or less insignificant.