I quite often come across album titles that leave me wondering…
CREAM - Disraeli gears
THE POLICE - Regatta Mondata (?)
THE OFFSPRING - Ixnai the hombre (?)
Please help explaining those and post ones that have you scratching your head
“Drummer Ginger Baker recalled how the album’s title was based on a malapropism which alluded to 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli”:
You know how the title came about – Disraeli Gears – yeah? We had this Austin Westminster, and Mick Turner was one of the roadies who’d been with me a long time, and he was driving along and Eric [Clapton] was talking about getting a racing bicycle. Mick, driving, went ‘Oh yeah – Disraeli gears!’ meaning derailleur gears … We all just fell over … We said that’s got to be the album title.[13] - Disraeli Gears - Wikipedia
Regatta Mondatta isn’t an album by The Police, it’s an album of raggae Police cover songs. I’d assume it’s a play on The Police albums Zenyatta Mondatta and Reggatta de Blanc. Regatta de Blanc loosely translates to ‘white raggae’ and Zenyatta Mondatta were made up words.
From wiki:
Stewart Copeland said that the group arrived at the album’s title after deciding it should roll off the tongue. Zenyatta and Mondatta are invented words, hinting at Zen, at Jomo Kenyatta, at the French for ‘the world’ (le monde), and at reggatta, from the title of the previous Police album, Reggatta de Blanc.
It’s a pig latin for nix and Spanish (and English) for The Man. They were implying ‘fuck the man’ or ‘fuck authority’.
The title combines Pig Latin (“Ixnay” is the version of the word “nix”, familiar in 1940s Hollywood movies) and Spanish (“hombre”, “man”) to convey the message “fuck The Man”, as in “fuck authority”.[6]
The second album by Brand X, titled Moroccan Roll. The cover picture by Hipgnosis shows a scene in Morocco.
Because it’s their second album, it’s a pun on “more rock-’n’-roll.”
The official story is that the name of the Grateful Dead’s album Aoxomoxoa has no meaning, and was chosen just because it is a palindrome.
I read that an alternate title was “Elephant Gerald.” (Ella Fitzgerald).
Joe Walsh’s “The Smoker you Drink, the Player you Get” is a play on what was apparently a common 1970s musician expression “The higher you get, the better you play.” This thread prompted me to do some research to find that out. In the process I found an old SDMB thread asking about the title.