Their Christmas music is wonderful but the name strikes me with an image of a big diesel-driven machine that throws out choking amounts of soot and horrendous noise while laying down stinky road tar and, for that reason, Methinks has to rank at the top as being the all-time worst naming of a musical group!
Not the greatest question ever posted around here, probably should be asked at around Christmas, yet, I boldly take a chance and present it anyway to hear your important thoughts on the matter.
P.S. There is some justification mentioned at Wikipedia for the name, but still…
Maybe they were shooting for irony or something. I remember back in the late '70s I bought my first real component stereo system at a Hi-Fi store in Salt Lake City. The only album they played to demo their stereos was Mannheim Steamroller. Over and over and over and over until you never wanted to hear it again.
I think it’s a perfectly cromulent name. It arguably follows the same pattern as “Electric Light Orchestra,” where you take a term from classical music and add something to it to give it a modern or “rock” twist. It’s admittedly a bit more obscure than that, but it makes sense to anyone with sufficient knowledge of the history of classical music to be familiar with terms like “Mannheim Rocket.”.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Composers of the Mannheim school introduced a number of novel ideas into the orchestral music of their day: sudden crescendos – the Mannheim Crescendo (a crescendo developed via the whole orchestra) – and diminuendos; crescendos with piano releases; the Mannheim Rocket (a swiftly ascending passage typically having a rising arpeggiated melodic line together with a crescendo); the Mannheim Roller (an extended crescendo passage typically having a rising melodic line over an ostinato bass line); the Mannheim Sigh (a mannered treatment of the Baroque practice of putting more weight on the first of two notes in descending pairs of slurred notes); the Mannheim Birds (imitation of birds chirping in solo passages); the Mannheim Climax (a high-energy section of music where all instruments drop out except for the strings, usually preceded by a Mannheim Crescendo); and the Grand Pause where the playing stops for a moment, resulting in total silence, only to restart vigorously.
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“We need a name that’s witty at first, but that seems less funny each time you hear it.” -Seymour Skinner
Two band names I never could accept were Sudden Infant Dance Syndrome (played a few shows in Seattle in the 00s) and Zyklon B (one of those extreme metal groups).
