Is June's Diary a Good Name for a Girl Group?
LatestKelly Rowland’s new girl group has chosen to call themselves June’s Diary, which is a name that means nothing.
The five-member group, assembled as part of Kelly Rowland’s BET reality competition series Chasing Destiny, claims the name represents the month they “spiritually connected as a group,” said Kristal in a Facebook Live chat on Thursday. It’s bad right now, but it won’t matter in a few months or years if they’re at all successful.
According to them, other group name options were: 1310, the Silhouettes, Thunder and Planet Skin, which all sound more awful. June’s Diary in a way is like Destiny’s Child (named from a Bible passage) or Danity Kane or Fifth Harmony or any other odd band name, running right on that fine line between fine, meaningless and weird as hell.
In the case of Danity Kane, Dawn Richard chose that name based on an anime character she drew as a representation of the group. Watch Dawn explain the name’s fruition in the clip below, from a documentary about the making of their first album. “The whole purpose of Danity Kane was to come up with something that we can define, not it defining us,” she tells Diddy, while the girls are all in a recording studio, surrounded by executives. “[With] Danity Kane, they really don’t know what is so they have to ask.”
The idea of choosing a group name that’s not so…simple…is an obvious, familiar strategy that might be more a sign of the times than anything. Consider the earliest girl groups of the ’60s and ’70s who aimed for perfect plural aliases designed to roll off the tongue: the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Emotions, the Chiffons, the Shangri-Las, the Marvelettes and—arguably the greatest girl group name of all time—the Supremes.Those all sound flawless and old school now, next to girl groups like Xscape, Destiny’s Child, Pussycat Dolls, Dream, All Saints, Little Mix and Fifth Harmony. June’s Diary opts for the Danity Kane strategy—mystery—which is distinguishable from the time-honored option of using an acronym to represent the group or individual names, a la SWV (Sisters With Voices), TLC (T-Boz, Left Eye, Chilli) or 3LW (3 Little Women, ugh). Or alternately, a straightforward “girls” name, a la Girls’ Generation, Spice Girls or Girlicious.
I fear I’ve already written too much about this subject, but let it known that the name June’s Diary is definitely better than Girlicious.
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