There is a trend afoot. It's a problematic one, so I am here to ask for help in putting a stop to it.
Hip-hop producers, it seems, have taken to calling themselves unnecessarily-complicated names. Mike Will Made-It, K.E. On the Track, JP Did This 1.
There are all sorts of problems with these names (like that they're...just...not names), but the biggest, the worst, for our purposes (and here I speak for anyone whose job it is to write about contemporary music) is that these names, with their basic-English-language-rules-to-the-wind construction, are impossible to use in a sentence in a way that doesn't make your eyes cross and a little dribble of blood leak down from your earhole.
With this new style of name in vogue, you find yourself facing clunky, awkward mind-twisters like:
"The 'We Can't Stop' beat, made by Mike Will Made-It, bridges the divide between pop music and rap..."
Or
"Featuring K.E. On the Track on the track, Future's 'Magic,' was destined to blow up in the clubs..."
Or
"If there was any question as to who was responsible for the beat on the new Pooh Gutta song, a quick look at the record's credits will reveal the answer: JP Did This 1 did this one."
Most publications have a policy of writing out an artist's full official name (as it appears in record credits) upon first mention in any article. And as people who have chosen such ridiculously redundant names become popular and successful (which, congratulations to them!), the people writing about these artists start to feel like trapped in an Abbot & Costello routine for the World Star Age.(Drake, too, belongs in an aside to this argument, for naming his latest tour the Would You Like a Tour tour.) It's maddening!
Please, producers, stop it. If you're at the beginning of your career, on the verge of getting your first credit, say, on a commercially available record, consider us—the people who will be writing articles about you some day. You want us to write about you, right? It seems that way, in most cases. It's only natural to want accolades for your work. Think about how your name is going to look in a sentence, surrounded by other words. Think about the idea of clarity.
I mean, what if great producers from the past had decided to name themselves in this manner?
Quincy Jones Arranged The Orchestration For This-Song
DJ Premier Really Put His Foot Into Some Drums, Didn't He?
Dr. Dre On the Beat But Ice Cube Wrote His Rhymes For Him
Rick Rubin Is the Guy Who Is Crazy For This One
Too complicated, right? Just name your self a name. A nice, normal name. Or nickname—fine with nicknames, too! But it should be a noun. A name should be a noun and just a noun. No verbs, please, explicit or implicit.
(Tyler, the Creator. We'll talk about that comma later, okay?)
