The 8 Most Annoying Misspellings in Popular Music History

Forget Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe — there have been far worse atrocities committed to the English language by rock and rap acts.

Misspellings and syntax errors, both deliberate and accidental, are as essential to rock ’n’ roll music as sex, drugs, and wanky guitar solos. The trend began in the early sixties with the Beatles (and their dimestore knock-off, the Monkees), and reached an apogee in the turn of the 1970s with Led Zeppelin (who were famously talked into this misspelling by a producer who worried that people would pronounce ‘Lead’ as ‘LEED’). The trend became ubiquitous in the seventies and reached comical new highs (or lows, depending on your perspective) during the hair metal halcyon days of the 1980s, and veered into bizarre new territory amid the nu-metal/rap-metal/gangsta rap miasma of the 1990s.

Some misspellings unquestionably work. Lead Zeppelin obviously wouldn’t have flown. (Pun intended.) Motörhead’s umlaut is not only stylish but also refreshingly correct, as the Germanic ‘Ö’ employed in languages like Swedish and Icelandic (equivalent to the ‘Ø’ in Danish and Norwegian) is pronounced like a ‘U’, as in ‘URban’ or ‘MotURhead’. Bands like Defunkt, Gorillaz, and OutKast and solo artists like 2Pac barely count as misspellings — the names simply slip off the tongue and look cool on the page. And in any case, 2Pac’s rebirth in holographic form gave the ‘2’ in his name a whole new meaning.

Others are questionable, but still get a pass on this list. Def Leppard is an obvious knockoff of Led Zeppelin, but still kind of cute. Fellow eighties icons INXS danced dangerously close to glam metal silliness with their name, but it was at least a clever and catchy name for a band that was very hard to dislike. Megadeth and Mötley Crüe get a pass (barely), if for no other reason that their names would have been even sillier spelled correctly. And I haven’t yet decided how I feel about Scottish synthpop wunderkinds Chvrches and their use of the Roman letter V. For now they get too get a pass, but they’re definitely on probation.

A third category, however, just simply grates. In the past this list would have included the solo artist formerly known as ‘Ke$ha’ with a dollar sign (a.k.a. ‘Ke-Dollar-Ha’), but she has since dropped the monetized moniker. The following eight, however, continue to offend.

1) Lynyrd Skynyrd

The godfathers of rock ’n’ roll anti-intellectualism, the geriatric Jacksonville, Florida-based southern rock unit best known for overplayed hits like “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Free Bird” allegedly got their name from a tight-ass PE teacher who hassled the boys in the band for their long hair. Beyond a pointless and silly misspelling, it also makes no phonetic sense, and if nothing else makes a case for its members’ need for further schooling. The Melvins took a similar approach in the 1980s, naming themselves after a dictatorial grocery store supervisor under whom guitarist Buzz Osborne worked for a time. But unlike Skynyrd, these west coast hardcore punks could at least spell.

2) U2

New rule: if you’re going to name your band after an iconic military plane, at least get it spelled right. The legendary Lockheed U-2 spy plane, famous for being shot down by Soviet surface-to-air missiles in 1960 over Siberia (and again during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962), had a HYPHEN in it. The B-52s got this right. The four lads from Dublin, alas, didn’t, and for that reason I will forever pronounce their name “Uh-Two” — as in the sound you make when you sneeze. Were this any other band, I would probably give them a pass on the missing hyphen, but given this band’s long track record for holier-than-thou haughtiness I’m not letting them off the hook. That and I’m still mad at them for spamming my iPhone with Songs of Innocence, which still sucks even four years after the PR debacle that surrounded its release.

3) RATT

The glam metal explosion of the late 1970s and early 1980s produced a veritable parade of intelligence-insulting band names. Names like Stryper, Enuff Z’Nuff, Kix, Tuff, Jackyl, Wild Boyz, and Trixter were ubiquitous in the era of hairspray, unflattering spandex, fist-pumping choruses, and cocaine-fuelled cheeseball guitar solos, but Sunset Strip denizens RATT take the cake in this category. Firstly there’s the sheer pointlessness of the superfluous T — the name ‘Rat’ would have actually been cool, although monosyllabic minimalism of this sort is much more punk than hair metal — and then there’s the band’s insistence on stylized capital letters, which makes it all the more nauseating. That is unless RATT is actually an acronym, possibly for Really Awful Taste in Tights. Also, for some reason they still exist.

4) N.W.A

Before some university decides to make Dr. Dre an actual doctor by bestowing an honourary PhD on him (stranger things have happened), they might want to consider that the pioneering gangsta rap trio that brought him initial notoriety is responsible for one of the most annoying misspellings in popular music history. No, it’s not the colloquial rendering of the N-word as n*ggaz — that at least has given the African-American community a slightly less distasteful version of the N-word to use. It’s the missing period after the A for ‘attitude’. Seriously, look them up — it’s ALWAYS spelled N.W.A, not NWA or N.W.A. Perhaps it’s a way of saying “Fuck the Grammar Police” but I kinda doubt it. Straight outta Compton? Straight outta punctuation more like it!

5) Guns n’ Roses

Different genre, same problem. If you’re going to shorten the word ‘And’ to the letter N you either need two apostrophes or none at all — or just use a frickin’ ampersand! You’d think that a band that plays “rock ’n’ roll” music would have figured this out, but then again this is a band whose lead singer can’t even spell his own name correctly. (Shouldn’t ‘Axl’ be pronounced ‘Ax-luh’ or something like that?) The only salvation here is the band’s popular abbreviation as GNR, which is typically rendered (mercifully) without recourse to punctuation, but then again the band spelled it “G N’ R” in their second (1988) studio album G N’ R Lies, preceded of course by the migraine-enducing EP title Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide. Seriously guys, what did punctuation ever do to you??

6) Limp Bizkit

The 1990s brought us the joys of rapcore and nu-metal and a new generation of bad spelling: cue Korn (featuring guitarist Munky), 24–7 Spyz, Staind, Trapt, and, of course, the kings of intelligence-insulting douchebag rapcore themselves, Limp Bizkit. Virtually everything about this band seemed to be designed to maximize its awfulness. Consistently annoying music: check. Thoroughly unlikable frontman: check. Banal lyrics that make Nickelback sound like Bob Dylan: check. Nauseating album titles like Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water: check. Violently stupid name: check. Even dumber misspelling of said stupid name: fuck yeah!

7) Linkin Park

Same vintage, same irritation. Admittedly, Linkin Park is a more likeable band than Limp Bizkit, and, as with Led Zeppelin, the reason behind the chosen spelling of their band name at least makes some sense. Founded in the early days of the Internet in 1996 and named after Lincoln Park in their home base of Santa Monica, California, the band opted for the creative misspelling in order to secure a domain name. (LincolnPark.com was, not surprisingly, not available — even in 1996.) And in fairness to Mike Shinoda and company, it could have been worse. Apparently bassist Dave Farrell once toured with a Christian ska-punk band called — I’m NOT kidding — Tasty Snax. Eww!

8) Deadmau5

Sorry Joel, I refuse to pronounce your moniker “DeadmauSS”. You will always be “Deadmau-FIVE” to me. Had you wanted a creatively spelled name that hearkened to deceased Germanic rodents, you should have gone with “Deadmauß”. Bet you feel stupid now, Deadmau-FIVE!