Sometimes being the parent of adolescents jibes nicely with being a professional cultural observer. What I mean is this: I've been thinking a lot lately about what rock bands and pop musicians choose to call themselves…the morphology and shifting fashions of their stage names.

Lots of bands today still pursue the plain-vanilla 60s M.O. A plural noun with a definite article -- back then there were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Monkees, today there's The Beastie Boys and the Hives and the White Stripes.

Then there's the singular noun without any article -- Creed and Offspring these days, Cream and Blind Faith back then. But I've noticed that several leading examples of today's hippest nomenclature barely existed when I was young. Like willfully quirky three-word names. In the 60s and 70s, only a very few bands went this route -- and they were all faintly ridiculous and a little cheesy.

I'm thinking of the bubblegum band The1910 Fruitgum Company and Three Dog Night, The Strawberry Alarm Clock and Grand Funk Railroad. Starting in the last decade though, almost all the bands with willfully quirky three- and four-word names were actually kind of cool. Like Rage Against the Machine, Toad the Wet Sprocket, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Stone Temple Pilots.

And today there are suddenly lots of cool bands with quirky, grammatically elaborate names -- and this is the new, 21st century thing -- names with verbs in them. I'm talking about bands like Jimmy Badly Drawn Boy, OK Go, Breaking Benjamin, and Jimmy Eat World.

Something like the same evolution has occurred with performers who go by one name. Back in the 1960s, I was aware of only two singers who went by a single name. Dion and Fabian. Both Italian-American, both cheesy, both second or third rank.

But then, over time, and especially after they were dead, the biggest iconic pop superstars of all became known by just their given names -- Elvis and Marilyn. And in the 80s, a couple of would-be pop superstars decided to accelerate that process, to will themselves to become icons -- thus, Madonna and Prince.

And so now practically every solo performer aside from folk singers goes by just a single synthetic name. There's Nelly and Nas, Pink and Ashanti and Shakira, Beck and Moby and, of course, Eminem.

The third new form of pop naming fashion combines trend number one with trend number two. These are names that are willfully quirky, linguistically imaginative, and consist of just one concocted word. It started in the 90s with the Seattle grunge band Soundgarden. Now almost every hard-rock band of a certain bent has a pseudo-Germanic one-word name: Nickelback, Pinmonkey, Hoobastank, Sugarcult, Lifehouse, Fischerspooner, Audioslave, and Coldplay.

There's yet another new naming fad I talked about on this show a year ago -- I mean the ones consisting of a noun followed by a numeral like Blink 182, Matchbox 20, Eve 6, Sum 41.

For that matter, I guess, like Studio 360.

This is Kurt Andersen, in Studio 360.

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