What's in a Name?

Why did I choose the name "Britton Beat" as the title of my blog, you ask?  Ok, you didn't ask, but Imma tell you anyway.  If you guessed that I selected the name "Britton" to represent the last name I took on December 14, 2001, the date on which I married the one and only Brent Britton a/k/a the "handsome husband," on a beach in Hawaii during a solar eclipse, you would be absolutely correct.  If you also guessed that I chose the word "Beat" as an obvious nod to the time-honored title of numerous news publications including, but by no means limited to, "Tiger Beat," the 1970s gossip rag from which I gleaned everything a tweenage girl needed to know about her heartthrobs – Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garrett and the Bay City Rollers – you would also be right.

My choice, however, of the name "Britton Beat" is also meant as an homage to two musical groups, English Beat (a/k/a the “Beat”) and Londonbeat.  English Beat sang such awesome tunes as “Twist and Crawl,”  “Save it for Later,” and my personal favorite, "Mirror in the Bathroom," which I, for most of the 80s, thought said, "Meet her in the Bathroom."  When you misapprehend song lyrics, as I often do, you get to witness a rebirth of sorts of your favorite songs when upon learning the actual lyrics, you discover fresh meanings.  

For example, just recently, I thought the song "Cooler than Me" by break-out artist Mike Posner crooned:

I used to parlor my tricks, I hope that you like this,
but you probably don't, you think you're cooler than me.

I thought it was artful that the songwriter had changed the word “parlor” from the phrase “parlor tricks” into a verb and juxtaposed language from a different era with the rest of the lyrics in the modern pop song.  I imagined what elaborate sleight of hand the singer had attempted in order to demonstrate to the object of his desire that he was in fact cool.  All this, until I learned from my husband that the song actually goes like this:

I've used up all of my tricks, I hope that you like this...

I’m not even going to tell you what I thought the words to Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s “Blinded by the Light” were, but in my defense, I think that song is sung with purposeful lyrical ambiguity. I still dig that “Cooler than Me” song though, and continue to belt it out at top volume in the car with my three favorite people, Brent and our two kidz, as a sort of spontaneously arisen Britton summer anthem, last year’s being “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas.  

Getting back to the “Beat” bands: Londonbeat, a band formed after English Beat, was perhaps a poorly named band, which, had they chosen a different name, might have been a bigger commercial success.  After all, English Beat was already a wildly popular ska band for more than a decade when Londonbeat was formed in the early 1990s.  I feel that calling yourself "Londonbeat” in this context is kind of like saying, "Well, we're sort of like English Beat, but we don't plan to be as big as those guys", kind of like, "we're a city to their nation-state."  (If you reread the previous sentence in an English accent, it makes a lot more sense).  Well, and that's kind of the way it played out, right?  I mean, you probably remember English Beat, but you probably don't remember Londonbeat.  Do you, however, remember Londonbeat's catchy tune, "I've Been Thinking About You?"  

You may be asking yourself why I remember Londonbeat, and that's a good question.  Well, you see, on one hot summer night long ago in, I think, 1991, I was in New York, visiting from law school in D.C.  My friends and I had been hanging out at a bar in SoHo called Lucky Strike.  On the walk back to my friend’s apartment, some guys approached us and began chatting us up.  

As anyone who knows me can attest, at the beginning of the night, I am the life of the party, but after a few hours, I get tired, my brain starts shutting down, and basically the night is over.  So I was only half listening as these guys told us that they were in a band called "Londonbeat," and that they had just finished their first world tour.  Tired and somewhat grumpy, I assumed they were just trying to impress us by convincing us that they were in a famous band, but I thought that, in their zeal to win us over, they had mistaken the name of the band.  So I said rather sarcastically, "I think you mean English Beat."  

To which they replied, "No, Londonbeat."  I mean, they must have gotten this all the time, don’t you think?  

We didn't believe them, so we left and went home to my friend's apartment.  There, we checked on the Londonbeat CD jewel case (my friend actually happened to own it), and – surprise surprise – staring back at us from the CD cover were the guys we had just met.  So we went back to Lucky Strike.  Hey, it’s not every day you get to hang out with someone who has a video on MTV.  They were very cool, and fun was had by all.  

And so you have the evolution of a blog name.  Tiger Beat, a glossy tweenage gossip rag from the 70s; English Beat, a band with a song I loved but misunderstood in the 80s; Londonbeat, a potentially poorly-named band whose lead singer I met in the 90s; Britain, a synonym for England; Britton, a homophone of Britain, and my name after marrying Brent Britton, the best husband a girl could ever ask for, in 2001; all culminating in the name of my blog for the 2010s: Britton Beat.  

I hope you like it! Thanks for reading!