Spot the fake CD

Earlier this week, I spent an hour or so admiring hundreds of randomly generated band names, album titles, and CD cover images; I blogged about theCD Cover Meme project for Brainiac.

Then, yesterday, after returning from my son's field trip to the Paul Revere House, I found myself with a couple of hours to kill on Newbury Street before school let out for the day. So I popped into Trident Booksellers & Cafe -- the only place I still enjoy visiting on Newbury Street -- and flipped through some music magazines. The CD Reviews sections of these publications were bugging me, but why? Then it hit me: The band names, album titles, and CD cover images seemed... randomly generated!

You don't believe me?

Here's a little test. Of the five CD covers below, three are authentic CDs and two were plucked from the CD Cover Meme photo pool on Flickr. Can you tell which are which?

I was just kidding. These are all authentic CDs. But were you fooled, for a second there? Here are a couple of other examples:

The unfairly neglected Canadian writer-director Dan Zukovic -- perhaps the most brilliant critic of 1990s pop culture -- was onto this sort of thing. In his 1993 short film "Conjurer of Monikers," he played the title role, a highbrow drunk who makes a living dreaming up names for soulless, talentless rock bands... by flipping through a thesaurus. These bands -- whom the Conjurer saddles with monikers like Fear of Banality, Draconian Measures, and so forth -- don't seem to understand that he's insulting them. What's worse, each one of them becomes more successful than the last.

So is this the secret agenda of the CD Cover Meme project: to point out how random-in-a-formulaic-way indie- and alt-rock band names, album titles, and CD cover images are these days? So formulaic that generating them can be crowdsourced?

Probably not. But that's what I'm taking away from all this.

UPDATE: The Zukovic short was recently uploaded to YouTube: