Name-dropping in conversation is annoying. Name-dropping in song is, well, that can be pretty annoying too. We’re looking at you, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” We’ll light the fire if someone will tie this song to a stake. (We won’t even look at Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger.” Die in a ditch, “Moves Like Jagger”!)
Sometimes it’s done a bit more artfully. In Taylor Swift’s debut single, “Tim McGraw,” the country star is a reminder of a past romance, “the song we danced to all night long.”
(Incidentally, young folks, Swift wrote “Tim McGraw” when she was a high school freshman not paying attention in math class. She monetized her own inattentiveness. Now, she owns the world. Think about it.)
It can be fun and joyous even as you contemplate doomsday, as in R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”: “LEONARD BERNSTEIN! Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs.” Don’t feel bad if you only knew the first name, like these guys.
It can evoke an earlier era of style and grace, as in “Puttin’ on the Ritz”: “Dressed up like a million-dollar trouper / Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper / Super Duper!”
Oh, that Taco. He had his finger on the pulse of a generation. Ha ha! No! “Puttin’ on the Ritz” was written by Irving Berlin, a Certified Great Songwriter™. If he drops a name, it must be OK!
(Also, Taco was Taco’s real first name.)
Heck, Cole Porter, another CGS™, dropped the names of Strauss, Shakespeare, Mahatma Gandhi, Greta Garbo and Mickey Mouse in a single song, “You’re the Top.”
Speaking of Mickey Mouse, David Bowie claimed the cartoon rodent had “grown up a cow” in “Life on Mars?” That song is from Bowie’s Hunky Dory album which takes name dropping to a new realm by having the songs “Andy Warhol” and “Song for Bob Dylan” sequenced back-to-back. Since Warhol and Dylan cared not for each other, Bowie may have been having a laugh at their expense.
Dylan, meanwhile, has sung about Woody Guthrie, Hattie Carroll, Mona Lisa, St. Augustine, John Wesley Harding, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Joey Gallo, Lenny Bruce, Alicia Keys and Leonardo DiCaprio, among others.
Sometimes songs don’t drop names which leads listeners to try to guess who’s being sung about. This helped pique interest in Don McLean’s “American Pie,” his cryptic hit that mourns the death of Buddy Holly. Was the Jester Dylan? Were the sergeants playing a marching tune The Beatles? In The Who’s “The Seeker,” they ask Dylan, the Beatles and LSD guru Timothy Leary. He couldn’t help them either.
Fifth Harmony’s “BO$$” gives a shout out to former First Lady Michelle Obama, although Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis surely is the first lady name dropped the most, appearing in songs by Tori Amos, Rod Stewart, John Mellencamp, the B-52s and more.
Of course, if there were a hall of fame for songs that drop names – there isn’t and there shouldn’t be but if there were – Reunion’s “Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)” would occupy its own floor. A top 10 hit in 1974, it mentions as many songs, performers and rock ‘n’ roll references as humanly possible. It’s the mic drop of name drops. The singer probably went on to a career reading those tax and title boilerplates at the end of car ads. Or became an auctioneer.