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The graphic designer added the umlaut to the cover of Motörhead's first album for æsthetic reasons.

A heavy metal umlaut (aka röck döts) is an umlaut over a letter in the name of a heavy metal band. The use of umlauts and other diacritics with a blackletter style typeface is a form of foreign branding intended to give a band's logo a Teutonic quality. It is a form of marketing that invokes stereotypes of boldness and strength commonly attributed to peoples such as the Vikings; author Reebee Garofalo has attributed its use to a desire for a "gothic horror" feel [1]. The heavy metal umlaut is never referred to by the term diaeresis in this usage, nor is it intended to affect the pronunciation of the band's name.

Heavy metal umlauts have been parodied in film and fiction. In the film This Is Spinal Tap, David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) opined, "It's like a pair of eyes. You're looking at the umlaut, and it's looking at you." In 2002, Spin magazine referred to the heavy metal umlaut as "the diacritical mark of the beast".

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Umlauts and diaereses[edit]

The German word Umlaut roughly means changed sound, as it is composed of um- (a prefix often used with verbs involving "change") and Laut, here meaning "sound". Adding an umlaut indeed changes the pronunciation of a vowel in standard (non-heavy metal) usage; the letters u and ü represent distinct sounds, as do o vs. ö and a vs. ä. Umlauts, or visually similar graphemes, are used in several languages, such as Icelandic, German, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Azeri and Turkish. The sounds represented by the umlauted letters in these languages are typically front vowels (front rounded vowels in the case of ü and ö). Ironically, these sounds tend to be perceived as "weaker" or "lighter" than the vowels represented by un-umlauted u, o, and a, thus failing to create the intended impression of strength and darkness.

The English word diaeresis refers to a diacritic graphically similar to the umlaut; the name comes from a Greek word meaning "divide or distinguish". This diacritic is used in languages such as Greek, French, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch and Afrikaans, and Portuguese with varying purposes. Occasionally English employs a diaeresis to indicate that two vowels are to be pronounced separately, as in the name "Chloë" or the word "naïve".

History[edit]

The German progressive rock band Amon Düül II (aka Amon Duul II) released their first album in 1969. However, their name came from "Amon, an Egyptian sun god, and Düül, a character from Turkish fiction" [1], so this use of diaereses was not gratuitous. The third part of Yes's progressive rock epic "Starship Trooper" is entitled "Würm" (on The Yes Album, released 1971). However, this again is probably not gratuitous, seemingly coming from the Würm glaciation.

The first gratuitous use appears to have been either by Blue Öyster Cult or by Black Sabbath, both in 1970. Blue Öyster Cult's website states it was added by guitarist and keyboardist Allen Lanier [2], but rock critic Richard Meltzer claims to have suggested it to their producer and manager Sandy Pearlman just after Pearlman came up with the name: "I said, 'How about an umlaut over the O?' Metal had a Wagnerian aspect anyway." [3] Conversely, Black Sabbath, on a rare 7" single version of Paranoid (with the b-side Rat Salad), for no forthcoming reason, renamed the single "Paranoïd" with an umlaut above the "i".[4]

On their second album In Search of Space (1971), Hawkwind wrote on the backside of the cover: "TECHNICIÄNS ÖF SPÅCE SHIP EÅRTH THIS IS YÖÜR CÄPTÅIN SPEÄKING YÖÜR ØÅPTÅIN IS DEA̋D". To add to the variation, the diacritical mark on the last " A̋ " is the "Hungarian umlaut" or double acute accent ( ˝ )—two short lines slanting up and to the right rather like a right double-quote mark—instead of dots (Hungarian uses neither the ( ˝ ) nor the traditional German umlaut ("Ä") over the letter "A", though). This was before Lemmy Kilmister, later of Motörhead, had become a member of the group.

Motörhead and Mötley Crüe then followed. (American hardcore punk band Hüsker Dü debuted in january 1981..) The umlaut in Motörhead was contributed by the graphic designer of the band's first album cover. In the words of Lemmy, Motörhead's front man: "I only put it in there to look mean." [5] (Interestingly, the standard German pronunciation of Motör is similar to the standard English pronunciation of "motor", the umlaut over the second "o" requiring, in German, the fronting of the vowel. The French equivalent, moteur, is genuinely pronounced that way.) For the Crüe (according to Vince Neil in the band's Behind the Music edition), the inspiration came from a Löwenbräu bottle. At one Mötley Crüe performance in Germany, the entire audience started chanting "Mertley Crew-e" - a pronunciation often used in Hungary as well.

Spinal Tap used the umlaut in an unexpected place — above a consonant.

Queensrÿche went further by putting the umlaut over the Y in their name. (The symbol ÿ is used in Dutch handwriting to display the letter IJ instead of IJ/ij, and, very rarely, in French, e.g., in the name of the Belgian-French composer Eugène Ysaÿe, in the placename L'Haÿ-les-Roses [6], etc.) Queensrÿche frontman Geoff Tate stated, "The umlaut over the 'y' has haunted us for years. We spent eleven years trying to explain how to pronounce it."[7]

Hawkwind-influenced 1980s space rock band Underground Zerø used a variation on the concept, using the Scandinavian vowel ø in their name. This may have been inspired by computer systems of the time, many of which used the slashed zero as a glyph for the digit 0 to distinguish it from the letter O and thus resembled ø. The Dutch band Bløf also uses ø in its name, even though the letter is not used in Dutch. Ironically, Bløf is neither pronounced blof nor bløf. Outside of rock, electronic music artist William Orbit as of recent has used the "Ø" in his surname.

The spoof band Spin̈al Tap raised the stakes in 1984 by using an umlaut over the letter N, a consonant. This is a construction found only in the Jacaltec language of Guatemala and in some orthographies of Malagasy, although it is uncertain whether the writers of This Is Spin̈al Tap knew this at the time.

The gratuitous umlaut in other popular literature[edit]

The 1974 film Blazing Saddles included Madeline Kahn's German-accented Marlene Dietrich-style chanteuse character "Lili Von Shtupp" (according to the credits). She is announced on a poster outside the music hall as "Lili von Shtüpp"; the film's characters pronounce the name without any change to the vowel.

In the mid-1980s, cartoonist Berkeley Breathed parodied the heavy metal umlaut in the comic strip Bloom County with the fictional group Deathtöngue, fronted by the depraved and unwholesome singer/'lead tongue' "Wild" Bill Catt and infamous for the songs "Let's Run Over Lionel Richie With a Tank", "Clearasil Messiah" and "U Stink But I Love U". Breathed eventually had Deathtöngue change their name to the umlaut-free Billy and the Boingers following pressure from congressional hearings on "porn rock" led by one "Tippy Gorp", an obvious reference to heavy metal's bane, Tipper Gore and the PMRC. The Bloom County book "Billy and the Boingers Bootleg" included an acetate single with two songs from "the band", "I'm a Boinger" and "U Stink But I Love U".

In 1988, Jim Henson and General Foods released a breakfast cereal, Cröonchy Stars, based on the popular Swedish Chef muppet. In addition to the gratuitous umlaut in Cröonchy, most of the cereal's labelling and promotional material used the idiosyncratic spelling Swed̈ish Chef. [8] As with Spin̈al Tap, this marks one of the rare instances of an umlaut being used over a consonant.

The novel Zodiac (1988) by Neal Stephenson features a fictional metal band called Pöyzen Böyzen, which one character describes as "not bad for a two-umlaut band".

In 1997, parody newspaper The Onion published an article called "Ünited Stätes Toughens Image With Umlauts", about a congressional attempt to add umlauts to the name of the United States of America to make it seem "bad-assed and scary in a quasi-heavy metal manner".

Journalist and author Steve Almond coined the term "spandex and umlaut circuit" in 2002 to describe the heavy metal touring scene.

Rock critic Chuck Klosterman subtitled his 2001 book Fargo Rock City with A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta.

Webcomic artist Scott Kurtz drew a series of cartoons about a fake band called Djörk in his PvP Online webcomic. Apart from possibly satirizing the heavy metal umlaut, this name also refers to the Icelandic singer/songwriter Björk Guðmundsdóttir, whose umlaut is genuine.

Other usages of diacritics in band or album naming[edit]

Umlaut[edit]

Other characters[edit]

Non-gratuitous umlauts[edit]

See also[edit]

Sources[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Garofalo, pg. 292 Some groups, for example Blue Öyster Cult and Motörhead, added gratuitous umlauts to their names to conjure up a more generic gothic horror, a practice that continued into the 1980s with Mötley Crüe and others.

External links and references[edit]