The Flooded Bowling Alley, Namespace Scarcity, and Everyone's Golden Age
An Elegy for Lost Names and the Scenes That Made Them Sing
I misread the marquee. Driving past the local vegan pub (only in Portland?), I could have sworn the sign advertised an upcoming show by "Onion Flavored Onion Rings." The actual band name—"Onion Flavored Rings"—disappointed me immediately, and not just because of the lost redundancy. My misread version committed fully to its absurdity, the double "onion" creating a pleasing rhythm and comic precision. The real name pulled back at ninety percent, hedging its bets, vague enough to squint at. Without that second onion, you're left wondering: rings of what? Saturn? Trees? The band reached for a Frito-Lay product reference and wouldn't even grab the whole thing. That second onion wasn't redundancy—it was percussion.
This small disappointment reveals something larger about the way cultural production works now, about the pre- and post-scarcity of namespaces, and about why everyone alive carries some version of a golden age in their memory, whether they inhabited a 1990s Houston venue with a perpetually flooded bowling alley in its basement or discovered punk through carefully curated Spotify playlists in their bedroom.
The Namespace Wars
There was a time when band names existed in pre-scarcity abundance. You could call yourself Butthole Surfers because the field was wide open and the consequences were minimal. The name might make booking agents and journalists (The Houston Post and Chronicle only referred to the band as "B-hole Surfers") uncomfortable, but that was the point. The dadaist provocation had room to breathe. Flaming Lips could be whimsical and absurd without worrying whether someone else had claimed it first, whether the domain was available, whether it would pass through five different search filters without collision.
Now, before committing to a name, bands check trademark databases, domain registrars, social media handles across multiple platforms, streaming services, and do a general web search to ensure they're not stepping on anyone's toes. Or at the very least search Discogs and Bandcamp. This isn't paranoia—it's practical necessity in a world where namespace collisions have real consequences. The low-grade anxiety of searching your own originality, the cold relief when the results page comes up empty. The abundance has evaporated. Every good name is already taken, held by a defunct MySpace band from 2006 or squatted by someone waiting for a buyout offer.
"Onion Flavored Rings" exists because "Onion Flavored Onion Rings" probably failed the five-step clearance. Someone, somewhere, had already claimed some portion of that territory. The band couldn't afford to waste their shot, so they trimmed the name to something that cleared all searches. Material scarcity created aesthetic caution.
Meanwhile, Frito-Lay launches "Steakhouse Onion Flavored Onion Rings" with complete confidence. The corporation doesn't worry about namespace scarcity because it operates at a scale where individual product failures are rounding errors. Discontinue one line, launch Flamin' Hot Ranch Twisted next quarter. They have actual abundance—capital, distribution, the infrastructure to flood shelves with experiments and see what sticks (visit your local Grocery Outlet to witness the failed experiments). They can be as redundant, nonsensical, and dadaist as they want because they're not trying to signal belonging to a countercultural scene. They're just moving product. Though even corporations now chase virality with the nervous energy of garage bands, launching bizarre flavor combinations hoping one might catch fire on social media—the anxiety creeping upward through the infrastructure.
The cruel inversion is complete: corporations have late-stage capitalism's abundance while artists have its scarcity. The kids workshop their quirky band name through careful clearance checks, thinking they're being subversive by referencing a snack food, while Frito-Lay casually out-dadas them without trying. The corporations have weaponized weirdness as pure id, no irony required, because they never had to question whether being strange was on-brand.
Pipeline and Spigot
In the 1990s Houston scene, information traveled through a pipeline (appropriate for the city's oil & gas hegemony): sweaty, leaky, human—physical, slow, embedded in social networks and geographical space. You found out about shows through xeroxed flyers, through someone telling someone, through being present in the right place at the right time. If you missed it, you missed it. There was no Instagram story to catch later, no setlist available on streaming the next day. Scarcity created value and FOMO that actually meant something.
The venues themselves embodied this pipeline logic. Less reputable bars and clubs with fire code violations and questionable ownership, places that might not exist in six months and often didn't. A stage barely larger than a New York efficiency apartment, somehow accommodating all of Stereolab. A bowling alley in the basement, perpetually flooded by all accounts, a detail that colored the entire experience even if you never saw it yourself. The knowledge that you were in a barely-holding-together space made Stereolab's meticulous motorik grooves even more miraculous. Precision against chaos.
Things bled together in these spaces: the bands, the crowd, the scene, the danger. You'd see a touring act and three local openers you'd never heard of. The bartender might be in one of the bands. Someone's ex would start a fight. You'd leave with a t-shirt from the merch table, maybe a phone number on your hand. The embeddedness was physical and social, not content consumption but lived fact.
Now we have the spigot: sanitized pressure, infinite access, always available, algorithmically curated. Every show documented, every setlist archived, every band instantly researchable. The abundance is real, but it produces its own poverty. You can't stream the feeling of a packed room in July with no AC, everyone drenched, the band barely able to hear themselves. You can't get kicked out of an algorithm. The porousness that made scenes matter—information traveling slowly, physically, through human contact—has been filled in and buffed into frictionless flow.
The spigot gives you clear water but no taste of the pipe. Or of the water.
Everyone's Golden Age
The specific convergence that produced those Houston shows—bands touring before they got too big, venues that couldn't exist under current regulations, ticket prices people could afford, a critical mass willing to show up to sketchy spaces—was unrepeatable and unsustainable. That's why it gets remembered as a golden age. Not because everything was objectively better then, but because the specific conditions aligned in ways that can't be recreated.
Someone too young for 1990s Houston might find their golden age in discovering bands through Bandcamp in 2014, when the platform felt like a secret discovery engine before it became institutionalized. Someone else might point to vegan bars hosting OSR gaming nights between shows, a curated approximation of older scenes but self-conscious in ways the flooded bowling alley could never be.
The pattern repeats across all cultural production. Readers remember when Amazon's recommendation algorithm actually worked, before it became a slot machine for sponsored content. Gamers remember when online multiplayer felt like community rather than matchmaking queue. Every generation gets a golden age before the namespace fills up, before the infrastructure ossifies, before the awareness and fear set in.
This isn't pure nostalgia. The material conditions genuinely were different. Namespace abundance was real before everything got claimed. The pipeline distributed information differently than the spigot does. Venues operated under different constraints. We all mistake abundance for progress until the pipeline clogs or ruptures. But the golden age thinking also serves a function: it's how we process the knowledge that some configurations of culture are fundamentally unsustainable, that what mattered about them can't be preserved through documentation alone.
The Azerbaijani hardcore band that grabs "Shrimps Is Bugs" from social media and makes it their own without the Portland graffiti baggage, without the shellfish hangups, without all the cultural knowledge that would make it insufferable—they're not accessing the same golden age. They're making their own, pulling fragments from the internet slurry and weaponizing them in new contexts. The phrase becomes pure sound and energy. The Finnish duo Maustetytöt being resolutely non-English despite probably speaking English more correctly than most Americans, choosing cultural specificity over international appeal—that's a different kind of abundance in an era of supposed connectivity. They understand that timbre matters, that the sound of Finnish carries information English can't translate.
Everyone will remember some form of golden age because everyone experiences the moment when the thing that worked stops working, when the namespace fills up, when the pipeline becomes a spigot, when you can no longer be "Butthole Surfers" because that train has long since departed and the rails have been torn up. The specifics change but the structure persists: abundance becomes scarcity, precarity becomes regulation, scenes become content. And underneath it all, auditory scarcity—the loss of distinct timbre in the algorithmic mix, where every band name sounds like every other, where Stereolab's precision against chaos gets smoothed into equalized playback on identical speakers.
Being too milquetoast to get kicked out of a show just means you survived to remember it. That should count for something. And somewhere, right now, someone is misreading a marquee, finding the better version of a band name, mourning the hedged commitment they'll actually see performed. The corporations will keep out-absurdisting the artists, the namespace will keep shrinking, and everyone will keep discovering that their particular golden age—whenever it was, whatever it looked like—can't be recreated, only remembered.
The Emo's bowling alley stays flooded in memory, perfect and perpetual, never actually seen but always known to be down there, somewhere below the stage, giving meaning to everything above it.