Nominalism

Am I the only one troubled by this? There's now a band called Edie Sedgwick. Not the Edie Sedgwicks. Not the Edie Sedgwick Blues Explosion. Just Edie Sedgwick. But Edie Sedgwick is not a member of this band. She's currently dead. But that's not stopping her from having her identity appropriated and employed to sell records for people who have nothing particular to do with her or her dubious cultural legacy of speed injection and star-fucking. I suppose the idea is her name transcends names and is iconic in its own right. The name is already reified.

But what good are names if they don't refer to anything in particular? If the concepts of names and brands and things are this blurred, what hope is there for us to ever be able to identify anything anymore? Mustn't names resist reification if we're to have any sembalnce of ontological sanity?

I'm starting a new band called Bob Dylan. Hopefully the Virgin megastore clerks won't accidently misfile our records.