– in which Dorn almost breaks into the rapper industry, but has branding issues.
eaching the Third Age is all about thinking about new careers. With Kathleen’s encouragement I decided it was time to become a rapper. I had already done most of the heavy lifting for the job—everyone knows that 90% of rapper success comes from having the right name, and I had picked out mine: “Beau Tox”.
But before I started, I had to make sure that some upstart rapper hadn’t already claimed this name, so I did an exhaustive search (using both Bing and Google). And it turns out the name is already being used by a Belgian techno-rapper. At least, I think he’s a rapper. There’s little background info on his site, and his tracks seem like easy-listening electro-pop background music with inoffensive (I don’t speak Belgian, but they sound inoffensive) lyrics delivered in rap style on a few of them.
I could probably survive a co-named competitor in faraway Belgium, but I had a bigger pig jostling for space at the Beau Tox trough: a social media star already has that name. He is apparently quite famous, mostly for being a lovable dog with a somewhat disfigured face.
Not encouraging. There are also Beau-Tox cosmetic surgery salons in Palm Beach, FL, Tribeca, NY, England, Australia, and probably elsewhere. I suspected this might be the case—the name is just too apt for that type of clinic to pass up—but I didn’t think this association would be close enough to be fatal to my career. After all, they sell Ice Tea and Ice Cubes in the grocery store, and those guys did fine.
More interestingly, there’s a Dick Tracy villian, the plastic surgeon “Dr. Beau Tox”, who gives new faces to criminals No Face and Prune Hilda. A vain Tess and Dick Tracy come in for facelifts as well, and criminal hijinks ensue, as they say. The comic can be read here, or there’s a short synopsis here.
But my favorite name pre-empter (or I should say pre-emptress) was Carlötta Beautox—“actress, thinktress, influenceress”—whose adventures trying to make it big in Hollywood can be followed in an apple podcast. It’s a funny, friendly little number full of pop culture references and silly running jokes (like everyone pronouncing her stage name byew-tox).
I couldn’t stand up to this kind of competition. I thought about reverting to my runner-up rapper name (and believe me, it was a distant second), “Butt Tox”. But I ran the mandatory Google due diligence on it and found that it also had been pre-empted, and not even by fashionable items like those above! There was Butt-tox the toilet seat sanitizer, and an ad for buttock botox injections that includes this enticement,
I know when I’m beaten. I’m giving up on the rapper business for something where the name competition is not as as cut-throat.
Maybe I’ll be a writer! Now, if I can only think of a pen name…
Thanks! Tell your friends about us if you like us!
Dorn
10/17/2019