On the weekend, Liv Tyler announced the birth of her baby girl Lula Rose. Once upon a time that might have been offbeat enough to be memorable—like eleven years ago when she named her son the then-unusual Milo. Maybe.
But I hope Tyler wasn’t looking for much column ink on the name, because everyone who cares about these things are going to be screeching over the return to ‘wacky’ celebrity baby names provided by Alanis Morissette, whose new daughter is named Onyx Solace.
Onyx Solace! Are you hearing me, casual name critics who still want to talk about Apple and Blue Ivy? Onyx Solace! It’s next generation Pilot Inspektor! This is great, and in these trying times it’s a pleasure to have a name like this to exclaim over. It’s also a pretty…you know… appropriate match for her son, Ever Imre. I mean, I guess if you’re naming your first child ‘Ever’, you have to choose something dramatic to avoid the other one seeming like ‘After’, no dad-joke intended, but it was kind of right there.
Also, speaking of these trying times, it’s…um…bold, maybe, to name your child Onyx Solace? Like again, this child wasn’t going to be named Bradley, but a name that can be easily thesaurus-ed to ‘Black Comfort’ seems either tone deaf or self-aggrandizing, or both. Like, even Saint West has some irony about it, you know?
But this comes back to my earlier point. With babies named Violet and Jonathan and Lula feeling so de rigeur, this is the ridiculous, overly-earnest, feelings-and-sentiments celebrity name we need to giggle over right now.
