I get a perverse pleasure when people ask me how to pronounce my last name, Krule. I usually smile and say “cruel, as in evil.” Writers have told me that I have a great name for an editor (one who isn’t so beloved I imagine) and in college, a commenter who didn’t agree with an op-ed I’d written for the paper wrote that my name sounded like a Roald Dahl character. I love it. Shortened from Krulewich (which is even more conducive to name-calling shenanigans than its current iteration) by my grandfather, if your name ends in Krule, we’re related.
So I felt an instant bond when I read a New York Times article about the 17-year-old British singer Archy Marshall—who recently changed his name from the juvenile “Zoo Kid,” to the majestic “King Krule.” My excitement was immediately followed by curiosity. Marshall’s breakout song “Out Getting Ribs” showcases his unusually, and unexpectedly, deep voice as well as his emotionally raw lyrics. What it doesn’t do, is explain his new name. At the time he was still going by Zoo Kid, but his latest single, “The Noose of Jah City”—part of his five-song EP that came out last week—isn’t much help either. While it’s typical for names to change as performers try to take on more adult personas (think Lil’ Bow Wow) this one resonated a bit more for me. Unfortunately, when I tried contacting him (I was hoping to write something for the magazine where I work) to see if I somehow inspired the name change—or if maybe he was a long-lost cousin—his representative strung me along, but ultimately stopped responding to my emails. (Maybe that’s where the cruelty comes from?)
Family lore has it that Krule is derived from a Polish word for royalty, though I haven’t been able to figure out the origin of this theory. (If that’s the case King Krule might even be a bit redundant.) When I worked at NPR a colleague joked that I was probably related to Robert Krulwich of Radio Lab fame, though even before my grandfather truncated our surname, his spelling is a bit different than ours. (The same goes for Sara Krulwich, a photographer for The New York Times, another person I’d love to be related to, if only for the theater tickets.) The only other “celebrity” my family has encountered with the name was a Marvel mutant (and savage) Krule, and who, as the name suggests, is totally evil. The thing is, no one who is currently at Marvel has any idea why it’s spelled that way—I was told that the proper spelling is “Crule” and the K was just a fluke. Of course at some point action figures were made with the “Krule” spelling—and yes, my family has quite a few of them lying around the house.
King Krule’s camp still hasn’t replied to my attempts to find out why Marshall went with the name and what he thinks it means (one friend suggested he may just be a bad speller). While Krule may be a unique name for a singer, using the homonym, cruel, in lyrics is commonplace. Though Marshall may have the spelling down, if we’re going with phonetics, you can’t really beat the chorus of my theme song of the moment: St. Vincent’s “Cruel.” If I ever become famous, that’s the song I want playing when I walk into a room.
