Ben over at the World's Fair is looking for a house band for ScienceBlogs. He goes on for a while about Phish, which is kind of bizarre-- you can't be stoned enough to appreciate Phish while also retaining the ability to do math. He also suggests a few slightly more obvious nerd bands-- Devo, They Might Be Giants, Weezer-- before ending up with Wilco. Which I also don't really understand, unless it's because Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is about as much fun as vector calculus.
If you want to suggest a "house band" for this mob, the obvious direction to go would for people like They Might Be Giants, or Tom Lehrer, or Jonathan Coulton, who do songs that are actually about science. These kind of miss the whole point of the "house band" thing, though-- you don't want a band that's as nerdy as you are-- if you're moderately cool, you want a band that's nerdier than you are, to make yourself look better (see, for example, David Letterman and Paul Shaffer), but if you're a total dork, you want a band that's cooler than you are (see, for example, Conan O'Brien and Max Weinberg) to bring people in.
We're dorks hereabouts, so clearly, we don't wnat to go with somebody really dorky as a house band, no matter how good a lyric "I'm so into you, but I'm way too smart for you" is.
Another way to look at this is to consider that Seed isn't actually about doing science, but rather about popularizing science. It's a magazine, not a journal, and they're the ones that pay the bills. So what we want is a band appropriate for Seed, not for the nerdiest people on the Internet. A band a little cooler than we are, but who has done songs about science popularization...
(My suggestion below the fold.)
So I'll throw out Fountains of Wayne. They're definitely nerds, but cooler than most of the ScienceBloggers, and they write smart, funny pop songs. They're a very New York band, and Seed is based in New York, and one of their songs ("Laser Show" off Utopia Parkway) is about going to the Hayden Planetarium... That's science, or at least pop science.
RPM's suggestion of the Weakerthans is a good one, too, but their science connection is even more tenuous. Reconstruction Site really is a fantastic album, though, and everybody should go buy it.
(OK, fine, it doesn't make any more sense than Wilco or Phish, but it's a chance to plug one of my favorite bands. And unlike Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Utopia Parkway and Welcome Interstate Managers are good pop records.)
(Also, it's been a long day, so cut me some slack...)
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Boo! I don't understand the anti-YHF backlash. Sure, the critics tried to turn it into Sgt. Pepper, but ignore that and you have one of the best rock albums of the past two decades. Not that I'm a partisan, but I see a direct line from The Replacements to Pavement to Radiohead to Wilco--which, yes, makes me look like a mindless hack of a "critic," but I can't deny the power of Let It Be, Tim, Slanted and Enchanted, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, OK Computer, Being There, Summerteeth, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
I think YHF the latest in that line, and fully worthy of being SB's house band. Think about it: the band's defined by its devotion to exactitude, just like a scientist. You complain about your tools, they insist on perfecting their own, &c. (Yes, that is a lame "et cetera," but your archives refuse to load, so I can only draw my examples--of which I have many more--from my RSS reader.)
P.S. This post never appeared in my reader. When this Mets game ends and I have my wits about me, I'll respond it. (I know, I know, but feel free to exhale.)
Well, Coulton does have experience as the official Contributing Troubadour at Popular Science.
All your arguments for Fountains of Wayne apply to another New York band in a similar vein with a much more apropos name - We Are Scientists.
And I still cannot fathom Chad's dislike for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Now A Ghost Is Born is meandering and pretentious, but YHF is genius.
What about Aussie band Regurgitator, especially their 'Unit' album. It's geek-a-licious, see the video-game-inspired Black Bugs for proof...
I might be overstating my dislike of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot somewhat, for the sake of controversy. I really don't think it's a towering work of genius, though-- Summerteeth is a great record, but YHF goes a little too far in the critics-love-it direction of "Let's have all the songs fall apart into meaningless noise at the end!"
Likewise, OK Computer is an excellent album, and everything after it kind of sucks. In both cases, I'm convinced that the rave reviews are part of either the mafia or "adolescent relationship to music" theories of criticism.
(True YHF story: When it first came out, I listened to it for a while in the store, and there was this annoying sort of howling noise in the background of one of the songs. "I hope this doesn't keep up for the whole album," I said, but it seemed like it was going to. I took the headphones off, and the noise didn't stop, because a store employee was vacuuming the floors immediately behind me.
(If I can't tell the difference between the miscellaneous crap you have on your album, and somebody running a vacuum cleaner behind me, that's not a good sign. See also: Phish.)
aww, come on, chad, give me some love here -- i'm an engineer (i.e, "good at math") and enjoy phish and all while not stoned. and are you suggesting here at the end that you *don't* appreciate when a drummer actually plays solos on a vacuum cleaner? or was the last line an off-handed random comment, not a reference to the actual infamous vacuum solos of Jon Fishman?
Count me in with Chad. YHF is way, way overrated. (Actually, so is Sgt. Pepper, now that you mention it, but that's another story.) It's not that I dislike it so much as that I don't like it as much as the critics and YHF fanatics think that I should. Quite frankly, I consider it a tad self-indulgent, and not self-indulgent in a good way, as Radiohead's OK Computer is. YHF is a decent album (and I do own a copy), but it's definitely not a towering work of "genius." I'd give it a 7/10, or maybe a 7.5.
I guess MC Hawking and his Dark Matter Band violate the rules for being too nerdy and too obvious, eh?
How 'bout Particle?? Check 'em out at www.particlepeople.com . Though they claim to be moving away from their "space porn funk," their symbol would still be appropriate.