#102: Dispatch from 2025 music festival season
Fcukers; Lana Del Rabies; Wave Chapelle; Organ Fairchild; Popes of Chillitown; Hans Gruber and the Die Hards; Hard Maybe; What So Not; Genital Shame; It’s You! It’s Me! And There’s Dancing!; more
It’s that special time of year, when young people’s thoughts turn to standing in sprawling fields under the sweltering sun to listen to music with thousands of overheated, probably intoxicated people. Let’s take a look at some of the artists sweating it out on stage for their enjoyment.
Fcukers
Where: Coachella, Electric Daisy Carnival
On the surface, “Fcukers” looks like something kids would type in chats to get around content filters, but its origin is less juvenile. Back in the early ’90s, British clothing brand French Connection started branding itself as “fcuk,” which naturally caused monocles to shatter all over Great Britain.
Decades later, fcuk clothing found its way to multi-instrumentalist Jackson Walker Lewis, who co-founded Fcukers with vocalist Shanny Wise in NYC. As Lewis told Rolling Stone:
“I had a French Connection hoodie at the time. To me, the name Fcukers perfectly encapsulated the vibe that she and I were going for, in the sense that we were both like, ‘We don’t give a shit. We’re not going to have a music career. Who cares? We’re going to do exactly what we want.’”
And that they are. As a Rolling Stone headline put it last month, Lewis and Wise are having more fun than anyone right now. Fcukers’ ’90s-indebted electronic music—think house beats and breathy trip-hop vocals—came on like 3-MMC in a club kid’s bloodstream. The group quickly went from a zero-fcuks-given lark in 2022 to the toast of Hipsterland.1
Their first 10 shows took them to four continents. Über-hip label Ninja Tune released their debut EP, Baggy$$, on its Technicolour imprint. James Murphy and Junior Sanchez remixed them. Fancy-pants French fashion house Celine flew the duo to Paris to DJ their Fashion Week party.
Fcukers’ Instagram is full of blurry candids, unsmiling selfies, startling live clips, and photo shoots for places like The Face and NME, so it’s ideal if you’re looking to feel hopelessly square.
Surprisingly, neither Wise nor Lewis were well-known pre-Fcukers. Both slugged it out in the indie-rock world for a bit, Lewis in another BNB-appropriate group called Spud Cannon and Wise in the more generically named outfit the Shacks. They didn’t really know anything about house music, either.
How #blessed are Fcukers? Wise can film herself lip-synching on an NYC bus, release it as a music video, and it’ll rack up more than 300,000 views. Expect the hype to kick up several notches when their full-length drops this year.
Lana Del Rabies
Where: Prepare the Ground
Wave Chapelle
Where: SXSW
Organ Fairchild
Where: Borderland Festival
You could infer numerous genres from these names. I can’t say I expected Lana Del Rabies to look like this…
…but it fits. Multimedia artist Sam An mixes “industrial, gothic noise, and metal with experimental elements” to explore “the esoteric brutality of what it means to be human in a world consumed by the threat of apocalypse.” The perfect soundtrack to 2025, in other words.
A few years back, An announced plans to abandon the Lana Del Rabies name, but it didn’t stick. “I was surprised to find that a lot of people cared about the LDR project after I tried to change it,” she said in an interview. She must’ve forgotten the first rule of Band Name Bureau: Never change your name. Maybe she kept it for consistency’s sake when she released a collaborative song with Brigitte Bardon’t.
Disregarding the first rule of BNB is Milwaukee hip-hop artist Wave Chapelle, who originally went by Astro. Some time in the ’00s, back when everyone loved Dave Chappelle, he switched it up.
“I pretty much got my name from just kicking it in the studio with the homies. We would always come up with these names like ‘Trill Cosby’ or ‘Xanny Glover’ and whatnot. This was around the time I got hip to the ‘Wavy’ term.2 I was using it a lot in my raps, and I said this crazy line where I ended up calling myself Wave Chapelle, even though I was going by a different rap name at the time. So the homies just started calling me Wave—Chapelle of course came from Dave Chappelle, who is my favorite comedian hands down.
I wonder if that’s still the case? The above quote is from 2016, before the comedian launched his “Trans People are Hilarious Freaks” comeback. Wave’s Instagram is full of support for the liberal candidate for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, so hopefully he found some other comedy heroes, like Tony Hinchcliffe.
Then there’s Organ Fairchild, the outlier among these three. I was wondering how anyone under 45 would know the sexpot star Falcon Crest,3 and then I saw a photo.
These dudes definitely remember the actor’s heyday, but they weren’t planning to pay her homage like this. As guitarist Dave Ruch told WXXI:
“We wanted to name the band ‘Organ Freeman,’ after Morgan Freeman, but we discovered there’s already an organ trio in Los Angeles with that name. We were batting around some other names, and we all remembered Morgan Fairchild from posters in the 1970s. It was just a way to get ‘organ’ in the name, and also have a little fun. But we do get a lot of comments from people who have no idea who she is and think it’s a great band name.”
Why does “organ” need to be in the name? IS THIS SOME PENIS THING, CREEPS?
No, Organ Fairchild self-describes as “instrumental organ trio/funky adventure seekers.” While I consider the latter grounds for immediate dismissal, other people don’t seem to mind. Organ Fairchild’s 2024 album, Songs We Didn’t Write, debuted at No. 1 on the radio chart compiled by Relix and JamBands.com. Far out!
The accolades continue. “Voted NY’s Top Emerging Band in 2021”4 blares the landing page for Organ Fairchild’s website. “Those guys, emerging?” you say. “From what, cataract surgery?”
Har har, you ageist! No, Organ Fairchild has only been a band since 2020, so they were still “emerging” in 2021. That said, the trio has known each other since 1983, when they played in Buffalo’s premier Grateful Dead cover band, Wild Knights. For whatever reason, they never wrote originals together until 2020. Their first show so displeased God that He unleashed COVID a month later.
Popes of Chillitown
Where: Bearded Theory
This is an A+ Simpsons reference from one of the show’s best episodes, season eight’s “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer.”
Popes of Chillitown have six members, so you know what that means. “We all started playing loads of reggae, reggae turned into ska-punk, which turned into punk, and over the years turned into drum n bass/metal,” frontman Matt Conner said in an interview. He’s kidding about that last one, though plenty of people would prefer “drum n bass/metal” over ska-punk. Most people would prefer anything over ska-punk, come to think of it.5
Hans Gruber and the Die Hards
Where: Camp Punksylvania
Ska-punk haters will want to skip Hans Gruber and the Die Hards too. Their “live shows are filled with pits, sock puppets, conga lines and confusion,” per their bio, which notes the band also bounces around from “Boston hardcore to Colombian cumbia, Southern gospel to crossover thrash.”
I first wrote about these guys in the 2017 Year in Band Names, and they fall under that classic band-naming convention I call Such and Such and the So and So’s. While this name elicits knowing chuckles, I’d argue it’s a bit on the nose.
These names work best when they’re more—apologies for this—IYKYK. Die Hard fans know Hans Gruber is the villain played by the inimitable Alan Rickman, so you don’t need “Die Hards” in the band name. There are so many options: Hans Gruber and the Bearer Bonds (what they were stealing at Nakatomi Plaza), Hans Gruber and the Mystery Guests or Hans Gruber and the Mister Cowboys (from Gruber’s dialogue), Hans Gruber and Yippee-Ki-Yays…I’ll stop now.
This is getting long, so let’s speed through these last few, eh?
Hard Maybe (Capitol Hill Block Party). Perhaps I appreciate the name of this Seattle neo-soul outfit because I feel a kinship to the spirit of “hard maybe.” Hey, it’s better than a hard no.
What So Not (Bonnaroo). Does this sound like an EDM name to you? I was picturing smart-alecky indie rock, not this:
Genital Shame (Prepare the Ground). This name really lands vis à vis the group’s self-described genre, “trans woman black metal.” The same goes for songs like “Hermaphroditic Image” and “I Met Kerri Colby.”
It’s You! It’s Me! And There’s Dancing! (Seattle Pop Punk Festival). Speaking of trans artists: This Portland punk group self-describes as “some kind of guitar music” and takes its name from “You! Me! Dancing!,” the signature song of Welsh indie outfit Los Campesinos.6
Eep-Oop! (Seattle Pop Punk Festival). Bio: “Seattle’s okayest pop/punk band.”
Pro Wrestling the Band (R4A Fest). Bio: “Pro Wrestling the Band are a five piece rock and roll band. The bar staff love them.” When you win over the staff, you win free drinks.
POST-SCRIPTS
Does it drive the copyeditor in me crazy that Wave spells it Chapelle, not Chappelle? Yes, yes it does.
Coming later this month: the Audit with the legendary J. Robbins, going through the many evocative monikers in his discography. Jawbox. Burning Airlines. Office of Future Plans. And more.
I hate this meaningless word, but look at their Instagram.
Rapper Max B, a.k.a. Wavy Crockett, popularized “wavy” back in the ’00s…before being sentenced to 75 years in prison. (It was later reduced to 12.)
Even that point of reference is more recent, because Fairchild found fame in the ’70s on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow. I know her best from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, of course.
I’m not one of them, shockingly enough. I’ve got no beef with fun music.
FESTIVAL STORY: At Lollapalooza in 2007, I bailed on Amy Winehouse’s set to watch Los Campesinos’ first-ever U.S. performance. For some reason, the festival put Winehouse in the middle of the afternoon, and not to be all “the vibes were off,” but the vibes were off. Her music didn’t suit a giant field of people beneath punishing sunlight. And let’s be honest, “You! Me! Dancing!” is way more fun than anything in Winehouse’s sadly abbreviated discography.
…copy editor in you…top ten maybe not purposely mispelled bandnames?…