#115: They came from 2006
LMFAO; Vampire Weekend; Japandroids; the Airborne Toxic Event; Does It Offend You, Yeah?; and too many more
The year is 2006.
The Iraq War still rages, while Saddam Hussein is executed for crimes against humanity. Speaking of crimes against humanity, Crash wins Best Picture at the Oscars. American Idol still dominates TV. The soundtrack to High School Musical is the year’s best-selling album, and U2 wins a bewildering five Grammys for How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
MySpace rules the nascent social media world, but Twitter launches in July, and then in September, Facebook opens to people who aren’t college students. The world has been worse ever since.
Here are bands who may or may not have helped matters.
LMFAO
No other name or group better embodies this time. LMFAO were like an over-customized MySpace page come to life.
Redfoo and Sky Blu—a.k.a. Stefan and Skyler Gordy, the son and grandson, respectively, of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy—made brainless, hyperactive party music. Like “a song called ‘Shots’ with Lil’ Jon”-level brainless.
Even that assessment may be generous. If you only listen for 30 seconds, you’ll hear everything LMFAO has to offer. There was truly nothing going on beyond the surface of partying, getting loaded, hooking up, and some combination of those. They made Andrew W.K. look like Leonard Cohen.
To be fair, that was the point. When asked about the inspiration behind their music—which includes songs like “I’m in Miami Bitch,” “What Happens at the Party,” “I Am Not a Whore,” “Put That A$$ to Work,” “We Came Here to Party,” etc.—Redfoo said, “Probably… women. You know, we love the ladies. Just ah… expressing that feeling inside that says [Slaps hands together.] I’m alive!”
The name tells you everything you need to know. Although internet slang for “laughing my fucking ass off” long predated the duo, it perfectly matched the group’s AOL Instant Messenger-addled shtick. (Perhaps ROFL was too PG for their 21+ vibe.)
Wikipedia will tell you, without citation, that Redfoo and Sky Blu briefly went by the name Sexy Dudes before LMFAO. Some digging turns up a bunch of interviews—like this one with NPR—with versions of this quote about Sky Blu’s grandmother.
“We were on Instant Messenger,” Stefan says, “and we asked her, ‘What do you think of our new name, Sexy Dudes?’ And she simply replied, ‘LMFAO. Are you serious?’”
This is, of course, bullshit. Setting aside the improbability of any grandmother a) using Instant Messenger and b) even knowing what “LMFAO” means, Sky’s grandma Thelma Gordy died in July 2006 at age 74. But kudos to LMFAO for not breaking character with Guy Raz on All Things Considered!
Continuing the bullshit, Know Your Meme says the duo also claimed the initialism stood for “Loving My Friends And Others.” I mean, we know they loved the ladies at least.
That would’ve worked better than the real meaning when LMFAO applied for a trademark in 2008. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected it for containing “immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter.”1 When they resubmitted in 2012, LMFAO claimed it meant “laughing my freaking ass off.”
Apparently the USPTO is cool with “ass,” because their trademark database shows it was approved. The office is also cool with “bitch,” because they approved I’M IN MIAMI BITCH for apparel. You can see Sky Blu rocking that shirt on their Wikipedia page.
All of their trademarks are now listed as dead, abandoned, or canceled.2 That’s because LMFAO were here for a good time, not a long time. After the massive success of their second album, 2011’s Sorry for Party Rocking—including the inescapable No. 1 hit “Party Rock Anthem,” which has 2.5 billion views on YouTube—and an appearance with Madonna during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2012, they put that a$$ out to pasture.
Vampire Weekend
Embodying this era for the Pitchfork Best New Music crowd is Vampire Weekend. They played their first show in 2006 at a battle of the bands at Columbia University, where they were students, and placed third out of four, according to Rolling Stone. By the following year, “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” was included in that magazine’s Best Songs of 2007. After their highly acclaimed debut dropped in January 2008, they landed the cover of Spin, a song in the opening credits of Step Brothers, a performance on Saturday Night Live, and a spot at Glastonbury.
Unsurprisingly, a backlash swiftly followed. That’s to be expected when a bunch of Ivy League preps inspired by African pop music3 find success playing smarty-pants indie rock. The jokes were so easy, even Alice Cooper got in on the fun, telling Noisecreep:
“Are all American bands metro-sexual now? I heard the title Vampire Weekend and I thought, ‘Oh, man, that’s gonna be great. I gotta see it.’ And there are these guys with little Gap T-shirts on and I’m going, ‘What happened to the balls in rock ’n’ roll? Why are American bands so wimpy?’”
As Josh Eells wrote in a Rolling Stone interview for the band’s 2010 album, Contra, “Their party-at-the-yacht-club vibe obscures the fact that songs like ‘Oxford Comma’ and ‘One (Blake’s Got a New Face)’ are slyly mocking the affluent twentysomethings that Vampire Weekend are assumed to represent.”
Still, when paired with the band’s music, the name Vampire Weekend feels less Tim Burton and more Wes Anderson. Just look at the inspiration: Koenig’s Lost Boys–inspired film spoof. While he never finished it, he cut a trailer.
That classic band-name scenario followed: When the group was about to play a show, Koenig needed a moniker. Thus began Vampire Weekend’s journey to disappointing Alice Cooper.
Japandroids
Japandroids doubled up on band-name tropes. Not only did they hastily choose their name before a performance, but they also employed a clumsy portmanteau, a popular naming convention (CunninLynguists, ApotheCarrioN, Audiotopsy, etc.)
Theirs is rooted in compromise, though. Drummer-vocalist David Prowse had suggested the name Japanese Scream (an allusion to a lyric from Kings of Leon’s “The Bucket”), while guitarist-vocalist Brian King wanted Pleasure Droids. So they mashed them together.
“Neither one of us especially liked Japandroids, but at least there was some satisfaction in knowing that neither one of us had to settle for a name that we consciously disliked,” King told The Line of Best Fit in 2009.
“I did that because we needed a name to put on this poster for one of our first shows,” he later told Tokyo Weekender. “I always thought, ‘We can change it later, whatever.’”
Ah, but bands always stick with the name they chose in a rush. Sometimes, it’s no big deal, like with Japandroids. Other times, it’s a millstone, like with Jimmy Eat World. But unlike Japandroids, Jimmy Eat World hasn’t broken up.
The Airborne Toxic Event
In Don Delillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, a railroad tank car derails, spilling a chemical that creates a cloud of noxious black smoke near the home of protagonist Jack Gladney.
“It doesn’t cause nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, like they said before.”
“What does it cause?”
“Heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu.”
“Déjà vu?”
“It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That’s not all. They’re not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore.”
“What are they calling it?”
He looked at me carefully.
“The airborne toxic event.”
Frontman Mikel Jollett is a writer, so he went literary when choosing a moniker. “People think we’re an Orange County punk band,” he told Spin in 2008. Fair.
But it wasn’t a “looks like we have ourselves a reader” flex, as Jollett explained to the Radio Free Silver Lake blog shortly after the Airborne Toxic Event formed:
White Noise changed my life. I’m not sure if it was because of his treatment of a world consumed by media or the way he dealt with the fear of death. But there’s something both touching and absurd about that book that seemed to capture what it feels like to live in America right now. You know: terrorism, death, fear, YouTube.
Some things haven’t changed!
OK, this is a lot meatier than expected. Lightning-ish round!
Other bands that formed in 2006
Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate). When a name has two exclamation points and a set of parentheses, there’s probably some long-ass explanation for it. And it’s even longer than you think, as I detailed in BNB #69.
Does It Offend You, Yeah? This name doesn’t hide its Britishness, and that’s before you learn it comes from the original British version of The Office. The group’s Dan Coop told NME, “When me and James [Rushent] first started writing music together, we decided to put it up on MySpace. We needed a name to put as our profile name, so [we] just put the first thing that was said on TV. We switched it on, and Ricky Gervais said, ‘Does it offend you, yeah? My drinking?’ So we just went with that. No thought went into it whatsoever.”
Band Name Bureau: No thought went into it whatsoever.
Yeasayer. Ever wondered what’s the opposite of a naysayer? These dudes are glad you asked.
Dananananaykroyd. This is a preposterous name, and I respect that. In a 2011 interview, member Calum Gunn said, “We really didn’t think about it when we were starting the band. We didn’t actually think we’d make it this far.” They announced their breakup a month later.
Street Sweeper Social Club. The short-lived project of Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and the Coup’s Boots Riley originally called itself Street Sweeper, but added “Social Club” because someone else already had the name. As Morello told Punk Rock Theory in 2009, “A street sweeper is an automatic shotgun. It’s basically a machine gun that fires shotgun-sized shells and is the only weapon that the NRA is in favor of banning.” Fully automatic weapons are already banned, though I’m sure the NRA would love to change that.
Thy Art is Murder. Thy name is stupid.
Tiger! Shit! Tiger! Tiger! The ’00s were the golden age for exclamation point names, though the origins of this Italian band’s moniker remain mysterious. That doesn’t stop their bio from touting how much Stephen King likes it.
Pianos Become the Teeth. “Everyone hates our name,” said vocalist Kyle Durfey in a 2011 interview. “Our old drummer came up with it. The basic thing of it is just, if you dwell on a problem so much, you become that problem. We get shit for our name all the time.” To me, the name sounds cartoonish, and I’m not the first person to say so. Bassist Zac Sewell added, “One person told us that our name reminded him of Looney Tunes, when a piano falls on a character, and they get up and they have piano keys as teeth.” While they considered changing the name, they decided against it. “If I didn’t listen to bands that had shitty band names, I wouldn’t have loved half of the bands that I absolutely love,” added guitarist Mike York. “Jimmy Eat World? Jimmy did not eat the world.” But he was so fat he could have, as we learned:
POST-SCRIPTS
I spent a truly insane amount of time fact-checking LMFAO. Please buy me a coffee so I can sip and reflect on my life choices.
Related: Redfoo currently spends his time as a tennis pro. The life of the idle rich.
In 2020, Mikel Jollett’s band and writing lives came together in Hollywood Park, an Airborne Toxic Event album and memoir about his life in the infamous Synanon cult. From the book description: “Per the leader’s mandate, all children, including Jollett and his older brother, were separated from their parents when they were six months old, and handed over to the cult’s ‘School.’ After spending years in what was essentially an orphanage, Mikel escaped the cult one morning with his mother and older brother. But in many ways, life outside Synanon was even harder and more erratic.” I’ve already checked it out from my library.
How old is that language? It might as well forbid words that grievously unsettle one’s humors.
Now’s your chance! Fashion is cyclical, so LMFAO merch is due for a comeback!
A story in The Guardian mentioned Madagasikara Volume 2, a 1986 compilation of contemporary pop music from Madagascar, along with late South African pop singer Brenda Fassie and Fela Kuti. Drummer Chris Tomson also cited an African music show at WKCR, the student station where he volunteered. OH THE APPROPRIATION!