#67: They came from 2003
Frightened Rabbit; Gnarls Barkley; AIDS Wolf; Now, Now; I Can Make a Mess; We Were Promised Jetpacks; Huckapoo; the Twilight Sad
The year is 2003.
And, let’s be honest, things suck.
President George W. Bush makes the terrible decision to invade Iraq and launch a long, bloody, and wholly unnecessary war. There are a whole bunch of terrorist attacks across the Middle East and Europe. The Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrates while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The RIAA decides it’s a smart idea to sue people for illegally downloading music, including a 12-year-old girl. The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is foisted upon the public. And, of course, 9/11 still casts a pall over American life.
But art, like life, finds a way. Across the globe people still cram into dank practice spaces to play music and choose questionable monikers for these projects. Let us toast our Vanilla Cokes—the year’s most popular soft drink—to their tenacity.
Frightened Rabbit
A BNB favorite, Scott Hutchison started Frightened Rabbit as a solo project in Glasgow before joining forces with his brother Grant and some other folks. While the name may sound random, he had a personal connection to it. It’s how his mom would describe the anxious look he’d get on his face in uncomfortable social situations as a kid. We talked a bit about it when interviewed Scott for The A.V. Club in 2010, and he described how that social anxiety doesn’t really go away when you’re a performer.
Small talk flummoxes me. I just can’t do it. If you say, “Hey, go up to that guy at the bar. Start a conversation,” I just couldn’t do it. But at shows, you’re often, because you just played a show, it’s like easy to get things going, but I’m really silly I guess. It’s not right. I freeze up. I have something wrong with me that doesn’t quite work in the same way that other people do and it’s frustrating, but it’s something I can’t do anything about. By the way, I don’t want to put people off talking to me. I do like talking to people. [Laughs.] It’ll be exciting. I won’t be rude. I promise.
Scott was the best, and it will never stop sucking that he’s gone.
Gnarls Barkley
The duo of Goodie Mob’s CeeLo Green and producer Danger Mouse formed in 2003, but reached the peak of their powers in 2006, when “Crazy” became the inescapable hit of the year.
Festival appearances and tons of press accompanied the ascent of “Crazy,” including an interview with The Guardian where Green and Danger Mouse talked about their name:
“You ask me why we’re called Gnarls Barkley and I’m asking you ‘why not?’,” says Cee-Lo. He’s hunched over a burger in a hotel suite in Burbank, California, talking about the group for the first time. “The name Gnarls Barkley isn’t anchored down. It’s a drifter. A High Plains drifter, I might add.”
Danger Mouse grins. “There’s no story behind it,” he says, reaching for the cheesecake. A Mouse who likes cheese - no surprises there. “The name doesn't have anything to do with anything.”
Not even Charles Barkley, the basketball player?
“Nope. It’s just like everything else on this record. There was no conscious decision about stuff.”
For the record, Charles Barkley was “flattered and honored” by the name, per an old story in The Chicago Tribune. “Does Charles Barkley like Gnarls Barkley?” is one of the pre-written questions that pops up when you google the group.
The top question is “Why was Gnarls Barkley canceled?” That goes to a 2017 NME story saying the duo scrapped reunion plans because they were too bummed about Trump’s election.
Uh, that’s not why, Google. Maybe you’ve forgotten about “Women who have really been raped REMEMBER!!!”
AIDS Wolf
Back in October I wrote about Black Crystal Wolf Kids, “the world’s first indie rock tribute band” specializing in early-’00s indie rock—hence the moniker, which sounds like an amalgam of naming tropes from the era. In 2003, both Wolf Parade and AIDS Wolf debuted, though we’ll focus on the latter because the former isn’t noteworthy.
If you’re starting a noise or no-wave band, AIDS Wolf is thematically on-brand, with its combination of something awful with something more mundane—like, I don’t know, Genocide Groceries or Lobotomy Truck.
In the case of AIDS Wolf, singer Chloe Lum claimed the name “derives from an urban legend involving wolves with AIDS kept as house pets who pass the virus to others,” according to an old write-up. Wikipedia has it a little different, saying the wolves pass AIDS to house pets, who then give it to people.
Sound like bullshit? Undoubtedly, considering there are no references to this alleged urban legend online except in relation to the band. But those just the kinds of hijinks you’d expect from a group that takes photos like this:
Now, Now Every Children
I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody’s Business
Unwieldy monikers may sound like a good idea at first, but that unwieldiness can get annoying. Sure, some groups hang in there, like The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, but others bail. When Now Now emerged from Minnesota in 2003, they went by Now, Now Every Children and followed the time-honored tradition of naming their band after an inside joke:
[The name] came about as a typo while talking to friends online on their old band’s account; it was originally being considered jokingly as a possible future EP title, but stuck as the band name when they officially started the project.
Ace Enders of the Early November debuted his solo project in 2003 as I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody’s Business. To paraphrase the Dude, he was not into the whole brevity thing: Track seven on his 2004 self-titled album is called “But When the Little Fellow Came Close and Put Both Arms Around His Mother, and Kissed Her in an Appealing Boyish Fashion, She Was Moved to Tenderness.”
It didn’t last. Enders shortened the name to I Can Make a Mess before abandoning it altogether.
We Were Promised Jetpacks
Another hallmark of the early ’00s was the acclaim surrounding the original British version of The Office, which aired its second and final series in 2002. Creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant also had a popular radio chat show at the time, which would become the world’s first hit podcast.
This is just a long way of saying the UK was in full-on Ricky Gervais Mania, including the Scottish home base of We Were Promised Jetpacks. As co-founder Michael Palmer told The Scotsman (“News You Can Trust Since 1817,” whoa!) in 2011:
“The name came about after we heard a Ricky Gervais podcast,” explains Palmer. “The actual quote was ‘We were promised hovercrafts’ but we thought jetpacks sounded cooler.”
Definitely, because jetpacks were right up there with flying cars in our expected future, but We Were Promised Flying Cars doesn’t sound as good. The future has failed all of us! Though come to think of it, jetpacks, like flying cars, would probably be disastrous.
Huckapoo
By 2003, boy groups and girl groups remain a thing, but just barely. A would-be impresario named Brian Lukow—who co-created the boy band Dream Street—decides to start a girl group. Like the Spice Girls, these young ladies will have characters based on archetypes: biker, cheerleader, punk, hippie, and “hip-hop gangsta.” They have the looks, they have the shtick, they have generic pop songs. All they need is a name. Don’t worry, because Lukow’s got it covered: Huckapoo. END OF DISCUSSION, per New York.
Ever since the word Huckapoo floated into his head—nothing to do with Huk-A-Poo, the seventies clothing label, he insists—Lukow has been almost perversely attached to it. That even tween girls wrinkle their noses at the name doesn’t faze him. “The fact that they even talk about it is, to me, unbelievably good,” he says. “If you have an opinion on it, that means somehow that it’s staying up there. And what the hell? It’s just a name.”
Huckapoo would never release an album.
The Twilight Sad
2003 was a big year for Scottish indie bands with peculiar names: Frightened Rabbit, We Were Promised Jetpacks, and the Twilight Sad all formed and became formidable in short order. But before the Twilight Sad could even release an EP, Stephenie Meyer would publish Twilight in 2005, kicking off a pop culture phenomenon. In case “the Twilight Sad” didn’t already sound eye-rollingly emo, it now had to contend with brooding vampire sparkle-hunks.
That’s what you get for trying to smart! Yes, the Twilight Sad owes their name to English poet Wilfried Owen, whose poem “But I was Looking at the Permanent Stars” includes this line:
Voices of boys were by the river-side.
Sleep mothered them; and left the twilight sad.
Evocative, heady, undoubtedly highfalutin. But let us answer their poem with a more famous one, Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse”:
The best-laid schemes of Mice and Men
go oft awry
and leave us only grief and pain,
for promised joy!
Quick story. The Twilight Sad played The A.V. Club’s SXSW party one year. I forget all the bands on the bill, but Andrew W.K. hosted the show. He was sitting in the sound booth to introduce the Twilight Sad, who was listed as “Twilight” on the schedule in the sound booth. So Andrew W.K. introduces them as Twilight, and the band takes the stage scowling. I don’t remember his exact words, but singer James Graham said something like, “We’re called the Twilight Sad, you fucking cunt.”
POST-SCRIPTS
2003 birthed numerous notable bands, but Substack will only give me so much space. Did STNNNG begin the “no vowels” trend? What possessed someone to call their band A Thorn for Every Heart? What’s the story behind Art Brut and Tapes ’n Tapes? And Thao & the Get Down Stay Down? Is there an inside joke behind the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson? Mysteries for another day!
Just in case Gnarls Barkley and “Crazy” weren’t enough of an early-aughts time capsule, the duo took this promo photo:
Shout out to Dave Holmes, who recently hipped me to the existence of Huckapoo. Dave has an amazing memory, especially when it comes to the also-rans of music history. Just check out his podcast, Waiting for Impact, a limited series investigating what happened to Sudden Impact, the group that appeared for a couple of seconds in the video for Boyz II Men’s “MotownPhilly.”
