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Nylon.
01
Blender. 02
Article by Linda, #48. 03
CMJ. 04
Nylon Magazine, June/July 2002, pg. 49
What do you
call a pop band that references Billy Squier, Adam Ant,
and The Cure? Who joyfully interrupt their stage show to
act out a scene from Les Miserables--or from
their smarty-pants rap spoof, Diamondz? Who choreographed
an elaborate boy-band parody for a cable-acces show in
Chicago? Who sing songs about ex-girlfriends and songs
about lost cats that sound like they're about
ex-girlfriends? And who is co-managed by a member of They
Might Be Giants? Anything but "quirky," please.
According to Webster's, that word means an unpredictable
act or event; a sharp turn or twist. According to the
music business, it means a goofball pigeonhole that you
can't escape.
"Do you think we're going to get called
quirky?" Damian Kulash, singer of the Chicago band
OK Go asks. "We're really worried about that. So is
the label. They don't want us to enact Les Mis
anymore."
But unpredictable twists like that are part of the
excitable charm of OK Go; at the same time, it doesn't
begin to do justice to the manic pop energy that exudes
from the band's eponymous debut album, which bounces
smartly between adrenalized anthems and bittersweet
slow-burns ("There's A Fire" is a lush wink at
The Cure). Clever, yes, but in a way that feels perfectly
unpretentious.
Maybe that goes back to their beginning. Kulash--whom the
Washington Post has described as "cute
enough to date supermodels"--met bassist Tim
Nordwind at "dorky summer band camp" when they
were 12. "We had a band called Greased Ferrets. I
played guitar, because I had played violin. We did one
show behind a chainlink fence that separated the girls'
and boys' camps. We had a concert flautist who wanted to
be a sax player, a guy playing drums on metal folding
chairs, and Tim climbing the fence, screaming at the
girls."
The two met up again in Chicago after college and were
joined by drummer Dan Konopka and Andy Duncan on
keyboards and guitar. The ball started rolling pretty
fast, as they went from opening for Elliot Smith and
Promise Ring to selling out their own headlining shows.
They Might Be Giants' John Flansbergh signed on as a
manager after they blew him away opening for his own
band. In 2000, they joined NPR show This American
Life's traveling holiday revue, winning over
audiences who had come to hear readers like Sarah Vowell
and Russell Banks. As the show's host Ira Glass remembers
it, "The band simply overwhelmed the audience with
this exuberant buzz of fun and happiness and youth and
rock 'n' roll. They were sexy in a way that had a kind of
well-scrubbed pop innocence to it, but also was able to
move a friend into murmuring backstage, 'I want to fuck
all four of them.'"
A deal with Capitol came around the same time, and the
band recorded what was to be their major-label debut. And
then scrapped the whole thing. "The first attempt
felt too self-consciously indie and arty. Like, there was
a conscious decision to make every drum sound different.
It was willfully left-turny. It would have been called
quirky for sure," Kulash says. "With the second
version, there's nothing precious about it."
First single "Get Over It" kicks in with a
thunderous, hand-clapping nod to Billy Squier's "The
Stroke" (or is it Queen's "We Will Rock
You"?) that soars into an infectious, arena-sized
rush of keybaord exhilaration and an anthemic chorus.
Kulash writes clever couplets from the Stephen Malkmus
school of lyricism (in fact, he was a semiotics major at
Brown): "mediocre people do exceptional things all
the time/...could've been a genius if you had an ax to
grind" goes the start-stop pop tart "What to
Do." Buzzing with nervous energy, "Don't Ask
Me" snappily sets the scene of meeting an ex for
lunch: "Don't think I've forgotten you never liked
that neckals/So cordial, so rotten/'Kiss-kiss-let's meet
for breakfast.'"
"The words are so not angry. They're
sarcastic," Kulash shrugs. "'Get Over It' was
inspired by Joan Jett and Adam Ant and Cheap
Trick--there's a log of angst in their songs, but you
would never call it angry music."
And then there's "Bye Bye Baby," in which the
love of the singer's life abandons him to chase her
movie-star dreams.
"It's about my cat in high school. She was kind of a
pissy little thing, but she loved me. I went away to
school, and when I came back she was gone," he
remembers. "My mom found a photo of her in a cat
food ad, so I guess she ran away to Hollywood. The lyrics
sound so cheesy up front, but I mean...they're about a
cat."
* * *
Blender Magazine, October 2002, pgs. 16, 34, 124
* * *
Written (for her school newspaper) and submitted by Linda, TNFC #48:
On Sunday,
September 15, OK Go played at Newberry Comics in Harvard
Square after their gig at College Fest. Formed in 1998,
OK Go comes from Chicago and has spent this past year
touring with the likes of The Vines and They Might Be
Giants.
I had the good fortune to catch their last two and a half
songs that day, the last of which was their current radio
single, "Get Over It." Being short of stature,
looking over the heads of the people in front of me was
impossible, but I was able to stretch out my neck far
enough to see a little to the side of the taller folks.
From the little that I heard and saw, OK Go played with
great energy and a lot of fun, and they were all
dutifully and sincerely grateful to their (modest)
audience.
After the show, they put away their instruments and sat
down behind a table in another corner of the store to
sign autographs and chat casually with the interested and
extroverted. Clutching my OK Go CD jacket in my hands
like a sacred relic, I immediately jumped in line behind
two young women with blue hair for my turn to be blessed.
(For a $2 deposit on the OK Go CD that came out on the
17th, I received a CD jacket, a sweatband, a patch, and a
sticker.) When finally I reached the front of the line, I
was so ridiculously star-struck that I could only stand
stupidly in front of the table with starry eyes and a big
smile plastered on my face, saying "hi" shyly
each time my CD jacket was passed on to another band
member. Finally it arrived at Damian, the lead singer,
who reached across the table to shake my hand with a
smile, introducing himself and asking my name like he
really cared. On impulse and a sudden panic that my
once-in-a-lifetime chance might go by without my having
spoken two words to any one of them, I said, "I feel
so young," with a nervous laugh.
"Why?" asked Damian politely.
I gave another small laugh, said, "Everyone's like
taller than me," and then cringed inwardly at my
complete lack of eloquence.
Damian laughed graciously and said something about how
Tim, the band mate sitting next to him, was rather short
too, "so he can relate." Tim looked up from his
Sharpie, smiled, nodded, and assented with a
"yeah." After Damian finished his autograph, he
thanked me for coming out with a friendly smile and I
said, "thank you," all smiley and still
star-struck, wondering if my voice really sounded as high
and schoolgirly as I thought it did.
From that day on, OK Go became my favorite band. There's
just something about seeing a band perform in such close
quarters and then shaking the lead singer's hand that can
give you the sense of a personal connection with them.
They become real to you, like they're actual people and
not misty demi-gods floating around somewhere in the
celebrity-worshipping imaginations of the masses. And
whenever you hear them on the radio or see them on TV,
you can smile and think to yourself, I met them, the lead
singer shook my hand, the bassist smiled at me, etc., and
all of a sudden they're no longer so far away in the sky
of Hollywood stars. They become simply a bunch of nice
guys who make music that you like to listen to. Call it a
terrific marketing ploy (and I agree it was an effective
one), but they've made a loyal fan out of me.
As for their music, OK Go's first CD (self-titled) is a
wonderfully fun pop/rock record with witty, often poetic,
always intelligent lyrics, excellent musicianship, and
catchy melodies that repeatedly induce singing along.
Though their chords and harmonies are sometimes
reminiscent of Weezer, they lack the woeful pain that the
emo genre is all about, replacing it instead with
shameless delight. The loud vocals and heavy guitar-work
on their current stadium-rock single "Get Over
It" implies a slightly heavier record than this one
actually is. Otherwise, the rest of the songs on the CD
follow perfectly along with its clever lyrics and
enthusiastic spirit. Subject matter ranges from an
unexpected and irritating encounter with an ex-girlfriend
in "Don't Ask Me" to more-ambitious-than-thou
departing friends in "Bye Bye Baby." On several
songs, such as "Shortly Before the End" and
"Return," the band gets more serious and shows
its emotional range, and on "There's a Fire,"
"C-C-C-Cinnamon Lips" and "Hello, My
Treacherous Friends" they edge away from more
conventional rock song formulas. If you're sick of morose
and angst-ridden heavy metal or simply enjoy the sweet
delights of happy, smart rock, OK Go is for you. If you
find all pop music sickening and cannot stand any song
that may have the least chance of qualifying as
"catchy," then you might want to look
elsewhere.
At any rate, a bright future lies ahead for OK Go. I'm
just glad I can say that I was a fan from the start.
* * *
An article from CMJ- Scanned and
submitted by Diadra, #29