Fueled by Ramen recording artist Cobra Starship is a very modern band. They are currently on tour, opening for Fall Out Boy, along with fellow openers Paul Wall, +44, and The Academy is . . . Cobra Starship’s name sounds like a cross between TheCobrasnake and late Jefferson Airplane. They’ve got a song on the Snakes on a Plane and the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie soundtracks, ringtones available, a Glamour Kills clothing endorsement, and impressively pimped out profiles on all the good social networking sites. They even (I’m sure ironically) cover Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” The CS site itself contains a sort of pseudo-ironic “typical” rockstar history, which is probably actually based on true events but liberally gilded. Band leader Gabe Saporta’s animal familiar-dictated mission is apparently teaching “hipsters to not take themselves so seriously and by telling emo kids to stop being pussies.”
I guess Cobra Starship’s genre is Self-Deprecating Post-Emo? I don’t know. The salient point for Blue Blood readers is that Xanthia Doll appears dancing her yellow-clad booty off in their new video for their long-windedly-named single “Send My Love To The Dancefloor, I’ll See You In Hell (Hey Mister DJ)” from their album, While The City Sleeps, We Rule The Streets. Xanthia says, “I’m so happy I’m in it! It was a lot of fun to be a part of! Just look for red hair and a bright yellow jacket and you’ll see me! Wheeeeeeeeee!!!!!!”
Xanthia’s positive attitude is a lot of fun, but I have to admit that I like my rockstars to truly own what they do. If I were more familiar with modern emo, apparently Cobra Starship’s Gabe tapped a number of big deal emo folks to work on the project. An emo allstar band slagging off emo kids for being pussies is, you know, emoriffically ironic. I’d be more versed in emo if it could stand up and be proud of what it is, instead of hiding behind irony, self-deprecation, and pretending they don’t really mean whatever it is they are expressing. Emo adults need to stop being such pussies.
I perused TuckerMax.com upon my return from Austin, to see if there was any vital news I should include in my article about Tucker Max and his writing and his SXSW panel. There was nothing which really jumped out as necessary for an introduction piece. But, what the heck, I’ll give you all the lowdown on what he has coming up.
He is currently working on a series for Comedy Central. He envisions the show as being a 100% scripted half hour comedy with no laugh track. Something like The Office or Entourage or Tucker suggests one “picture a Sex and the City for guys, done in the vein of my stories.” I’ve never seen Sex and the City, so this doesn’t evoke much for me, but maybe it will for other folks. At any rate, a fictional comedy half hour with the feel of a Tucker Max adventure sounds entertaining to me, so I’ll be putting the key phrase “Tucker Max” in my TiVo for whenever the heck the long-ass cycle of television production produces an actual show. I just used the word heck twice in the same article. Don’t get me wrong, I like the word heck, but I think this means I am jet-lagged.
A fun factoid is that apparently one of the producers of the upcoming Tucker Max show is former ABC president Jamie Tarses, the first female entertainment chief in the industry, who is reportedly the inspiration for the character of fictional sensitive-but-tough network president Jordan McDeere on the Aaron Sorkin-written, Thomas Schlamme-directed, star-studded, and shockingly disapppointing NBC show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
The Tucker blog announces his SXSW appearance and mentions that the show might be a bit pricey just to hear him speak, but caveats: “If you are a hot girl in or around Austin, well, you don’t need to pay to hear me speak. Just send me an email and we’ll get drinks. Or just we can just skip the pleasantries and you can come over to my hotel and fuck, whichever you prefer.”
The most recent entry in Tucker Max’s blog announces that he is going to be co-writing a book with Paul Wall. I told Forrest Black this and his first response was to ask if it was going to be called Stuff in Your Mouth. He then immediately posted this thought to his Twitter account. Twitter, although you can use it in your browser or instant messenger client, is essentially like short attention span LiveJournal for your Blackberry or Treo, and it was this year’s hot site to, err, twitter about at the 2007 SXSW Interactive conference. If you are feeling digitally trendy, you can find my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/AmeliaG and the still kinda undeveloped Blue Blood Twitter account at http://twitter.com/BlueBlood. Ya know, I just popped over to Twitter, preparatory to making this post and the two most recent posts were Forrest saying “Coffee is a good thing” and Halcyon saying, “trying to find a balance between SXSW inspiration and despair.” There may be a certain sort of odd haiku quality to Twitter.
