GREAT APES: Don't Change ❤️‍🔥

… PLUS a Look Back at 2023 🌒

We open at the top of an email (or web post?). The words “Slow Descent Into Radness” are stamped onto a title banner next to a cat with a french fry or a pencil in his mouth.

The year is 2024. 

All is not right in the world, but as they begin to peruse the on-screen text, our reader — intelligent, mid-twenties to fifties-ish, quite presentable — visibly relaxes, their breathing slows, neck and shoulders bleed tension, the deep folds of forehead flesh now become furrows, now seams, now mere palimpsests, as in the time-lapsed erosion of a cliff wall. 

Cue the music. 

CHRIS: With today’s track, INXS lunges to the front of the Great Apes pack, easily and precisely doubling even their nearest competitors’ numbers in the rankings. [INXS has now been Aped twice.] What drove you, Keith, to bestow such an honor on this band, even knowing, as you surely did, that the imbalance will have far-ranging effects not just in popular music but also in entertainment writ large, and politics, and indeed in the natural sciences? The lyrics seem quite apposite, considering it’s the start of a new year and we just “ended” (more or less) an album cycle, but I wonder, did you even notice the lyrics when you chose and performed this song? Did the lyrics have anything to do with it — anything at all??

KEITH: Good eye, Chris. No, let’s be straight — great eye. You’ve got a great eye for these little details. Because, yes, it was the lyrics that brought me to the song, you’re exactly right about that. But let’s start from the beginning.

After last week’s Ape of Sarah McLachlan’s beautiful but maudlin “Angel,” I really felt like we needed a peppier tune to kick off the new year. If only in the context of Great Apes, then, readers could have some sense that 2024 was gonna be a little brighter, a little more exciting, a little peppier than 2023. That’s our gift to them: a totally speculative and baseless prognostication about the emotional temperature of the year to come. Emotional manipulation is one of the great deployments of music, and I’ll be damned if I’m not gonna use it to give our little community a tad of optimism to start their year.

So when I asked you for recommendations of more upbeat tunes to Greatly Ape, you sent a damn tasty clutch of ideas my way. I won’t name them all because I’ll probably pillage the list for potential Apes later on, but the one that really leapt out to me was Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again.” A classic hair metal ballad, it was obviously gonna hit me right in the sweet spot, even though Whitesnake was never really in my top or middle or even lower-middle tier of 80s glam rockers. They were too old, too stodgy, too likely to end up just forming tepid side projects with hobbled ex-members of Led Zeppelin. But still, yes, “Here I Go Again” is a classic, of course, and I was pretty excited to sink my teeth into it. But Chris, my teeth aren’t sharp enough. I could not tear the jerky-like flesh of this wizened and sinewy old beast. Let’s be honest: 80s hair metal was not about great songwriting. That’s not to say it wasn’t without great artistry! Swept arpeggios and whammy dives and spandex pants — these are all fundamental to our post-80s cultural DNA, and that they have not to date been celebrated in a retrospective at MoMA is one big reason that I refuse to renew my annual membership there. Fix yourself, MoMA.

Anyway, playing “Here I Go Again” solo acoustic was a pretty depressing revelation. Without the washing synths and the booming reverbed drums and the hyper-compressed Tube Screamered guitars (that is, without an occlusive coat of bombast) the song’s a little bit of a dump. It did not withstand the strip-search.

But I did really start coming around to the idea of singing a song that defies the standard “New Year, New Me” conventions of New Year messaging. I’m not gonna show up to S.D.I.R. demanding that anyone use this arbitrary calendar of ours to suddenly reshape themselves in my image. If you wanna make some resolutions, by all means, go for it, but don’t do it on my account!  

Thus, “Don’t Change.”

CHRIS: It’s a ripe message, and good on you for plucking it from the tree, slicing it up, and serving it to our readers — like some kind of piece of fruit, is what I’m illustrating! But it’s possible you’re too heavily discounting the need, the desperate need among people today, for some kind of guidance. We’re living through a moment of intellectual gloom and moral dyspepsia. Our politicians are dead cars in a junkyard that we’re pretending are taxis. The capitalist mumbo jumbo about supply heeding demand is revealed to be a ruse: further Marvel and Star Wars movies are coming: something more ancient and evil is afoot. 

What do you think a person should be doing in 2024 to avoid sinking into the morass? Have you made any private vows you’d like to reveal, simple behavior changes or attitudinal adjustments you’re hoping will make 2024 a whopper instead of a flopper? Eleanor Roosevelt purportedly advised doing something every day that scares you. Fun idea, but the practical difficulty of figuring out a new thing to scare yourself with every day is daunting. Kevin Kelly, who started Wired magazine, says, “Whenever you can’t decide which path to take, pick the one that produces change.” I like that as a more tempered version of Mrs. Roosevelt’s admonition, but suspect it leaves a lot of us stumbling forward, heads down, unaware of the alternate paths we’re inadvertently skirting. 

What kind of shit should our readers get into this year, Keith? And what kind of fresh flip-outs do you envision for We Are Scientists? 

KEITH: I can get behind that Rooseveltian advice, if only because, as with so many bromides dropped from political luminaries, it can mean almost anything to anyone. Scared of talking on the phone, in this age of text-forward communication? Pick up when that SpamBot calls you with a warning that the IRS needs your social security number, STAT! Scared of eating too much chocolate in the new year? E. Roos says grab that extra Snickers bar and face the terror! Scared of over-saturating the market with top-notch dance-pop? Get to work on that new We Are Scientists record!

And, yeah, that WOULD be my plan, but you, Chris, have given me a solid means of confronting my litany of fears while also studiously avoiding getting any actual work done. I’m talking here about your Christmas gift to me: a year’s subscription to Shudder, the world’s premier horror-streaming service. Now I can confront my fear of impalement on Monday with Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Meyers, my dread of outsized subterranean crocodilians on Tuesday with Alligator, and my abject terror of Gary Busey-flavored baked goods on Wednesday with The Gingerdead Man. And when I say that I “can” do this, I of course mean that I have been doing this — those were my first three films of the new year.   

I recommend that everyone else follow my lead.

A Look Back at 2023

As the only website, newsletter, or internet retailer not to offer a “look back at 2023” over the last couple weeks, we thought it would be interesting, now that 2024 has gotten its feet under it, to offer you a look back at 2023.

In an approach too simple and pure to provoke even a curmudgeon’s ire, I (Chris) am just going to scroll back through my phone’s camera roll and pick out a few photos of Keith and tell you what was going on when they were taken. No big deal. This is something I’d have been doing anyway, except instead of writing things down I’d just be muttering to my dog, who would be, and is, curled up beside me on the couch. So let’s dive in.

Oh, this one happened just the other night, at our New Year’s Eve party. We were all standing around mumbling with relief about how we had nailed the countdown — “Sixty-eight! Sixty-seven! Sixty-six!” — when Carne said he was exhausted and could use a chair. Murray said No problem, he’d grab a chair from the other room, just go ahead and get yourself ready to take a seat. Now, if I had to guess, I’d say that Keith Murray walked away absolutely intending to retrieve a chair for his buddy. I think he left, in other words, heart brimming with good intentions. But something happened between his turning away to get the chair and his return, something dark. The Devil found a weakness, and evil crept in. For when he returned, he held, instead of a chair, a cat box, a stinking, filthy cat box, fairly swimming with urea and turdlets (I have photoshopped them out of the image in order to evade G-Mail’s censor software).

Well, poor Carne was expecting a chair, and you know what you do when you’re expecting a chair? The sensible thing? You sit. Which by george he did, and my, I don’t mind telling you, what ensued was a cat-astrophe🐾.

Going back a few weeks, here’s Keith at a rest stop in North Carolina, trying to choose a bubble drink. For him the problem is never Should I get a bubble? but rather Which one should I get, goddammit I seriously can’t decide, I seriously want every single one of these but my stomach will only hold four. I think in the end he went with 7-Up Bacon, probably because as a strict vegetarian, he can only eat bacon on Good Friday. If I remember correctly, Keith Carne got a Coke Cherry and I got a Pepsi Coke, and Keith Murray ended up guzzling most of those on top of his 7-UB, sloshing a generous mix of all three onto his jeans while trying to drive straight🤣.

Oh, shit, this is right after our meeting with A24. Unfortunately, Keith’s sanguine expression has way more to do with finding some 2-day-old popcorn in the hip production company’s exit lobby than with anything that transpired during our meeting.

Let me back up a little. Ever since Lobes came out last January, Keith and I have fantasized about a movie tie-in — a two-hour, self-contained snackable content chonk, totally cinematic, that would illuminate and broaden the album for those hungry enough to reckon with both pieces of art, yet focused and internally coherent so that you didn’t need the album as a rosetta stone or anything. Many, many hours in the backs of limousines and on the roof decks of private clubs and in the first class lounges of Qantas were spent kicking around ideas, batting ideas back and forth, and hacky-sacking ideas. In the end, we had probably ten viable versions of Lobes: Sound of Freedom: Cri de Coeur: Andrew Vangelis & The Cruciform Rocket, but when the time came to sit down with Brig and Marigold at A24, we had trouble presenting a “cogent chonk,” as its known in the industry. Overwhelmed by the possibility of watching this funky, visionary studio bring our ideas to life, we kind of panicked. One of us froze up, and the other jabbered for thirty straight minutes about “mega horsies” — not at that point a significant part of our concept for the film. Honestly, leaving the conference room was a tremendous relief. I think this project belongs with Warners or Universal — an unflappable Methuselah whose tough hide and hard-won wisdom can help us navigate the pitfalls and mud chutes of film production in the modern, post-everything era. I do feel bad about A24, because our manager really went to bat for us and put her ass on the line to get the meeting, and then one of us, as I mentioned, just kept talking about an idea for “mega horsies” — like, larger-than-normal horses capable of great pulling feats with four or five trunk-ish legs (I think tree trunks, but maybe in retrospect he meant elephant trunks?) — while the other just looked on in real horror. But in this game you have to walk away from a losing hand before it eats all your capital, so that’s what we’re doing, begging Kat to try to get us in to see Universal or Warner Bros., or even Disney, though the obvious fear is that Lobes: Cri de Coeur: Big Vangelis and the Destiny Skull would end up getting lost there. Still, please, Kat, will you at least try??

This is an afternoon that I’ll revisit as nightmare for the rest of my life.

Doldrums of summer. The cat has collapsed, now leeching whatever ambient chill he can from the linen tablecloth. Keith, cross-eyed, delirious from the heat, stares idiotically into the middle distance, like some hard-up head injury vic. I snapped this pic just before he slumped into the chair, dead I thought, like if an asshole cut the strings on a marionette. After a pocket mirror collected the shyest hint of vapor under his nose, I used smelling salts to bring him around, then flung him into a cold shower till sour-faced mumbled protests became yowls of outrage, then we sat with ice packed against our necks and tepid sink water in cups and watched the cat continue to droop, as though gravity were mounting.

Casey McAllister, anonymous in the mirror top left, caught this moment pre-show in Liverpool when we undertook the Reboot Challenge, which was then making the rounds on social media. Editors, the band, had publicly selected us for the dare after they completed it, landing drummer Ed on life support in the process. In case you don’t remember the Reboot Challenge (perhaps because, as a participant, you mangled your hippocampus), it requires you to press a cup firmly over your nose and mouth until you pass out. Some people don’t last long — less than a minute isn’t uncommon — while others spend half an hour shuffling about in confined, hypoxic distress before “rebooting.” We all lost consciousness pretty quickly. I wasn’t awake to see it happen, but apparently Carne endured for a bit over three minutes — I know that when I came to, he was still draped like a heavy coat over the back of a chair, the whites of his eyes twin crescent moons in the twitching, clammy heavens of his visage.

I’ve got mixed feelings about having passed the challenge, after we completed it, on to The Rolling Stones and them being too chickenshit to accept. I guess for really old guys it’s definitely not safe. On the other hand, the amount of mockery and contempt that was heaped onto them in the press felt like overkill. These guys are professional entertainers, not daredevils. If their history of debauchery and excess led you to believe that they would never back down from dangerous challenges, perhaps you’ve been too credulous in devouring a carefully curated mythology. Should Mick have done the thing with the cup and the hidden air hose, and the poorly acted fainting? In retrospect, there’s more dignity to Keith Richards’ simply leaving the public eye for a few months. But maybe it’s cool that Mick went to the trouble of putting on a little theater. I really don’t know. I do hope failing the Reboot Challenge ends up a mere chapter in The Rolling Stones’ biography, not its subtitle.

Festival site, early summer, in our artist trailer backstage. Keith and I were facetiming with Natacha Rafalski, President of Disneyland Paris, about a possible Lobes ride/experience at EuroDisney. The conversation actually went great — Natacha was a super-fun hang; she did some very committed impersonations of off-piste Disney characters like Lampie, Mickey Rooney’s part in the original Pete’s Dragon, Launchpad McQuack from Duck Tales, and Gurgi from The Black Cauldron. Confusingly, we asked her to do a couple of heavy hitters like Baloo, Mufasa, and even Snow White, and she kept saying, “Not canon! Oh no, not canon, darlings.” Casey Junior from Dumbo isn’t canon?? You started to get the sense that Ms. Rafalski had just memorized a very specific shortlist of characters as a party trick, but had been hired at her job for her business acumen, not a particularly strong aptitude for impressions.

I think the EuroDisney Lobes ride/experience is still happening.

Caught Keith in the green room reviewing his own lyrics before that night’s show.

Oh boy. Of all the pitch meetings we did this year (we’re always working behind the scenes to expand our footprint), the one where we offered Tim Wheeler the opportunity to turn his band Ash into a We Are Scientists tribute act was probably the worst. It’s not even that Tim wasn’t into the idea, there were just so many little things we couldn’t agree on. Would Ash be allowed to continue playing concerts as Ash when they were back on land? We said no. Would Ash have final say on their booking schedule? No way. If it turned out that Rick, the drummer, who had never been on a boat, suffered from seasickness, could they back out of the deal? No, they could replace Rick. Since they’d be spending, ideally, many months at sea, could they rent out their apartments? No, we intended to use their apartments as free lodging whenever we came through their various hometowns, and we didn’t relish the annoyance of having to schedule those stays around other tenants. Could they play gigs on terra firma as well, since they’d be doing it transparently as a tribute act? No, that would ruin one of the big PR wins for us: saying that a British court had ruled the tribute act illegal after we claimed that they were performing our songs so poorly that it amounted to defamation, so the only place Bunsen Burnouts (or The Beaker Boys) would be able to play would be on cruise ships in international waters. Would the new act be called “Bunsen Burnouts” or “The Beaker Boys”? No consensus.

In the end we agreed to put a pin in the idea and revisit at a later date, when Tim is harder up for cash.

We had been hearing for weeks about the awesome new helmet Keith had ordered, and how he was going to wear it every night on-stage; how it wasn’t at all like Daft Punk; how he had always been really into race cars and did we know Michael Mann was making a Ferrari movie? and had we seen Speed Racer? and did we know Steve McQueen did his own driving in Le Mans? and on and on and on. Finally the day comes, Keith gets a delivery notification on his phone, and we learn that his helmet has arrived at the venue in Bratislava, where we were playing that night, and it’d be waiting for him inside when we arrived. Or waiting for him outside, as we discovered. Keith, you see, when completing the order form for his helmet, had used the wrong unit of measurement for size — meters instead of centimeters.

You might be saying that the price should’ve been a red flag — 11,300 Euros. My personal belief is that Keith was so in thrall to the idea of the helmet that no amount of money would have seemed excessive. Anyway, he sold the helmet to Muse, who fit it into their stage show without much fuss.

This is right after we returned from the UK tour in Feb/March, and believed we were ruined. Somebody had brought their dog to a show — this was a “teacup” breed of some kind; it came in under a coat — and it got loose and bit a kid — I say “kid,” he was 19 — who was fine at the time but soon came down with rabies, got on a train (evading the fare), grabbed somebody’s baby just as the doors were opening (human baby), and disappeared into the crowd. That was two or three weeks before this photo was taken, and the baby still hadn’t been found (nor had the rabid kidnapper), and the Crown Prosecution Service was making lots of noise about holding us responsible, which we were pretty sure would at least get the band “canceled,” even if we avoided a conviction. Keith has always liked — maybe “loved” is the word — cheddar cheese, so he decided the time was ripe for trying something new, and he launched rather headlong into mongering, posting up with this luxe display at a Brooklyn farmer’s market before British authorities had even found the baby. Which they did do, in fact, in late March, and in the end it had never been kidnapped at all. It was sleeping soundly the whole time under a blanket in the pram or buggy or whatever the English call strollers, maybe wedged along the edge of the cushion, unusually difficult to spot, but definitely there, and for weeks — this I find a little miraculous — had just slept, undisturbed, in the buggy in the foyer of his parents’ flat while they tore at their own hair in desperation and dread, and yes on waking he was very hungry indeed, but otherwise unharmed, and it emerged that the rabid teenager’s rabies test was a false positive and he’d been playing video games, like the baby undisturbed, in his mother’s basement all those many weeks, eating uncooked pizza out of the freezer, which for him wasn’t actually unusual.

It also turned out, according to the unanimous opinion of the seventeen people who took samples from his stand that first day at the farmer’s market, that Keith’s cheese was “shit,” “inedible,” “just foul,” “nightmare”(sic), “unfit for mice,” so this is actually a happy photo.

January 20th, the green room at Brooklyn Made, where we launched the Lobes album cycle that has recently come to a close (more or less; one or two more tidbits yet to come, perhaps). I’d like to say we always have A Dozen Cupcakes With [Current Album] Icing on our rider, but these were a thoughtful gift from Super Agent Mike Mori, who books us in North America. He had syringed them full of LSD, and when we got back upstairs after the show, all our friends were tearing off their clothes and drinking candle wax and trying to take a bath in the sink and stuff. We had taken one look at the cupcakes and said “no fuckin way,” and so skipped the trip, but it certainly made for a memorable evening.

January 1, 2023, 2:08 am: Keith trying to decide whether to break 25+ years of vegetarianism. “This looks so gooood,” he kept saying, “Look at this thing! You don’t even have to cook it!” — a dubious claim that shows just how out of the meat-preparation loop Keith was (and, thankfully, still is today). And before you ask, yes, Mike Mori had brought cupcakes.

Gang! Hope you enjoyed that lazy saunter down memory lane, and the lovely tune up top. We’ll be letting the Tour Machine cool down in the coming months — its parts need oiling, and you can’t do that safely when they’re still red hot. There’s lots of other stuff we must attend to in the meantime, and keeping the S.D.I.R. train rumbling across these cultural planes is high on the list. We have two dynamite posts next week, the first of which will be paywalled. We’re going to experiment with a little more pay-walling this year, with an eye toward sending paid subscribers material that for one reason or another we don’t think is appropriate for the general public. We’ll continue to distribute high quality posts to all of our free subscribers — the same 7- or 8-out-of-10 stuff you’ve come to rely on — so please do not imagine that this is going to become yet another walled off, gate-kept, elitist club that does not send very okay jokes and drumless songs to its readers.

Leave your Shudder recommendations in the comments, along with tellings of your own experiences with LSD and rabies.

🔋,

K & C