Biography
Last November, we were fruitlessly trying to brainstorm new ways to raise funds for Scott and Carrie. At the same time, we were teasing our friend Steve for hating folk punk, an obscure musical genre. Have you ever had a friend who loved to hate things and be miserable in a way that was positively adorable? Steve is that kind of person, as hundreds of admirers can attest. Somebody had spread a rumor that Steve was in a folk punk band, Steve was incensed, it was hysterical—and suddenly we had a brilliant money-making scheme.
We knew that Steve would never stand in the way of a benefit for Scott and Carrie no matter how personally humiliating it was. So we sent out a top secret email soliciting pledges to their legal fund on the condition that Steve record a folk punk album. We hoped to reach $1000 worth of pledges, but within a week we had more than $2000—everybody wanted in on this prank! We broke the news at the last show of a From the Depths tour: picture a wild crowd waving fistfulls of dollar bills, holding signs reading “Don’t let us down!” and chanting “STEVE! STEVE!” A dumbfounded Steve was ceremoniously presented with a banjo and eventually stuttered that the album would be recorded, to the glee of all.
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Performing under the nom de shame “Spook Rat,” Steve has now completed the recording. Hearing Steve’s anguished voice belting out these tuneless anthems warms our wicked hearts—Steve is a highly trained musician and a perfectionist who never dared sing a note until now. And the album does not disappoint: it’s at least as funny as the prank itself! Borrowing from Umlaut, plagiarizing Manowar, and covering Kool Keith, Spook Rat mercilessly satirizes folk punk, anarchist subculture, and everything else within reach. “Drunk Dialing Legal Support” and “You Say Oogle like It’s a Bad Thing” are destined to become timeless classics, while “Deth 2 Folk Punk” is more introspective, capturing Steve’s meditations on life’s inescapable tragedies.
So, to Steve’s eternal misery and mortification, we present “The Shape of Bagels to Come,” Spook Rat’s magnum opus.
[http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2010/09/08/brand-new-legal-support-tactics/]
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.