Culture

The Presidents of the United States of America
Columbia

My first college crush was a menacingly tall, pale, ebony-haired, and sneeringly clever bastard who nailed baby dolls to his wall, quoted Sam Shepard, and balanced his reverence for Jello Biafra with just enough irony to make it jiggle. When he predicted the Beastie Boys' rise to power, we puzzled. When he assured us of the coming scenester status of Seattle, we rolled our eyes. But when he gave us all tapes of his friends' basement band, The Dukes O' Pop, we got religion. These guys were a brainbox of spillover pop energy that way prefigured the present formal resurgence. Conjurer Chris Ballew's brave geek voice and absurdist sensibility had us dubbing off copies of tunes that lyrically raided the Brady Bunch's "Tiki God" episode, green Keds and Little Foxes with equal fervor.

And where are they now? They've been reincarnated into The Presidents of the United States of America, and are hammering you with a tune called "Lump" (rumored to be about Courtney, but what song isn't these days?). If you listen to Rev-105 or The Edge, by now you either love or despise it. Trust me, they might seem lame, but they're really way ahead of us, creating a world where faking the funk, rhyming "brain" with "insane," sliding into insulting drawls, writing songs with unabashedly silly lyrics (Five thousand fishies rockin' really really really hard/ nobody taught them how!), and getting faux-sensitive ("You seem cool, for a naked chick in a booth") is the coolest and most profound way to fly. We just don't know it yet. The Presidents' eponymy is gonna be worth something someday, and even if I'm wrong, everybody's got somethin' to hide; why not this? (Laura Sinagra)