I think it’s fair to say that We Are Scientists is a great band but every time I listen to them there’s this feeling that comes over me akin to an itch I can’t scratch. It’s been driving me crazy for years, like there is some unresolved melody or out-of-place synth I couldn’t pinpoint.
It wasn’t until I started paying attention to the lyrics that it finally hit me: the band, despite their name invoking knowledge and study of the natural world, has never written a single song about mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell.
Seriously, what the hell is up with that? As a band with a STEM reference they have some responsibility to educate the public, like an indie rock Bill Nye (or Beakman’s World since there’s three of them). The closest thing they’ve done to anything science-related was “Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt” which I assume is about that bowling ball pendulum experiment from physics class.
I find it hard to believe that after eight studio albums, the guys wouldn’t put out one winking inside joke track about breaking down glucose into adenosine triphosphate. Are they trying to gatekeep eighth-grade science from the masses? I’m fully aware they’re not a theme band like Mac Sabbath, Okilly Dokilly, or the Misfits but given how badly underfunded our public schools have become, they should feel a moral obligation to sneak in some lines about our body’s ability to produce energy.
Hell at this rate I’d be satisfied if they covered Adolescents’ “Amoeba”. It’s not exactly what I’m looking for but their name is one of the first lines in the damn song! How has their body of work never been peer-reviewed?
I bet if we lobbied Congress to give them some research grant with 100% royalties they could knock out a few songs about photosynthesis or whatever. I don’t care if they’re just named after a Guided by Voices song, this whole outfit stinks of stolen valor, or at the very least false advertising.
Had I retained any scientific knowledge past middle school and possessed any musical acumen, I’d have done it myself already. So if the band would just live up to their namesake and drop an EP or just a one-off single about mitochondria and the human genome, I can get back to dancing my ass off to Lobes.