Cobra Starship: good band gone bad

(Credit: Decaydance/Fueled by Ramen)

“We like making fun of people…but mostly ourselves,” explains Cobra Starship frontman Gabe Saporta. “It’s liberating—if we make fun of ourselves, nobody else can!”

That’s not to say that Cobra Starship shouldn’t be taken seriously—just not too seriously. The band started off in 2005 as a somewhat jokey reaction to Saporta’s former group Midtown—a very good, but also very serious set of emo-punkers. Since their inauspicious debut (as the theme songwriters for the movie “Snakes on a Plane”), the NYC-based dance-rockers have walked the fine line between goofy fun (witness the new track “Pete Wentz Is the Only Reason We're Famous”—the band is signed to Wentz’s Decaydance label) and actual pop genius, as heard on the group’s latest CD, the appropriately titled “Hot Mess.”

Fresh from an interview on CNN (!) and hearing word they landed their first Top 40 hit (“Good Girls Gone Bad,” featuring Leighton Meester from "Gossip Girl" and a one-second cameo by a Metromix-branded flask), Saporta and guitarist Ryland Blackinton sat down with us for a discussion on why “American Idol” pop and French disco mix so well with punk, the joys of giving out your phone number to fans, and not remembering Megan Fox.

I know you’ve got a hit, but what were you doing on CNN?
Gabe Saporta: We don’t know! No was in the room when we did it—we were alone in a room, they put earpieces on us, and we spoke to somebody we couldn’t see.
Ryland Blackinton: Actually, we saw Lou Dobbs in the building; that was cool.

One of your old bios stated this as your mission: "Make sure mankind goes out in style, by teaching hipsters to not take themselves so seriously and by telling emo kids to stop being pussies.” Is that still the mission?
GS: I think we already accomplished that.
RB: We need a new goal. Emo kids aren’t crying anymore.

You did a one-off show with Katy Perry last summer. I guess she liked the fact that you once did a parody song called “I Kissed a Boy”?
GS: I think she liked it. Actually we recorded it on Warped Tour while we were both on it. We were hounding her for the instrumental version of the song. We’d say things like “We just want to remix it!”

I called the number you have listed on your MySpace page (646-462-4449), and Gabe, it sounds like it goes straight to your voicemail.
GS: Do you want to see it work? People will just start calling and leave messages, songs, whatever. I call them back sometimes. Some of these are kids that have talked to us before. One person called just to tell us they had met Shia LaBouf. [Fiddles with phone; brief, nearly inaudible call comes in] Hi! Hello? We have really bad service here. Um, I love you. Bye.

Was “Snakes on a Plane” already an Internet phenomenon when you were asked to do the theme song for it?
GS: It just started to become this thing online. I actually had that song for six months, I was just sitting on it, then the movie came up. I was like, “Fuck it, let’s throw the words ‘snakes in a plane’ into the song.” If you’re going to do it, you gotta go all the way, right? And I remember that song totally taking off, climbing the charts…and then the movie came out, everyone hated it, and all the radio stations stopped playing it immediately. It’s still one of our biggest hits. [Laughs]

Were you really going to name your new album “Griller”?
RB: That was just a joke. We did a bit for our CobraCam Web site [the band’s quite funny sketch video page] where we came up with fake titles for the album.

Do you guys write all that stuff for the Web site?
GS: Yep. Ryland oversees the majority of it. He went to theater school for that.

On the Warped Tour, I notice a lot of bands now have a dance-pop element. Are you responsible for that?
GS: Not say we’re responsible, but I’d like to say we’re part of it. I know when we used to play there, kids were wearing all black, and now they’ve expanded their color palette a little bit.

Your new song “Wet Hot American Summer” has a French disco/Daft Punk/Justice vibe. Are you fans?
GS: Definitely! We’re the dumbed-down versions of those bands.

You use the line “Woah-oh, here she comes” in one of your new songs. It sounds like “Maneater”…are you also a Hall and Oates fan?
GS: We had to pay for that! It’s only five words, but it’s a recognizable phrase, so we gave away part of our song royalties to use that one little line. We also used “Goody Two Shoes” from Adam Ant and a line from Madonna’s “Vogue,” but they were not so noticeable. We like wearing our influences on our sleeves, and bringing them all together into our little pool. Our cesspool.

What’s that cobra-esque hand gesture I see all your fans flashing at shows?
GS: That’s our gang sign. We figured every good band should be more than a band, it should be a gang. So you need a gang sign. But, um, we’re not a real gang.
RB: We don’t hurt anyone.

So “Good Girls Gone Bad” is now a top 40 hit and you’re on CNN. Is it weird hitting the mainstream?
GS: I mean, the goal is for everyone to hear our music. I think bands end up sabotaging themselves because they want that, but don’t want to do certain things to get there. We try to be ourselves in spite of everything. But we’re also very grateful we get to do this for a living; we did this for a long time when we were broke. It’s nice to be able pay bills and not worry for a few months.
RB: I just don’t want to go back to catering.
GS: Wanna give a shout-out to that catering company?
RB: Not really.