We Are Scientists—the duo of vocalist/guitarist Keith Murray and bassist/vocalist Chris Cain—are known for the oblique humor and intelligence that they bring to their music, but a question about their sharp mental acuity produces gales of laughter. “I don’t believe brains or wit are particularly helpful, or necessary, in pop music,” Murray says, still chuckling. “If we intended our appeal to be narrow and excessively insular, those qualities might be good for us, but nobody likes a smartass.” Despite this protestation, the songs on the band’s new LP, TV En Français (Dine Alone), are brimming over with wry humor and skewed insights into the state of modern romance. TV En Français was recorded with the help of producer Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV On The Radio), who helped give the album a polished, expansive sound. Cain will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on the band.
Cain: The color of snack cheese (think Doritos) is hunter orange. Hunter orange being the blazing fluorescent color that hunters buy their clothes in so that other hunters won’t mistake them for anything remotely deer-like, and shoot them. It’s the color they choose because it has never, in the history of our planet, occurred in nature. The wavelength of light that comes off a hunter’s vest and tells your eyes to show your brain hunter orange is a wavelength of light that was literally invented in 1972 (or whenever DuPont invented it). Light waves of that length had never occurred, since the formation of the universe. Which makes it weird that Frito-Lay would decide on this color for their chips. As if they wanted them not so much to look appetizing, but to stand out against any possible background.
To most people, snack cheese = hunter orange. Doritos, Cheetos, Kraft macaroni: all hunter orange. And here’s the thing: we’re willing to bet it’s not just people who have learned this association.
Nature has been reduced to an archipelago of theme parks. Even standing in the middle of Yosemite or Arches, it’s an absolute triumph of the imagination to feel like you’re “in the middle of nowhere”; you could use the spinning pointer from Twister as a compass, and still within half an hour you’d run into either a freeway, a town or Chicago. There’s no border anymore between civilization and wilderness; animals that can live amongst us—birds, chipmunks, racoons, possums—do so, and the rest, the wolves and bears and lions, live in zoos or on preserves. Given this overlap of habitats, it’s safe to assume that animals have by now eaten plenty of Doritos and macaroni out of dumpsters; or hell, from the hands of two-year-olds sitting in the car with the window down while mom pays for the gas. And they’re starting to learn, some of them, that hunter orange is the color of snack cheese.
It’s going to be hard not to cheer when packs of wild dogs and deer and coyotes start attacking hunters, thinking they’re big delicious cheese sticks.
