"Are you Bay Aryans?" they ask, as disarmingly deadpan and dim as ever. It's dark by the time the guys come onstage and they peer around, baffled by whatever Mountain View is. There's a break, and when the lights come on, the tinfoil has been peeled off the instruments and the atmosphere is improved by the addition of a small stuffed sheep. He's followed by FOTC alums Demetri Martin and Arj Barker. John Hodgman starts things off wearing a dress Emily Gilmore might favor.
The stage looks reassuringly DIY and off-kilter. It's cool in Mountain View, and people start wrapping up in blankets during the opening acts. Seven years is a long time, and it's hard to get shinier than a Googleplex-adjacent amphitheater. While no one would admit to being a hipster, many shared this sense that creative faculties get shallower and shinier the more time someone spends in the spotlight. "Can Flight of the Conchords avoid the fact that they are fully fledged music superstars?" asked The Guardian. "Will success spoil Flight of the Conchords?" Maxim wondered.
#FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS SHOW TV#
You'll recall that the hipster constituted a slippery category back in the aughts (when people still cared about that kind of thing), but most people agreed on his telltale phrase: "I knew them before they were cool." The question driving a lot of cultural coverage back then was how (not when) a band or comedian would sell out, and coverage of Flight of the Conchords while they were still on TV reflects this. It's a question that has plagued the group since it began. The giant lifeless heart of Silicon Valley? What had the Conchords become? You can imagine my surprise when I learned I'd be seeing them there - this charming duo I'd associated with torn wallpaper act breaks, crappy production values, and a resolutely analog sensibility. Seven years after leaving their show and three years after their last tour, Flight of the Conchords' 2016 summer tour sold out almost instantly, forcing them to add five extra concert dates to accommodate fans at venues including Mountain View's Shoreline Amphitheater, a behemoth built on a landfill and rimmed by the eerie Google campus. You feel really, really silly when you catch yourself nodding along to " Sugalumps" or belting out the chorus to " Business Time." That's the trouble with musically brilliant comedy savants.ĭespite breaking out at a specific cultural moment - an era during which America, at any rate, was seething with ironic hauteur and fetishized authenticity - these New Zealanders' penchant for loving parody turned out to be evergreen in ways no one suspected.
Whether it's " You Don't Have to Be a Prostitute" riffing on The Police, " Carol Brown" winking at Paul Simon, or " Rambling Through the Avenues of Time," a shaggy-dog version of Billy Joel, Flight of the Conchords' full-throated commitment to the genre or artist they targeted often made their songs just as catchy as the originals. Let's call it "loving parody" to strip out that edge of kiwi self-deprecation. Would people laugh if it wasn't mean?" There it is, then: fawning parody. It's rare for either to step outside their persona and name the comedic ethos they developed together, but Clement offered a rare glimpse into the Conchords' sense of their own creative philosophy in a tribute to David Bowie: "We had never heard a parody song like this before, that fawned over the artist instead of mocking them. Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie - the brilliant duo behind the long-defunct HBO show Flight of the Conchords and the still-thriving band Flight of the Conchords - are sincere about everything except their own artistry.
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