here haven't been too many funny science-fiction-based rock songs—Nilsson pulled "Spaceman" out of his hat, and the Bonzo Dog Band's "Beautiful Zelda" and "Humanoid Boogie" are fairly well known in the SF community. Sacramento, California's Warp 11, though, is probably the only rock outfit that has attempted not only to be funny most of the time but also to do it in the context of Star Trek. Now, that is bravely going where no one has gone before.
Yes, it's very silly, but they're not just a goof. The band is fully capable of kicking out the jams, at least on this disc from Reboot Music, their third album. They're solid and they're tight. True, the tunes aren't particularly complex, but so what? A recent review says that "not since KISS has a band had this level of shtick." The shtick extends to cool little guitar logos on their shirts (keyboardist and "Chief Science Officer" Kiki Stockhammer has hers tattooed, delightfully, on her left breast). More to the point, there is an automatic audience for Warp 11's Adults Only act numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The good news is, they've got the musical chops to back up their zaniness.
The album gets off to an energetic start with "She Make It So," a sexually charged tune with more or less the same chord progression as that Better Than Ezra tune, "Good." But it's more up-tempo and has been getting some radio play. That said, one can't help but wonder what the more staid Trekkers think about a lyric like "She's got a red shirt on / And I'm gonna take it off / She'll feel the wrath of my Khan / And she'll be screaming like Chekov." This is prime stuff for the fanboys, but Warp 11 would never be allowed in Ten Forward—more's the pity.
In fact, the whole "red shirt" trope gets a lot of play from Warp 11. The second tune, "Rage Against the Federation," deals explicitly with the cliché of some red-shirted and anonymous Enterprise crew member getting killed off in the first or second act of the original series.
"Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill Klingons" is actually—wait for it—a ballad about—well, you know. "This microphone that I sing on / I'm gonna use it while I kill myself a Klingon." It's hard to hate a lyric like that. "Give It Up for the Captain" is a rave-up, with bassist "Captain" Karl Miller bragging about his sexual prowess in a rumbling minor key that goes blissfully major in Stockhammer's sweetly sung bridge. "A Song for People Who Never Watch Star Trek" is just that—it lays out the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triad and again refers to the red-shirted crew members getting killed.
Too sexy for their spaceship
Perhaps the funniest song in the set is "Captain Caught Me on the Holodeck," in which a hapless crew member is caught wearing his Darth Vader helmet in the middle of a Star Wars sex fantasy. Oh, and the title tune—"Boldly Go Down on Me?" Well, it's a ballad. A very dirty one, but a ballad nevertheless.
Of course, the very shtick that guarantees Warp 11 a place on the stage at any SF con (not just Trek cons) probably also means that their appeal is somewhat limited as long as they stick to the Star Trek stuff. They're smart enough to add a lot of sexual references and four-letter words to the mix, which no doubt makes the fanboys shiver in tumescent delight. Some of the tunes bear the marks of over-reaching—"Auto Destruct," for example, is not a very strong effort—but then they pull off something like the album's seventh cut, "Man on a Mission," which manages to elicit some actual SF "sense of wonder."
Other tunes reference Data, the yellow-eyed android, Odo, the shape-shifter from Deep Space Nine, and so on. The endless Trek references are grafted onto genuine garage-band rockin' and rollin'—make no mistake, musically Warp 11 takes no prisoners. Resistance, as has been said elsewhere, is futile. Even the album's thank-yous are funny. The band gives top honors to "our INCREDIBLE FANS. Without you guys we would have probably ended up in some crappy Buck Rogers band."
Sure, there are nits to be picked. Stockhammer's keyboards get buried in the mix so that one can't tell if she can really play or not, and some of the vocal performances could benefit from more creative production, and when the band's musical inventiveness flags they are too quick to rely on adolescent sexual material; but when did rock and roll ever not have a lot to do with sex? The good thing about Warp 11 is that the sex is right out front instead of being alluded to by miniskirts and gravity-defying breasts. Warp 11 is simply saying what everyone suspected all along—space travel is the biggest turn-on of all. That's not a bad message.
