Jonathan Snipes had a song featured in “Snakes on a Plane,” another song featured on “The Office,” and is poised to tour Europe with his band.
He also might be your TA.
By day, Snipes is a graduate theater sound design student at UCLA. He works as a TA for theater courses and does sound design for campus plays. In addition, he contributes “cleanup” to film and TV scores, including the new series “The Sarah Connor Chronicles.”
By night, so to speak, Snipes is one-half of Captain Ahab, an intensely manic underground electronic music duo, in which Snipes records all the music to his laptop, writes the lyrics, and sings.
During high school and college, Snipes crafted his own musical persona. Expanding upon a childhood fascination with programmable music on computers, Snipes began making cerebral electronic compositions not far removed from intelligent dance music artists like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher.
“I started getting into DMX Krew … he was on Rephlex Records, the label that Aphex Twin ran. … He’s putting out this really ridiculously stupid pop music alongside all this really interesting stuff. I listened to it more, and I listened to it as a novelty. Then I started listening to disco as a novelty, and I was like, “˜Wow, this is so phenomenally stupid and bad,'” Snipes said.
Eventually, Snipes had the epiphany that many artists have: “bad” may really not be that bad.
“The more I listened to it, the more I realized, well, regardless of whether it’s good or bad, I’m listening to it more than I’m listening to Autechre, you know, and getting more enjoyment of it. And that’s when irony kind of ended for me. It was like, all these things that I appreciate them ironically, I don’t have to, I can appreciate them genuinely,” Snipes said.
As a result, Captain Ahab is an unholy concoction of genres previously thought to be distasteful. Distorted and insistent happy hardcore four-on-the-floor beats with upward of 150 beats per minute collide with Lavigne-like crunching guitars on loan from pop punk, which is all sugarcoated with a heavy dose of ’80s synths and electropop vocoded vocals.
The lyrical content is eye-opening, to say the least. Song topics range from purely scatological exercises (“I Can’t Believe It’s Not Booty!”), to hip-hop braggadocio (“Snakes on the Brain”) to meditations on LA Lights sneakers (“His Sexy Moves”), to the most hilarious and faux angst-ridden invocation of middle-school relationships since Degrassi (“I Can’t Wait For Summer”).
What about the other half of Captain Ahab?
Enter Jim Merson.
Snipes and Merson met in high school, when both were involved in a monologue competition. They didn’t see each other for a few years, until they unexpectedly reconnected.
“We ran into each other at the theater department at UCLA, and we were both like “˜You were that guy.’ So we just became friends,” Snipes said.
Merson started giving Snipes, who had already been performing around Los Angeles under the name Captain Ahab, rides to his gigs. Merson would stay for the show, dancing vigorously and often shirtless. However, one night he became part of the act.
“We did one show where he gave me a ride, and on the way there I got violently ill and I was vomiting out of the car. When we got there, I just thought there was no way I can do this, so I’m just going to crouch behind a laptop, and exert minimal effort, and you run around and be the physical element of the band. And he did that to the point of overexertion. … It was kind of magical.” Snipes said.
From that moment forward, Captain Ahab became somewhat notorious for its live show, which included at various points: Snipes eating sushi off Merson’s chest, Snipes drinking beer out of Merson’s beard, and Merson dancing manically in a speedo.
As if a Butthole Surfers-esque live show weren’t enough to secure cult status, Captain Ahab famously won the Snakes on a Plane song contest, with their ominous rapcore aping song “Snakes on the Brain,” which was featured in the film over the credits. In addition, their song “Girls Gone Wild” was featured in an episode of “The Office.”
Has this influx of mainstream exposure changed things for Captian Ahab?
Not that much, according to Snipes.
“Every time “˜The Office’ airs, I get a text message from someone I haven’t talked to in five years, or an e-mail from someone, who’s like, “˜Hey, we went to high school together and I don’t know if you remember me, but I just heard your music on “The Office” ““ that’s so awesome. We should catch up sometime.’ You know, certainly not that big of a deal,” he said. “In the grand scheme of things, we’ve definitely not made it.”
Despite the lack of a qualitative change resulting from the added exposure, Captain Ahab will be touring a handful of cities in Europe, at the behest of Jason Forrest, a fellow electronic musician who is credited as Donna Summer. Captain Ahab’s forthcoming album, “The End of Irony,” will be released in the fall in both the U.S. on Deathbomb Arc Records, and on Forrest’s record label Cock Rock Disco in Europe.
Even though Snipes is a working graduate student and a now-international electronic musician, he doesn’t find it hard to keep the two roles separate and in balance.
“I don’t care if my friends come to Captain Ahab shows,” he said.
“Like how many times has your friendship with someone that you really like been tainted by his terrible, terrible band that he keeps making you go see. Who wants that?”