Skip to content
News

The Decemberists Score Springfield’s Hipsterfication on ‘The Simpsons’

the decemberists simpsons hipster spingrfield

In Sunday night’s episode of The Simpsons, “The Day The Earth Stood Cool,” Homer went hipster after meeting a goateed food truck proprietor played by none other than Portlandia‘s Fred Armisen. Carrie Brownstein guested, too, alongside comic and sometimes SPIN editor Patton Oswalt, while, as the AV Club reports, “a cluster of grey clouds [brought] irony, retro chic, and organic farming from the Pacific Northwest” to Springfield.

That chic zephyr also brought with it Oregon’s own baroque-pop indie auteurs the Decemberists, hired to replace M.I.A. music teacher Dewey Largo. As we learned in Mikael Wood’s review of the band’s 2011 album, The King Is Dead, the high-minded five-piece is quite capable of poking fun at itself, and main man Colin Meloy kicks things off by asking the kids, “Now who wants to learn a song about press-gangs and infanticide?”

In addition to getting the old Groening treatment, the Decemberists also contributed some sound work to the show. Also, Meloy has adopted his animated alter-ego as his Twitter avatar. The A.V. Club was featured in the “Cool” episode as well.