And sometimes, the stars align. Gruff-throated Philadelphia rock oddballs Man Man found themselves featured on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° last night. The reason for the season? Their latest album, On Oni Pond, includes a song called “End Boss,” which sounds like a Nintendo tale but turns out to be a wolf story, except the wolf involved is not a feral dog, but The Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer. Did we say “oddball”? We meant “curveball.”
Still, Anderson Cooper caught the plot.
“Tonight I want to introduce you to the song stylings of a band called Man Man,” he said with a lilting grin. “You might think this is just typical lupine indie rock imagery, but it is, like so much of the art that surrounds us, inspired by Wolf Blitzer.” Wait was that a “wolf bands” joke? Or a TV on the Radio jab? In any case, the show’s producers cued up the old sing-along lyrics-and-bouncing-ball gag, while our host looked on quizzically. Watch that above.
As Pitchfork points out, Cooper wrangled an interview with frontman Honus Honus (here appearing under his government name, “Ryan Kattner”), who explained that he’d begun writing a regular old story about a wolf who eats infants, then realized the cliché of his ways, so he made it about a Glenn Danzig-obsessed Blitzer instead. Fair enough. In the photo accompanying the quote, Honus wears a custom dashiki printed all over with Wolf’s fuzzy face.
“How do I get that?” asks Anderson before calling out his station-mate for being the “vodka-swilling baby eater” that he is. Well played, Coop. Well played.
