We Are Scientists - It's A Hit

FEB 20 2006 · 12:00

We Are Scientists - It's A Hit (2006) Director: Akiva Schaffer Era: Post-Punk Revival / Mid-2000s Indie Boom (2005–2006) - Peak NME-era UK indie rock crossover, aligning with the transatlantic wave of guitar-driven acts breaking through Virgin Records and the emerging YouTube/digital-short comedy ecosystem. High curatorial value as a documented intersection of two distinct cultural trajectories: the UK NME-era indie rock boom and the emerging Lonely Island/SNL Digital Shorts comedy movement. With director Akiva Schaffer confirmed via VideoStatic and production credits fully documented, this video is a verifiable primary source for scholars of 2000s music video history, internet comedy evolution, and transatlantic indie rock culture. Its rapid-cut boxing-parody structure and warm, saturated cinematography constitute a time-capsule of mid-2000s lo-fi comedic filmmaking aesthetics. Context: Released in February 2006 as part of the UK single campaign for the debut album 'With Love and Squalor' (Virgin), 'It's A Hit' arrived at peak NME-era indie rock fever in Britain, where the song charted at #29 despite the Brooklyn-based band never approaching the US Hot 100. The video's director, Akiva Schaffer, was simultaneously being hired by SNL's writing staff in late 2005, positioning this clip at a unique convergence point: the mainstreaming of internet-native comedy filmmaking into commercial music video production. The boxing-parody concept, a literal interpretation of the song's fight-at-a-party lyric, predates and aesthetically anticipates the SNL Digital Shorts format Schaffer would go on to define, making this video a documented early artifact of that comedic vocabulary entering the music video form. The cross-promotion of the video on The Lonely Island's own website further reflects the hybrid indie-rock/internet-comedy culture of 2005–2006. Director notes: Directed and edited by Schaffer for Virgin Records, produced by Nick Carbonaro, production company Seaworthy. The video was filmed around the period Schaffer was simultaneously joining the SNL writing staff in fall 2005, placing its production in the precise window when his comedic short-film sensibility was being formalized into the Digital Shorts format. The video employs a boxing-match narrative in which frontman Keith Murray takes on his bandmates and eventually faces a real pugilist, built around classic sports-parody grammar, ironic heroism, crowd cutaways, slow-motion action, and a hubris-driven fall. VideoStatic noted the video was also hosted on The Lonely Island's own website, directly cross-pollinating the indie-rock and internet-comedy audiences at a pivotal early-YouTube moment.