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Flobots
American rap rock group
Flobots is an experimental hip hop band from Denver, Colorado, formed in 2005 by Jamie Laurie. The band's origins date back 5 years earlier to a similar project by Laurie.
Flobots found mainstream success with their major label debut Fight with Tools (2007), featuring the single "Handlebars", which became a popular hit on Modern Rock radio in April 2008. The band has released four studio albums and one EP, with their latest Noenemies being released in May 2017.
The Flobots project started in the mid-1990s, with two albums self-released on cassette tape in 1996 and 1998. The personnel and aliases varied between the albums, but by the second album James Laurie was using the alias "Johnny Five". In 2000, James Laurie now going by "Jonny 5", teamed up with producer Farhad Ebrahimi, a.k.a. Yahktoe (who had contributed to the previous Flobots cassette as musician, producer and cover designer). Together they released Onomatopoeia in 2001 under the alias "Jonny 5 + Yak", and the title track ended up in a compilation by the MIT Songwriting Club at Yahktoe's alma mater. In that compilation, the band was still credited as "Flobots" (and as "Flobots (a.k.a. Jonny5 and Yak)" in the liner notes). The title...
"Handlebars" is a song by Flobots. It was released as the first single from their debut album, Fight with Tools, and is the group's largest success, peaking at number 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number three on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.
Background
"Handlebars" was originally released in 2005 on the band's first EP, Flobots Present...Platypus, before being re-released on Fight with Tools two years later with re-recorded vocals. The song won in a fan-voted local radio station contest at the end of 2007, giving the song the chance to be played on the station. The song was so popular that it was put into full rotation at the station by the end of January 2008, attracting the attention of record companies. Flobots ultimately signed with Universal Republic off the back of the single's success.
Music video
The animated video for the song opens with two young friends, one wearing casual clothes and the other in a businesslike suit, seated on their bicycles on a hill looking over a city. Prominent in the city is a crystalline tower with part of its framework showing. The friends ride their bikes down the hill without their hands on the handlebars until they arrive at a sign that points in two directions, one labeled with a corporate-looking symbol leading to a shadowed street, and the other labeled by a dove leading down a sunlit street. They hug and head their separate ways, the casual friend taking the path of the dove.
