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The band hanging out on their tour bus. Likely early 2007. Photos originally sourced from Buzznet.

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Cobra Starship - Tainted Love (Soft Cell Cover) (TRL, 2007)

Some very crunchy partial video of the band covering Soft Cell's Tainted Love during a broadcast for Total Request Live (TRL)'s Prom Week special. As far as I know, this is the only footage of them playing this song on the broadcast, and the only time they've covered this song.

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Cobra Starship's Buzznet Videos - Alex Interviews "Yung Nate" at the Snakes on a Plane Soundtrack Premiere (2006)

This is a gifset I made as a teen of a video "interview" of Nate, conducted by Alex, at the LA premiere of the Snakes on a Plane soundtrack. I don't have the original video anymore, so these gifs are the only way the material is preserved. Sorry they're so crunchy-- Tumblr's gif limits used to be much smaller, and the source video wasn't exactly HD to begin with!

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Cobra Starship's Buzznet Videos - En Route to the AOL Sessions (2006)

I was going back through my files the other day and realized that this Buzznet video never got reuploaded to this blog. Oops!

Anyways, this video of Gabe and Ryland joking around and sharing a band update was taken while the group was on the way to their AOL Sessions set in Los Angeles. (You can see a video of the song they covered during that session here on YouTube!)

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A selection of scripted ringtones that Ryland recorded in 2006, possibly for America Online. From what documentation I was able to glean from my original blog, I believe this audio may have originally come from a Buzznet video, but this MP3 of it is all I have now :(

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Victoria and Ryland at the Phoenix Concert Theatre, March 14, 2007. Sourced from Flickr.

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Cobra Starship - The Scene Is Dead; Long Live the Scene (2011 iTunes Sessions)

In 2011, the band put out an iTunes Sessions EP, containing new renditions of several Hot Mess tracks as well as a single song from Night Shades. This version of The Scene Is Dead is much more acoustic-focused and has a comparatively softer sound than the album version.

For those of us who don't use Apple Music, the iTunes EP has kind of fallen through the cracks in recent years! I'll be uploading the rest of the EP here over the next few days, and I'm also working on a CS discography package containing every single song I can possibly find. When that's done, I'll be uploading it to the Internet Archive and linking to it here! :)

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Cobra Starship - Monkey Magic (2009)

(Ten seconds of silence have been inserted into the beginning of this track to dodge Tumblr's copyright detection. Mind your volume!)

This song was included exclusively on the German deluxe iTunes release of Hot Mess, and has never been made available for streaming via Spotify. It's a cover of the song of the same name by the prolific Japanese rock band Godiego, which was originally released in 1978 and was used as the theme for the anime series Saiyuki/Monkey.

I don't think anyone in the band ever shared why they chose a 1970s J-rock/anime theme to cover. It's always been my personal suspicion that this particular song was Ryland's idea, as he's spoken before and since about being a big anime fan, but we can't know for sure!

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Gabe and his very good friend Pete Wentz. Likely late 2005-early 2006.

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Citizens For Our Betterment: Welcome to the New Administration Mixtape - Cobra Starship Interlude/Outro (2008)

(Watch out! This audio track is a little loud. You may want to turn down your volume before pressing play.)

This interlude features Gabe and Ryland bantering and joking around a bit, and then mixtape host Clinton Sparks recapping the artists who appeared on the mixtape, over an instrumental version of Cobra's Hot Mess track The World Will Never Do. Of some note is that this mixtape was produced and released before Folie a Deux's release date was delayed, hence Sparks' proclaiming the release date as November 4th.

You can listen to or download the CitizensFOB mixtape on the Internet Archive!

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Photos of the band performing at Bamboozle Fest on April 4, 2008.

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(Warning for flashing lights in this video!)

Alex and Ryland, appearing as their electronic side project GRVRBBRS, perform a live instrumental cover of Kanye West’s Love Lockdown, with Alex playing lead guitar and Ryland on bass. October of 2010.

(A note to any younger viewers— Kanye was not always the wildly offensive and controversial artist he is today!)

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This blog has nearly hit double digit followers, which is frankly more than I was expecting for a CS blog in 2025! In light of that, I thought it might be fun to get some more audience engagement going on :)

If you feel like sharing WHY it’s your favorite in the replies or tags, I’d love to hear that, too!

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Cobra Starship - I Kissed a Boy (2008)

(Watch out! This audio starts with a pretty loud sound effect. You may want to turn down your volume before pressing play.)

As far as I've ever been able to find out, the band never gave any word on why they chose to cover Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl for the CitizensFOB mixtape, and this cover was never officially released as a single or as a track on any of their studio albums.

This track is also sometimes listed as featuring Fall Out Boy, but to the best of my knowledge, this is a misconception, and no members of Fall Out Boy were involved in the production of this song in any real way. My guess is that incorrect attribution started back in the file-sharing days, when someone may have seen that this song came from a Fall Out Boy mixtape and assumed that the band was directly involved.

You can listen to or download the CitizensFOB mixtape on the Internet Archive!

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A selection of childhood and high school yearbook photos of Alex.

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Screenshots from the Flash game Where In the World Is Cobra Starship?

This game was made in 2010 to promote the band’s then-upcoming Too Fast For Love Tour, and as one might guess, it plays like a Carmen Sandiego clone. You play as a detective tasked with traveling the world in pursuit of the band, unveiling their identities one at a time by investigating clues and interviewing witnesses, ranging from other Decaydance-associated people like Travie McCoy and Adam Siska all the way to Taylor Swift.

Though the game stopped working on its original website when Flash support officially ended in 2020, it has been preserved and can still be safely played via emulation on the Internet Archive! You can play it here. The game’s radio function and social media links don’t work anymore, but the core game itself is fully intact.

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A promotional photo of the band taken on the set of their MTV "reality show" television spot series. 2007.