Music

The Killers want free Panda Express for life after opening fortune cookie

by Luke Ottenhof

The Killers have given us some pretty damn catchy populist sentiments over the years: I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier. Somebody told me that you had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend. COMING OUT OF MY CAGE AND I’VE BEEN DOIN’ JUST FINE.

The Las Vegas rockers have been putting this kind of airy nonsense in our mouths for over a decade now, not least of all the titular, emphatic phrase, “Smile Like You Mean It.” And it’s over that little string of five words that the band has a bone to pick with Panda Express.

The Killers shared a photo of a reading found inside a fortune cookie from the restaurant that reads, “Smile Like You Mean It” (which is a pretty shitty, copout fortune if you ask me; I expect more from my fortune cookies). Alongside the picture, the band tweeted, “I’m thinkin’ orange chicken for life and we’ll let you off the hook for using our stuff.”

Now, for a band that has fairly shamelessly cultivated a career cashing in on American popular romanticism and nostalgia (no, Bruce Springsteen doesn’t have a monopoly on that industry, but surely “Dustland Fairytale” was found on a scrap of paper Brandon Flowers dug out of Springsteen’s trash while late-night rummaging with Brian Fallon for song ideas), it only seems natural that a restaurant of such repute and splendour would carry on the tradition.

The chain has since responded via Twitter.

Stay tuned for whether or not a Las Vegan mormon and his cronies succeed in extorting a mall food court chain. This is, of course, in jest; the only concrete part of this is that we now know The Killers’ one true weakness: orange chicken. If someone doesn’t throw some at the band while they’re onstage, what will this all have been about?