Alter ego band cincinnati how to#
Alter ego band cincinnati tv#

If the Archies proved that cartoons could be a band, Gorillaz proved that a band could be cartoons.

Alter ego band cincinnati tv#

Most films and TV shows usher fictional songs into reality, but this was an inversion: The director effectively sealed the singer's realest songs inside a fictional universe. Today, those songs sound perplexingly catchy and maybe even influential - they seem to foreshadow the Auto-Tuned yawp of Young Thug, the incessant chatter of the Minions and plenty of digitally processed babble in between.ĭirector David Lynch and his trusty soundtrack composer Angelo Badalamenti wrote and produced Cruise's billowy, stand-alone 1989 debut, 'Floating Into the Night,' after working with the singer on Lynch's 1986 film, 'Blue Velvet.' But as exquisite as this music was in its own right, it became inextricable from 'Twin Peaks' after Lynch called on Cruise to perform in two episodes of his deeply imaginative television series. In 2004, the vocal vroom-vroom became a massively popular ringtone, and in 2005, Crazy Frog was sputtering out songs aimed at the pop charts. A recording of that onomatopoeic gurgle - ding-ding-da-da-ding-ding - began to circulate online, and in 2003, another Swede drew an animated cartoon character to go with it.

Later that year, when he decided to assign these bizarre vocalizations to a fictitious trio of rodents via 'The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late),' it all clicked with listeners, blooming into an entertainment franchise that still exists nearly 60 years later.Ĭrazy Frog started as a sound, too - the sound of a Swedish teenager impersonating a moped engine in 1997.

Alter ego band cincinnati how to#

In 1958, songwriter Ross Bagdasarian had figured out how to record his singing voice at half-speed and then play it back an octave higher as a high-pitched chirp, scoring a big novelty hit in 1958 with 'Witch Doctor' (refrain: 'Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah-ting-tang-walla-walla-bing-bang'). 25.)īefore the Chipmunks were bankable cartoon characters - or even chipmunks - they were a sound. (Wilson Pickett released a cover of 'Sugar, Sugar' in 1970, but he only got it up to No. 1 with 'Sugar, Sugar' in 1969, a garage band that only existed in two dimensions was suddenly vibrating the three-dimensional air from the top of the charts.

When the fictional cartoon teenagers reached No. Penned and performed by a team of session musicians, the Archies' bubble-gummy rock songs weren't very strange, but the group's success certainly was. This is fictional music that might help us better understand the breadth of what's already out there, and what could still be.Ī lot of great pop music reaches for those mysterious spaces where novelty becomes artful and familiarity becomes strange. I've chosen nine fictional acts to put to that test - not because they're the greatest make-believe pop acts to ever (not) exist, but because certain aspects of their work initially made the line dividing fiction from reality go fizzier than usual. So how should we measure the work of fictional musicians? We could start by weighing the music's novelty against its artfulness, and its familiarity against its strangeness. And that feels like a wasted opportunity. Why isn't this more astonishing to us? Probably because most of the songs that survive this freaky metaphysical transition aren't all that freaky in and of themselves. Sometimes they're human (the Partridge Family, Spinal Tap, the cast in most Broadway musicals), sometimes they're not (the original animated Josie and the Pussycats, Kermit the Frog singing 'Rainbow Connection,' the characters in most Disney cartoons).Īnd while fictional musicians are commonplace in pop culture, we rarely pay any mind to the spectacular fact that their music leaks out of a fictional space and becomes a part of reality. Most of the time, these imaginary musos originate as characters in movies or television shows, and their music fundamentally exists to help advance a story being told on screen. Or maybe it's just that music itself is a kind of sonic fiction, so it feels natural when it comes flowing from the mouth of an imaginary character.Įither way, the possibilities begin to multiply when we're listening to the work of fictional musicians - that is, when the musicians don't exist in real life, but whose music does. Perhaps that's because adopting an alias simply grants a pop star permission to explore different realms of the self - the more they can express from a pseudonymous point of view, the more they can tell us about who they really are. Still, we rarely lose track of who's who.