FAKE IT TO THE LIMIT
On a scale of Monkees-to-Gorillaz, how should we evaluate fictional music?
In the noisy jungle of pop music, many artists speak their truth by pretending to be somebody else.
Singing from the perspective of an alter ego has become standard practice for the likes of Lana Del Rey, The Weeknd, Lady Gaga and every rapper whose stage name doesn’t match what’s printed inside their passport.
A few exceptionally multitudinous souls have even gone to the trouble of assigning alter egos to their alter egos: Nicki Minaj becomes Roman Zolanski, Eminem transforms into Slim Shady. 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.
I’ve chosen nine fictional acts to put to that test:
THE ARCHIES
Penned and performed by a team of session musicians, the Archies’ bubble-gummy rock songs weren’t very strange, but the group’s success was. When the fictional cartoon teenagers reached No. 1 with Sugar, Sugar in 1969, a garage band that only existed in two dimensions was suddenly vibrating the threedimensional air from the top of the charts.
THE CHIPMUNKS
In 1958, songwriter Ross Bagdasarian Sr. figured out how to record his singing voice at halfspeed and then play it back an octave higher as a high-pitched chirp, scoring a big novelty hit in 1958 with Witch Doctor. When he assigned these bizarre vocalizations to a fictitious trio of rodents via The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late), it clicked with listeners, blooming into an entertainment franchise still existing nearly 60 years later.
CRAZY FROG
Crazy Frog started as a sound, too — the sound of a Swedish teenager impersonating a moped engine in 1997. A recording of that onomatopoeic gurgle began to circulate online, and in 2003, another Swede drew an animated cartoon character to go with it. 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. Today, they seem to foreshadow the AutoTuned yawp of Young Thug, the incessant chatter of the Minions and plenty of digitally processed babble in between.
GORILLAZ
If the Archies proved that cartoons could be a band, Gorillaz proved that a band could be cartoons. Comic book artist Jamie Hewlett sketched the characters and Damon Albarn of Blur wrote the songs, and today, Gorillaz stands as the most successful “virtual band” of the 21st century. But musically, after five well-regarded albums, the project seems to primarily exist as a platform for Albarn to scratch his collaborative itches — the band has worked with everyone from Vince Staples to Mavis Staples.
LET IT GO
This power ballad from Disney’s Frozen was absolutely inescapable in 2014, and it scaled the charts in two separate iterations — the dramatic version that appears in the film (sung by the character Queen Elsa, voiced in song by Idina Menzel), and a brisker version sung by plucky pop singer Demi Lovato. The song’s ubiquity proved fictional music is flexible: A tune that belongs to one animated character could be sung by two distinct human voices.
THE MONKEES
The most astonishing thing about fictional music is how effortlessly it slips out of its narrative context to join us in reality. In the case of the Monkees, the pretend rock band singing those songs became real, too. And that’s wild! Imagine if, say, an actor playing Batman decided to leave Hollywood and give vigilante justice a try.
HATSUNE MIKU
For a glimpse into the future of fictional music, gaze into the saucer-shaped eyes of Hatsune Miku, an animated character created by the Japanese software company Crypton Future Media. The company’s singing synthesizer application allows users to compose music for Miku to “sing,” and in her native Japan, the character has become a new kind of virtual celebrity, performing concerts as a threedimensional projection.
JULEE CRUISE IN TWIN PEAKS
Director 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. 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.
ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS
Another inversion: Just as the Monkees learned to be real, David Bowie yearned to be fake. But what many imitators of Bowie’s shape-shifting too often forget is that he wanted his most celebrated alter ego to be more than human — a pansexual space alien for starters, and a rock ’n’ roll icon for the ages.