Fake it to the limit: On a scale of Monkees-toGorillaz, 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, Kool Keith mutates into Dr. Octagon, and on and on.
Still, we rarely lose track of who’s who. 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. 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.
Either 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. 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. 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).
And 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. 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. And that feels like a wasted opportunity.
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 some 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. This is fictional music that might help us better understand the breadth of what’s already out there, and what could still be.
A lot of great pop music reaches for those mysterious spaces where novelty becomes artful and familiarity becomes strange. More fictional music should.
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 certainly 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 three-dimensional air from the top of the charts. (Wilson Pickett released a cover of “Sugar, Sugar” in 1970, but he only got it up to No. 25.)
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. Why does that require Albarn to pretend he’s a cartoon?
“Let It Go”
For better or worse, 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. If anything, the ubiquity of “Let it Go” proved that 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. But back in the ‘60s, once the Monkees’ music became more popular than their television show, there was no turning back. — WPBloomberg