![]() 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. 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. 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. ![]() A lot of great pop music reaches for those mysterious spaces. This is fictional music that might help us better understand the breadth of what’s already out there, and what could still be.Īnd yes, this graph could be plotted on a three-dimensional ball to better account for the zones 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. 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. 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. In the noisy jungle of pop music, many artists speak their truth by pretending to be somebody else. Illustration by KEI, Crazy Frog: WENN Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo The Chipmunks: Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo, The Archies: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo, The Monkees: AP, “Let It Go”/Elsa: Disney, Ziggy Stardust: Brian Horton/AP, Gorillaz: J.C. ![]() (Julee Cruise: Andrew Toth/Getty Images for New York Fashion Week, Hatsune Miku: Crypton Future Media, Inc.
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