A Short History of Cartoon Bands in Honor of the New Gorillaz Album
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
Last week, Gorillaz—the animated band formed by Damon Albarn and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett in 1998—released their ninth studio album, The Mountain. The album is basically what you expect from Gorillaz after all these years—it’s the perfect album for soundtracking the livelier cars in Snowpiercer, where the world is ending but you might as well get ripped and party—but it adds two interesting wrinkles.
First is the influence of traditional Indian music, which Albarn and Hewlett have worked the edges of in past Gorillaz work but never embraced fully. The second is weightier: In a span of two weeks, both Hewlett and Albarn lost their fathers, which lead to both men confronting death and all its phases. It ends up, partially at least, like a musical collage exploration of The Year of Magical Thinking. The way they accomplish this is by rescuing old snippets and samples and contributions to abandoned past Gorillaz songs from people who have passed in the years since, ranging from actor Dennis Hopper and Nigerian drummer Tonny Allen to rapper Trugoy from De La Soul and soul legend Bobby Womack. Mark E. Smith from the Fall is here too.
It’s an interesting direction for the Gorillaz project to go in its 28th year, which is an insane sentence when you consider it. This cartoon band has been active three times as long as the Beatles, longer than Albarn’s main gig, Blur, longer than peak era Fleetwood Mac, even. It’s remarkable for any band to clock that temporal distance, but even more so when you pause and remember: It’s a bunch of cartoons. Certainly no other cartoon band has gone that distance, right?
The cartoon band is nearly as old as televised cartoons and rock ‘n’ roll itself. The first of any notoriety—or at least that put out music you may have heard of—was Alvin and the Chipmunks. In 1958, a producer named Ross Bagdasarian fooled around with tapes to create “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late),” which was a technical wonder at the time, even if it’d go on to annoy millions of people since. It was nominated in the first year of the Grammy’s but didn’t win. The cartoon followed in the early ‘60s, and the “band” put out records throughout the early ‘60s, and again during various revivals with different creative heads and animation techniques over the years.
The biggest cartoon band off all time is undisputedly the Archies, formed in the studios of Los Angeles by ringers who served as the “band” from the popular Archie comics and cartoon show. Whatever marketing executive came up with the concept of turning a band from a comic strip into a real band was ahead of their time. But it wasn’t just a novelty: the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” was the number one song of 1969, in a year when basically every band in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame was active.
The Archies lead to the spin off Josie and the Pussycats, who lowkey had better songs:
The cartoon band had a bit of a fallow period until the late ‘80s, when Jem and the Holograms launched a cult cartoon that is rumored to be relaunched every three to five years. She’s truly outrageous!
The late ‘90s and early ‘00s had no competitors to the Gorillaz—depending on you feel about the Beets-- and the fictional bands and popstars for younger millennials were less cartoons and more of the Hannah Montana variety. The only band that comes close to touching the Gorillaz in terms of craftsmanship, however, is Dethklok, the band from the Adult Swim cartoon Metalocalypse. They launched in 2007 as a cartoon, and when that became a hit, the band formed to tour the material. They’ve actually even been on the road this year, despite the cartoon being cancelled years ago. They might eventually challenge Gorillaz in longevity, depending on how long Albarn and Hewlett want to keep going.
Which lead to last year, inarguably the biggest year for cartoon bands since at least 1969, if not ever: Huntrix, the band from K-Pop Demon Hunters have entered the chat, the only band you can talk to a 35-year-old and a 5-year-old about anymore.
Gorillaz exist in this pantheon of cartoon bands as the peak of the, well, Mountain. But the thing that makes them special, beyond the multimedia execution, is that their albums can cut to the core, can tackle grief and the meaning of life in a way no one who worked on the Archies could ever have conceived.
