A Friendly Rant From Captain
Spaulding
SYNERGY
FOR THE DEVIL
No further
nominations are being taken for Captain
Spaulding's Album of the Year, as a clear winner
has emerged from the pack. It's Songs In the
Key of Springfield, (Rhino) a CD filled with music written and
recorded for and appearing in the Fox animated
television series The Simpsons.
Anyone who demurs
regarding The Simpsons's status as the
best show on television is needlessly exercising
his or her larynx. We're all familiar with the
pretenders--and no, I don't mean the
George-Plimpton-meets-The Prisoner
series that's part of NBC's Saturday
"thrillogy". They're all pretenders for
a reason. Seinfeld is growing stale and
formulaic; ER is borderline soap; NYPD
Blue, Homicide, and Law &
Order are merely good variations on the
endless cops-and-robbers theme that has been a TV
staple since Jack Webb first droned "Just
the facts, ma'am" to a fifties housewife;
and The Daily Show and The Larry
Sanders Show are disqualified because a show
cannot be the best if Jack and Phyllis Nocable
can't get it on the set at home.
Among the many
joys that make The Simpsons such a
nonpareil landmark in the history of
boobtubery--joys such as the literate and
multilayered writing, the endearingly motley cast
of characters, the revolving in-joke intros, the
ongoing excursus upon children's cartoons that is
The Itchy & Scratchy Show, and more
pithy one-liners in a single episode than Friends
has in an entire season--is the music.
Start with the
Danny Elfman-penned theme song, which series
producer James Brooks aptly described as
"lemmings-marching-to-their-death
music". Then move on to the special music
created episode-by-episode by musical director
Alf Clauson, the most underrated composer in pop
culture since Ennio Morricone scored his first
spaghetti western.
Songs In the
Key of Springfield captures the frenetic
pace and sly wit of the show's writing and
combines it with some of the best-realized
musical parody since the days of the Bonzo
Dog Band and the National Lampoon Radio
Hour. Working in tandem with various
lyricists, Clauson flawlessly Simpsonizes such
musical genres as country ("Bagged Me a
Homer"); Tinseltown schmaltz ("Send In
the Clowns"); hepcat fingerpop jazz
("Cool"); mambo (Tito Puente's take on
"Senor Burns"); swing ("Capital
City", sung by Tony Bennett); kidvid cartoon
rock ("The Amendment Song"); drinking
chants ("We Do (The Stonecutters
Song)"); TV themes ("Flaming
Moe's"); and a plethora of Broadway sendups.
The latter is a Clauson specialty, evidenced in
the cleverness of "Springfield,
Springfield", "The Monorail Song",
and the hilarious PETA nightmare, "See My
Vest".
Although musical
guests like Puente, Bennett, and Robert Goulet
will occasionally perform Clauson's numbers, most
are sung by the show's voiceover artists in their
familiar guise as the show's characters. Dan
Castallaneta as combover Everyman Homer
Simpson, TV's definitive dimwitted dad, moans
"It Was a Very Good Beer"; Julie Kavner
as grackle-voiced ubermom Marge Simpson, she of
the stratospheric blue beehive, intones "I
Thought My Life Would Be a Mardi Gras"; Hank
Azaria as the popeyed Hindu convenience store
clerk Apu warbles "Who Needs the
Kwik-E-Mart?"; and so on.
The Broadway
numbers are Clauson's labor of love. The CD has
two pseudo-musicals which appeared in Simpsons
scripts: Streetcar! (a musical version
of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named
Desire, starring Marge Simpson and Ned
Flanders) and Stop This Crazy Planet Of the
Apes, I Want To Get Off! (the sci-fi simian
saga done Busby Berkeley style, with Phil
Hartman's Troy McClure in the Charlton Heston
role singing such gems as "Dr. Zaius"
and "Chimpan A to Chimpan Z"). A third
musical spoof, of Julie Andrews in Mary
Poppins ("Cut Every Corner"; Happy
Just the Way Things Are") does not appear on
the album.
Broadway is easy
to satirize, but hard to satirize well. Clauson
(and the show's writers) know and understand the
tried-and-true cliches of the Great White Way,
and turn them inside-out with a straight face.
The best thing
about Songs In the Key of Springfield,
though, is that it completely takes the shame out
of watching television. Even the most blithe
among us sometimes wonder if we're wasting our
lives endlessly watching "the flickering
blue spouse" (as our fearless leader at Pando
Dave
Liljengren calls it) that sits
lord-and-master-like in our living rooms. More
censorious intellectuals decide at some point in
their lives that they're through being hollow men
and women in Newton Minow's vast wasteland and
throw their television sets away. Television is
the secular world's version of the devil--always
there to tempt you with worthless pursuits that
will empty you of your soul and snap! crackle!
pop! your brain into Quaker oatmeal.
For those of us
who persist in suckling at the paps of the
cathode sow but continue to feel guilty about it,
Songs In the Key of Springfield points
the way to a better tomorrow. "Synergy"
may be one of those detestable buzzwords du jour
(as were lampooned in The Simpsons "Poochie
the Dog" episode), but synergy describes
exactly what the braintrust behind the series has
done. They have produced a television show whose
creativity extends beyond the conventional
screenwriting-acting-directing (and, in this
case, animating) triad and into another artistic
field--pop music. And in doing so, they've made
TV safe for those of us carefully husbanding our
few remaining neurons.
Of course,
television has been attempting to creatively
co-opt music into its programming since Ricky
Nelson first picked up a guitar on Here Come
the Nelsons. But it has never been done it
this completely, or this well...and it has never
offered such stand-alone product as Songs In
the Key of Springfield. In the past, shows
have used songs as extraneous filler (just as the
musical acts that performed them used the shows
as promotional appearances), and, beginning with The
Monkees and moving on with diminishing
returns to The Brady Kids and Fame,
followed the same tired format of a band or
ensemble inserting lip-synched performances into
various episodes.
The Simpsons
not only uses a broader palette of music, but it
fits the musical numbers seamlessly into the
narrative thread. And in not taking itself
seriously, Clauson's sonic carnival demands to be
taken much more seriously than the usual
fluffernutter dispensed by the music industry
nowadays. Happiness is, indeed, just a flaming
moe away.
The Simpsons
makes it okay to watch television again. Not only
are you not being dumbed down by watching it, you
can click off the set at the end and have a
snappy tune running through your head. You find
yourself tempted to follow Homer's lead and hug
your Zenith while cooing, "Oh,
television...let's never argue again!"
E-Mail Captain Spaulding.
Previous
Mountaintop Experiences with Captain
Spaulding:
Hooray
For Me #1-- One Margarita Too Many?
Hooray
For Me #2-- Spitting at the Generations
Hooray
For Me #3-- The One-Eyed Spokesmodel
Hooray
For Me #4-- Semisardonic Over Semisonic
Hooray
For Me #5-- Bury My Brain at Wounded Knee
Hooray
For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup
Hooray
For Me #7-- Princess Diana
Hooray
For Me #8-- Get Back, Honky Cat
Hooray
For Me #9-- Mother Teresa
Hooray
For Me #10-- Selling Johnny Cash
Hooray
For Me #11-- Is the Male Ego a Hairy Beast?
Hooray
For Me #12-- Why America Gets No Kicks from
Soccer
Hooray
For Me #13-- O Canada! Who Stand on Guard For
Thee?
Hooray
For Me #14-- Suicide is Painless, but Loss of
Creative...
