About This Time 20 Years Ago…

It’s The Hits Of June-ish 2005!

The Hottest Hit On The Planet:

During our last visit to 2005 – that’s 20 Years Ago! – we looked at “Lonely” by Akon, a pop smash specifically written to be sold as a ringtone. Today we look at the reverse phenomena; a ringtone, that turned into a global (except in the US) pop smash!

For that’s the kind of year 2005 was. When you look around, at the world as it is today, and you think things couldn’t possibly get any worse, remember… we’ve fought our way through this before.

Bem Bem…

Crazy Frog was originally known as “The Annoying Thing.”

This provides the financial incentive for a bounty hunter seemingly portrayed by Dr Claw to set loose a giant robot to capture our “hero.”

Purely from an accomplishing-what-they-set-out-to-achieve point of view and accomplishing-it-in-the-most-annoying-way-possible:

“Axel F” really ought to be a 10 (spoiler alert: it is NOT going to be a 10)

Bem Bem…

This is what the vocals of Crazy Frog are meant to be. This is why Crazy Frog is always wearing a leather jacket and motorcycle goggles. Crazy Frog is meant to be a biker, although quite why he insists on making his own motorcycle noises remains a mystery. It’s probably not something we are meant to think too much about.

Crazy Frog was not, however, meant to be a frog.

Daniel saved this recording as 2TAKTARE.MP3 – which is Swedish for “two-stroke.”

Daniel did this sort of thing a lot; recording “musical jokes” and distributing them on CDs and floppy discs. Daniel used to play the CD at friend’s parties. I guess Sweden in 1997 was caught between the fall of Ace Of Base and the rise of Max Martin, so they had to make their own fun.

There was the Internet of course – you could always find something fun on that – but it was still pretty rudimentary in 1997. The Internet was still rudimentary in 2001 when “The Insanity Test” became a meme.

Here’s a recreation of the experience:

I can’t remember it existing, but apparently it was quite a big deal. Daniel’s silly “musical joke” was getting around.

Bem Bem…

Years passed and a Swedish nerd by the name of Erik Wernquist, found the sound on the Internet – presumedly through “The Insanity Test” – and made a short animation based on it. He called this animation “The Annoying Thing.” Once again I need to emphasize: there is no indication that this was supposed to be a frog. Indeed, there is nothing frog-like about it. Also, as Erik often pointed out, no reason to assume that “The Annoying Thing” was crazy.

Bem, bem…

This is when ringtone marketer Jamba – aka Jamster aka Jamba! – jumped in.

Jamba saw “The Annoying Thing” and they saw ‘hit ringtone potential.’  At which point Daniel thought…

“I’m very, very, very stunned that it’s gone so far, almost too far. It’s such a little creation, it’s less than a minute and I would guess that most people actually would have no idea that it’s an imitation of a two stroke engine.”

Little did Daniel know quite how far it was about to go.

By the time everything settled down Jamba had created other characters –  Brad the Bratt, Sweety Chick and Nessie the Tiny Dragon – but these did not catch on.

Even Sir Mix-A-Lot jumped on the bandwagon…

Bem, bem…

Then – possibly inspired by the news that ringtones were outselling CD singles – Jamba decided to release a CD single. Apparently just to stomp on the grave of a dying medium.

But even at the peak of Crazy Frog-mania, you couldn’t release a CD with just the Crazy Frog voice on it. You still needed music.

Fortunately, the perfect song was just waiting for them:

But Jamba were too lazy to rework an old 80s track so that it would work as a ringtone friendly 00s track… after all, they were ringtone marketers, not dance producers… and anyway, somebody else had already done the hard work for them:

Captain Hollywood (for this track credited as ‘Murphy Brown vs Captain Hollywood,’ despite zero involvement from Candice Bergen). Just in case the mere recording of “Axel F” wasn’t 80s enough, it also features a sample of Max Headroom.

Quick backstory for Captain Hollywood: Tony Dawson-Harrison was an Army captain from Newark, New Jersey, stationed in Germany in the 80s, where he had his own party trick poppin’ and lockin’ in his army captain’s uniform. This led to Captain Hollywood being possibly the first person ever to breakdance on European television, which led to a career in choreography, which led to a career as a Eurodance rapper, most famously on the 1992 classic “More And More”, one of the most-Eurodance Eurodance tracks of all time, and such a big hit that it even took off in the usually Eurodance-resistant U.S. market (“More And More” a 7)

The Crazy Frog version of “Axel F” simply takes Captain Hollywood (and Murphy Brown) off the track and smacks Daniel Malmedahl’s silly voice over the top of it. The Max Headroom sample remained. That was all the effort needed to ensure that the Crazy Frog record would be a hit.

And WHAT A HIT! The week the Crazy Frog single dropped it not only debuted at Number One in the UK but outsold the Number 2 record, the latest, long-awaited, single by Coldplay by 4-to-1! Crazy Frog was flying with the speed of sound!

Now, clearly, Jamba weren’t going to stop there.

The kind of people willing to impose Crazy Frog on the populace are not the kind of people who might step back and think for a moment, “maybe that’s enough for now.”

Besides, it’s not as though Crazy Frog had feelings. He was never going to feel self-conscious about the fact that millions of people hated his guts. He was a frog.

And he was crazy. He didn’t know when to stop. Not when there were so many other cheesy party anthems to murder with the Crazy Frog treatment.

Most of the hits the Crazy Frog team chose were pretty obvious:

• “Pump Up The Jam”
• “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”
• “I Like To Move It”
• “I’m Too Sexy”
• “Cotton Eyed Joe”
• “We Like To Party”
• “Who Let The Frog Out?”
• “Ice Ice Baby” – Crazy Frog “ding-ding-ding”s the bassline, which is almost funny
• And for “Axel F”s follow-up single, the only instrumental with rave-potential more blatant than “Axel F”: “Popcorn:”

Which was such a big hit in France that it gave Crazy Frog back-to-back Number One singles there. Between “Axel F” and “Popcorn”, Crazy Frog was Number One for 20 CONSECUTIVE WEEKS! 

The French really love frogs.

But I don’t think anyone saw “We Are the Champions (Ding a Dang Dong)” happening, even if it was a World Cup year.

Bem, bem…

There were plenty of reasons to hate Crazy Frog’s guts.

Even before the single was released, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority were flooded with complaints. Crazy Frog advertisements – and Jambo advertisements in general – were the most complained about advertisement in the UK that year.

And because their kids were buying the ringtone, thinking that it was a one-off purchase, unaware that it was actually an ongoing pocket-money draining subscription service!

Parents also complained about Crazy Frog’s penis. Rarely – if ever – have television viewers been exposed en masse to male genitalia on such a regular basis as during 2005, The Year Of The Great Frog Flashing. It was never a welcome sight – it was never consensual – particularly when you were trying to eat your breakfast. It’s hard to comprehend how it was even legal, even in Europe. Exactly when Crazy Frog had his penis removed is unclear.

Bloody hell, Crazy Frog, PUT ON SOME PANTS!!

So what was happening with Daniel all this time? The man who had started it all?

There was one, for example, of a spaceship door opening; another of an old Amiga game. Despite Daniel being the guy behind Crazy Frog, no one was interested.

NBC was interested, however. They interviewed him. So I’ll leave you with this quote: “It’s very hard to predict whether it– for how long it’s going to hold. But definitely the–it’s a start of a kind of new era of creating music.”

Bem, bem…

“Axel F” is a 4.

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Meanwhile, in Cartoon Land…

Just in case Crazy Frog wasn’t quite enough animation for you, here’s a band made up entirely of animated characters; one that managed to accomplish the impossible:

By being a critically acclaimed band of animated characters!

Of course it helped that the main human behind the band was already critically acclaimed:

A man who had spent the decade since Britpop: becoming more and more embarrassed by the whole thing. A man so desperate to distance himself from his greatest achievement that he made the leap from a 3-D world to a 2-D one.

You may think that the leader of Gorillaz is Damon Albarn, but you would be wrong.

The leader of Gorillaz is Stuart Harold Tusspot. Or, since that is a terrible name for a rockstar:

Which led to his hair, first falling out, and then growing back… blue!

2-D also – although the artwork is sometimes inconsistent about this – has gaping holes where his eyes are supposed to be. Those gaping holes are not 2-D’s fault though.

That Murdoch also had an unfortunate childhood – assaulted by a lunch lady at the age of nine, forced to dress up like Pinocchio and sing for his father’s drinking money – can be seen by the fact that his skin was green; the result of catching a flesh-eating disease in the toilet. Murdoch also became a Satanist and did that whole sell-your-soul-in-return-for-fortune-and-fame thinng.

At the age of 31, Murdoch had formed a gang and were stealing synthesizers. Their plan was to crash their car into Uncle Norm’s Organ Emporium, which they proceeded to do, crashing not only through the window, but into 2-D’s face. This is how 2-D lost the first of his eyes. The second was when Murdoch was driving around with 2-D, driving like a hoon, and 2-D went flying out the window.

The sight of a blue haired freak with gaping holes where his eyes were supposed to be, was so rock’n’roll that Murdoch decided that he and 2-D would start a band together, discovering their recording studio – Kong Studios – on the website: Giganticdisusedhauntedstudiomansionsinthemiddleofnowhere.com

There was something about Russel that made him a conduit for spirits and demons; one night a bunch of his friends were shot in a drive-by shooting, their spirits consequently ending up possessing Russel’s body, including Del The Ghost Rapper, the star of the Gorillaz’s first hit “Clint Eastwood” (“Clint Eastwood” is a 10.)

Russel ended up in the Gorillaz because Murdoch kidnapped him.

Then there was Noodle…

Unfortunately the children were deemed too dangerous, the project cancelled, and the children killed. All but Noodle, whom Mr. Kyuzo, who was running the project, decided to spare. So he hypnotized her, wiped her memory and FedExed her in a box to London, where she appeared one day at Kong Studios. As soon as the box was opened, Noodle sprang out and played a guitar solo that sounded like “200 demons screaming in Arabic,” before saying “noodle.”

Nothing in this surprisingly dark back story is apparent from listening to a Gorillaz album.

Those are the actual members of Gorillaz. But, on another level:

Damon and Jamie were flatmates at the time. Because, I guess, if you are one of the most famous people in the country and you are friends with one of the other most famous people in the country, and you both get dumped by your girlfriends at the same time, the most natural thing to do is to get a flat in Notting Hill together, and start a virtual cartoon band.

Did Gorillaz sound like a cartoon band? They certainly didn’t sound as though they were band made up of real-life humans.

I very much prefer the Gorillaz self-titled debut album – the one with “Clint Eastwood” – over Demon Days, the one with “Feel Good Inc.” On the first album, Gorillaz sound as though they might actually live in a cartoon. Demon Days on the other hand, sounds like an action blockbuster. It no longer sounds like a joke. Or, as Damon puts it: “if you do it again, it’s no longer a gimmick”

As if to underline how serious Gorillaz now was, Jamie had put more effort into drawing them.

And the guest stars were bigger: with all due respect to Del the Funky Homosapien and Miho from Cibo Matto, but you’re not exactly Shuan Ryder, or Neneh Cherry (although Neneh doesn’t really do much). And you’re certainly not De La Soul!!

There are few rap groups that make more sense in a cartoon format than De La Soul.

Demon Days also features Bootie Brown from The Pharcyde, pretty much their main competition for that very specific hip-hop niche – about the only rap group that might shoulder their way into a song in order to spit a line like “Care Bear reppin’ in harder this year”, and not have to worry about their street cred.

Demon Days was also a darker album.

Just look at the song titles:

• “Last Living Souls”
• “Every Planet We Reach Is Dead”
• And the track which De La were initially supposed to be on, “Kids With Guns.”

If Gorillaz had been very much a pre-9-11 sort of album, Demon Days was a paranoid post-9-11 album.

One inspired by Damon going on a family holiday through the Gobi Desert from Beijing to Mongolia…

Well, I guess Demon Days does feature a “Girls & Boys”. It has “Dare.”

Which – as I’m sure you’re aware – was initially supposed to be “It’s There”, but Shaun Ryder’s Manchurian accent was so strong that it came out as “It’s Dare!” and consequently stuck. I also assume that Shaun was off his face on something. Or everything.

“Dare” is a song that sounds like debauchery just as much as “Girls & Boys” was about debauchery, and it’s simply just great for dancing, as Noodle ably demonstrates. (“Dare” is a 10.)

But yeah, anyway, Mongolia? Why Mongolia? Seriously, why Mongolia? China I get. I’ve been to China. It’s one of the classics. It has a lot of people. But… Mongolia? What’s in Mongolia?

According to Damon, Mongolia – or at least the train to Mongolia – is all “dust bowls, loose earth rapidly turning into desert. There are little satellite towns in the middle of these semi deserts that are absolutely on their knees… And that will happen to us in our lifetime.”

But what about the windmills? What explains the windmills? What’s that all about? Who the hell writes a song about windmills in 2005?

The windmills, according to Damon, were:

• (a) because he was strumming his acoustic guitar and needed a suitably idyllic lyric to go along with it, and
• (b) a reference to the “dark Satanic mills” of William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” itself a reference to the belching chimney stacks of the Industrial Revolution.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out what “Feel Good Inc” is all about.

I mean, people have written essays with titles like “An Analysis of Figurative Language in Feel Good Inc and Clint Eastwood Song Lyrics by Gorillaz.”

Fortunately then, Murdoch has uploaded a Commentary Edition:

“it’s very prescient this video… Feel Good Incorporated, giant company, taking over the world, delivering fake happiness, subjugating its workers… Sound Familiar?”

The fact that I can think of multiple contemporary real-life Feel Good Incs off the top of my head is the scariest thing of all.

Naturally, a song by a cartoon band ought to be inspired by a cartoon. Or an anime, anyway.

In this case: Hayao Miyazaki’s 1986 animated classic Castle in the Sky, the first Studio Ghibli film, which in turn was about the 1984-85 miner’s strike in Wales. Or, more obviously, it’s about two innocent children searching for a floating castle, whilst corrupt grown-ups chase them around, trying to gain control of the castle for their own nefarious purposes.

Whatever “Feel Good Inc” is about – whether it’s supposed to be about the evils of late-capitalism destroying the natural world, as evidenced by the references to “dark Satanic mills”, Care Bears saving the world with their Care Bear Stare, and “Castle In The Sky” – it’s probably not supposed to be funny. Which begs a further question: 

WHAT’S WITH ALL THE INFERNAL LAUGHING?!? (Other than the fact it was sampled from De La messing about while the microphone was on)

I love Gorillaz. I love De La Soul. But I don’t particularly love “Feel Good Inc.”

• Is it the windmills?  
• The laughing?
• It is how jarring the different moods are; from Noodle strumming the guitar around the campfire, straight into De La Soul smashing through the wall? 2-Ds half asleep distorted rapping?
• The laughing again?

“Feel Good Inc” is one of the weirdest hit records of the decade, so I’m kind of glad it’s regarded as a classic… I’m just not entirely sure why it is… not when “Dare” is right… well, c’mon Shaun Ryder, help me out… IT’S DARE!!

“Feel Good Inc” is a 7.

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Meanwhile, In Insanely Ambitious And Ultimately Abandoned Musical Project Land:

It was all a lie. From the very beginning: it was all a lie.

Sufjan Stevens never intended to record 50 albums about all 50 of the United States of America.

It was a promotional gimmick that his manager came up with over a Chinese dinner in New York, after Sufjan had told him he was working on a concept album about Michigan.

They coined it “The Fifty States Project.”

Now, what you need to understand, is that the blogosphere was just beginning to become a thing, and they needed something interesting to write about. “The Fifty States Project” fit the bill perfectly. It was the sort of literary project that people who earn money by writing stuff liked to write about. I’m still writing about it now.

Not enough indie rock stars complete Creative Writing courses. If anybody was going to be able to pull off a feat like “The Fifty States Project”, that someone was Sufjan Stevens. But would he be able to pull it off? Was it even possible? Or would he just give up?

Reading through the multitude of articles about Sufjan at the time, nobody really seemed to believe he’d go through with it all… maybe that’s why they were so excited when the second album came out As Damon pointed out above: “If you do it again, it’s no longer a gimmick.” Except that in this case, that’s exactly what it was.

Sufjan was pretty open that it was all a promotional stunt early on, telling Junkmedia as early as 2004

Sufjan admitted it was gimmick – seemingly his favourite word – in pretty much every interview he has ever done, but still people keep expecting him to continue with the entire 50 states.

Which just goes to prove that “The Fifty States Project” was the most successful promotional stunt in indie pop history.

Suddenly Sufjan went from being a nobody with a banjo, to having a very vocal cult following, particularly amongst music critics putting together end-of-year lists. And music journalists looking for an angle.

“I think we should all be measured by our work, and … not measured by our advertising.”

Or, should we be measured by our song titles? Because “Illinois” – apparently its official title, even though the cover states “invites you to: Come On Feel The Illinoise”, an objectively far better title and thus the one that I am determined to use – includes such song titles as:

• “They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!”

• “To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament, and It Involves Tube Socks, a Paper Airplane, and Twenty-Two Able-Bodied Men”

And:

• “The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You’re Going to Have to Leave Now, or, ‘I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'”

Which, ironically, is pretty much an instrumental:

Sufjan had grown up in Michigan. He already knew everything they was to know about that state. Writing “Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State” was presumedly a breeze.

But for invites you to: Come On Feel The Illinoise, Sufjan needed to go to the library, he needed to search through immigration records, he needed to read Saul Bellow novels … and all this for a state he was reasonably familiar with, what with Illinois being more or less next door to Michigan, give-or-take a short drive through Indiana, or a longer drive through Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, in addition to his deep-dive research into Illinois:

The result of all this research was to make Illinois sound like the most fascinating place on Earth.

There are songs about:

• UFO sightings
• Superman
• The World Columbian Exhibition of 1893
• Invention of the Ferris Wheel
• The Great Godfrey Maze
• Random lyrics about Andrew Jackson, the Underground Railroad, Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, Caterpillar construction equipment, Hellen Keller, the dying of the Chicago river green on St Patricks Day (but not the far more impressive fact that they reversed the river’s flow?) and something about a Chicago Cubs billy goat curse?

Then there’s the “Night Zombies” song, which is basically a list of ghost towns. Oh, and the song about serial killer John Wayne Gacy. I bet you’ve never been so intrigued about Illinois in your entire life!

Despite being featured on the cover, there is no song about Al Capone.

The biggest hit on invites you to: Come On Feel The Illinoise was “Chicago.”

That feels inevitable. It is the biggest city, after all (but not, as I keep on having to remind myself, the capital.)

In the context of the album, “Chicago” stands out. It has the shortest title; one word.

In addition to its distinction as the song with the shortest title, “Chicago” is also the only song on invites you to: Come On Feel The Illinoise not to be about an historical event or a pop culture reference. It’s the only song that doesn’t require the listener to have an in-depth knowledge of trivial Illinois facts.

“Chicago” is the only song on invites you to: Come On Feel The Illinoise to be about Sufjan himself.

Is “Chicago”, Sufjan’s version of a driving song? – something he did multiple times during his younger years. He saw his first rock concert there. It appears that for young-Sufjan, Chicago is where he thought of when he thought of “the big city.”

Sufjan may have been born in Detroit, Michigan, but he grew up, up north, in Alanson.

Here’s a couple of trivial facts about Alanson, Michigan.

• Population: about 700.

• Biggest Tourist Attraction: America’s shortest swing bridge:

This makes sense. “Chicago” is nothing if not the work of a small-town boy looking for salvation in the big city. That’s why “Chicago” sounds both folksy, and gloriously aspirational, a tricky combination. The city came to take us. And recreate us.

At least until Sufjan decides to take off for New York instead in the second verse.

It’s like they’re being upstaged in their own song… that’s gotta hurt.

But at least Illinois got a Sufjan Stevens’ album. New York state never did. And, as seems increasingly likely, they never will.

“Chicago” is a 9.

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