The G.R.O.D.D. Initiative - Day 2: Anyone can see, she made a monkey of me

While Kevin Church continues his hard hitting series of posts dealing with anthrophobia in comics books, I’d like to use this opportunity to discuss similar trends in music. Case in point: Lancelot Link and The Evolution Revolution.

When the cast members of Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp were offered the opportunity to perform musical interludes between sketches, they had little idea of the creative constraints the network would place upon them. The members of The Evolution Revolution were extremely progressive and eclectic in their musical tastes. Lance drew his musical inspiration from the avant-garde rock of Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, and Mata Hairi’s love of The Velvet Underground and Nico was well documented. (Some detractors have since insisted that this affection was merely due to the album’s cover art, but their assertions should be dismissed as barely cloaked anti-simian hate speech.)

The fruits of the band’s recording sessions were played to the network executives, who were horrified by the raw, jungle-inspired, primal beats they heard. The suits then went behind the band’s back and called in legendary bubblegum producer Archie Andrews to remix the tapes into something more friendly to middle America’s homo sapien-centric ears. The band’s more experimental sounds (ambient fecal impact noise and atonal screeching vocals) were either buried in the mix or discarded entirely. Legend speaks of a lost acetate pressing of the material from the original recording session, but its existence is still unconfirmed as of this writing.

It would be another three decades before the raw power of simian music would reach the listening public, and it would take a quartet of (non-ape) cartoon characters to make the those infectious beats acceptable to the listening public. While the members of the Gorillaz chose not to incorporate the more radical methods of their simian predecessors (i.e. no ambient fecal noise), one has to admire their rather excellent efforts all the same.

(Editor’s Note: Please do not confuse the above ravings of a fever-ravaged lunatic with anything remotely associated with “the facts.”)

Lancelot Link and The Evolution Revolution – Yummy Love (from Lancelot Link and The Evolution Revolution, 1970) – In truth, this group was pretty close to a Grass Roots (“Midnight Confessions”) side project, using material (including rejected GR songs) by the same songwriters and session musicians employed by that band.

Gorillaz – Tomorrow Comes Today (from Gorillaz, 2001) – When I listen to this track, or anything off of Daft Punk’s Discovery, it triggers bittersweet feelings of nostalgia to the summer of 2001, before 9/11 gave G.W. Bush the opportunity to graduate to “dangerous idiot” from “pathetic joke.” It sad how much this country has changed since then; that horrible tragedy brought out the worst in a lot of people…or rather, it emboldened them to go public with their ugliness and find a receptive audience.