Style 2000 Eastwood

[Azalee Rowling]

Thisprogram features the twenty-third annual special presentation of Kennedy Center honors for the performing arts held in Washington, D.C. Recipients of this year's honors are actress Angela Lansbury, actor/director Clint Eastwood, opera singer Placido Domingo, dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, and musician Chuck Berry.

Host Walter Cronkite offers opening remarks and introduces a performance by modern drum troupe Blast!. Actress Glenn Close introduces a clip reel of Lansbury's life and career, including her roles in many motion pictures, stage musicals and television shows, including her long run on the mystery series "Murder, She Wrote." Close then introduces Broadway performers Marin Mazzie, Donna Murphy, Karen Ziemba, Nathan Lane, and Len Cariou, who perform several of Lansbury's famous musical numbers, including "A Parade in Town" from "Anyone Can Whistle," "That's How Young I Feel" from "Mame," "I Don't Want to Know" from "Dear World," "You'll Never Get Away From Me" from "Gypsy," "The Worst Pies in London" from "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," and the title song from "Mame."

Next, actor Donald Sutherland honors Eastwood by introducing a series of clips describing his lifelong love of jazz, his early roles in "Rawhide" and in Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy, and his transition to film directing. Actors Tommy Lee Jones, Forest Whitaker, and Morgan Freeman take the stage, joined by comic Don Rickles, to rib Eastwood about his idiosyncratic personality and directing style. Rickles, Whitaker, and Freeman then join pianist Billy Taylor to perform "Ain't Misbehavin'."

Singer Beverly Sills honors Domingo, describing his inspiration from his parents' singing careers and his love of opera, including his later work as an artistic director and educator. Cronkite then acknowledges the international Operalia competition, founded by Domingo in 1993 to inspire younger singers, and two of the 2000 winners, Virginia Tola and Konstyantyn Andreyev, perform "O Soave Fanciulla" from Puccini's "La bohme." The cast and crew of the Washington National Opera then take the stage to surprise Domingo.

Kennedy Center Chairman James A. Johnson offers brief remarks, after which dancer Gregory Hines celebrates Baryshnikov and introduces a clip reel of his long career, including his famous defection to Canada in 1974. Choreographer Mark Morris introduces The Mark Morris Dance Group, who perform a polka set to Lou Harrison's music, and a series of Baryshnikov's colleagues and dance partners, including several past Kennedy Center honorees, take the stage to honor him, including Natalia Makarova, Patricia McBride, Rob Besserer, Tricia Brown, Maria Tallchief, Edward Villella, Jacques d'Amboise, Arthur Mitchell, and Judith Jamison.

Finally, actress Goldie Hawn salutes Berry, introducing a series of clips detailing his early life and entry into rock 'n' roll history. Cronkite welcomes a series of "all-star" musicians, including The Black Crowes, Little Richard, and The B-52s, who perform "I'm Talking About You," "Roll Over Beethoven," "Rock and Roll Music," "Sweet Little 16," "Johnny B. Goode," and "Back in the U.S.A" in Berry's honor.

Cronkite then closes the program by commenting on the first-ever Kennedy Center Honors in 1978, and clips are shown from a number of ceremonies from years past. Commercials deleted.

Just as Napster, also working behind an odd cartoon avatar, used files from CDs to undermine the record industry from within, so Gorillaz presented a new challenge for young music fans who didn't know much else. Thus began some of my first arguments about the nature of pop: "Who makes the songs?" None of us knew Blur, or Damon Albarn, Gorillaz's IRL string-puller, and thus we had no idea. Being in fifth grade meant that we couldn't rule out the possibility that the cartoons were somehow making the music themselves. "What if you went to their concert and a bunch of cartoons came out onstage?" I specifically remember Gary asking that one, and I specifically remember being completely stumped. "How can you like a band that's just cartoons?" Another tough one. For now, let's table it.

Popular music has always been good at producing inversions. What had been fresh quickly becomes trite. Sounds that had grown stale return cooler, more exciting than ever. Audiences push for new songs, but the songs also remake their audiences. Sometimes you realize that the most subversive thing is the one right in front of you. Other times, years later, you realize that the cartoon band that blew your mind when you were a kid is really part of a tradition that begins with chipmunks singing Christmas carols.

In 1958, the producer Ross Bagdasarian, Sr., stage name David Seville, recorded "Witch Doctor," a straight-forward rock song about woman who wouldn't return the singer's affection. In the verse, the witch doctor of the title reveals a magic spell that will make the woman fall in love with the singer; the chorus is the spell, pitched up in a style we've come to associate with singing chipmunks and Kanye West beats from the early 2000s.

The single stayed at Number One for three weeks, and on Halloween of the same year, Seville recorded a holiday-themed follow-up, "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)." This time, he turned the squeaky voices into individual characters, rodents named Simon, Alvin and Theodore, and included their images on the sleeve of the 45. So were born Alvin and the Chipmunks. They are, of course, still with us, as is the combination of love and hate that greeted their reception. "The Chipmunk Song" won three Grammys and returned Seville to the top of the Hot 100. Yet when it faced American Bandstand's "Rate-A-Record" jury, it received the lowest score possible.

The golden age of the cartoon band began about a decade later, its biggest hits faced with the same combination of success and disgust. But pop doesn't tally the No votes, only the Yesses, and in 1969, year of Abbey Road and "Everyday People," the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar" was the top song in both the U.S. and U.K. Written by 16-year-old Andy Kim and Brill Building mainstay Jeff Barry, the song was originally sent to live-action TV band the Monkees. They passed, and so it went to an animated TV band: the Archies, a group composed of the kids from the Archie comics.

They didn't really exist, but over the next few years the Archies stood as one of the most imitated bands in pop. Suddenly, kids around the country learned that their favorite Saturday morning cartoon characters secretly doubled as skilled musicians, and a handful of shows attempted pop crossover. Bob Stanley, in his book Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyonc, provides the following list of Archies-style spin-offs: the Groovie Goolies, the Hardy Boys, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, the Banana Splits ("actually live action with actors in animal costumes and dubbed speaking voices"), the Cattanooga Cats, the Chan Clan, the Neptunes and Josie and and the Pussycats, who were originally published in a series under Archie Comics.

Record companies found these acts similarly advantageous. "One of the things that made the Archies the envy of a lot of other people in the music business was that the Archies were anonymous, the Archies were owned. The Archies couldn't hold out for more money."

Bangs names a tension that has helped drive pop music ever since. Subcultural arbiters have often tried to enforce purity, insisting that it can only be one or the other, raw violence or sugar sugar, but it's striking how many artists have allowed these two extremes to sit side-by-side, unresolved, just as Bangs did. After the Archies, it took Bob Marley and the Wailers less than a year to record their own reggae cover of "Sugar, Sugar." Years later, even more unexpectedly, the Marley embellished the hook to "Buffalo Soldier," a song about the so-called Negro Calvary regiments that fought with the United States Army in the American Indian Wars, with some La-La-Las that immediately recall the theme song for the Banana Splits.

Still, the return was an ironic one. For animated bands like the Archies, animation tended to simplify the presentation of the music. This was music without musicians, and thus music that was unburdened by authorship in the traditional sense. "Sugar, Sugar," though technically the product of a TV show, seems to float in its own realm, with no connection to personal expression of a particular singer. As a medium for the music, the Archies left as few marks as possible.

Gorillaz went in the other direction, using animation not to free their songs but to complicate them further. The cartoons set up a game, and it's never been clear how seriously the game is being played. It's hard to tell just how much distance the irony is creating, in part because both the distance and the irony are both always changing.

Albarn first dreamed up Gorillaz in the mid-'90s, when he was roommates with the illustrator Jamie Hewlett, creator of the comic Tank Girl. The friends envisioned their project as a boy band parody. This frequently came up in Gorillaz's early interviews, but, in another meta trick, Albarn had the characters themselves object to his idea.

"Because we're cartoon characters, I'm sure we'll come up against some prejudice," the fictional bassist Murdoc "told" Spin, who in turn described him as the "Lou Pearlman-like mastermind" behind the group. "Don't compare us to boy bands," he continued. "We ain't no 'N Sync."

Which is maybe just to say that they were the first animated band to take full advantage of the internet and explore its possibilities. In the only 2000s, the music press was particularly enamored with this aspect of the band, frequently stressing the interactive capability of gorillaz.com. The site's format recalled that of the web comic Homestar Runner; fans could explore Gorillaz's cartoon studio or log on to Gorillaz's cartoon computers, where they could read fictional intraband emails. Sample email: "2d, you are gay! MuRdoc."

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