https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgocE-JfWFI
Omaha's indie pop outfit Tilly and the Wall, pictured above, likes the alphabet: The quintet filmed a music video about ABCs to be aired this fall on Sesame Street and, on June 17, is also releasing a new full-length simply called O. But Tilly and the Wall is just the latest group to bring cool to the kids in Sesame Street's nearly 40-year history. That's a lot of great music, which engendered my Stephen Colbert-ish rhetorical question above.
See, after joining the GeekDad ranks with a daughter of my own, I've found no shortage of awesome music programming from the files of Sesame Street to keep her entertained. Some feature bands huge and small, and some just feature sick funk. On the latter score, her diehard favorite is still an animated pinball video, at right, that could give every Pro Tools new jack night terrors. It's a psychedelic mindwipe with a mean steel drum solo. It's also clocked at 2:42 which, according to my esteemed colleague Eliot, may in fact be the perfect song length.
Others outshine the original. R.E.M.'s funny stint with a bunch of bipolar beasts in "Furry Happy Monsters" is enough to make you forget "Shiny Happy People" ever existed. Some are riotous lampoons: madman Little Chrissy's "8 Balls of Fur" is a bizarro riff on Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire" that starts with some of the strangest puppetry on record and ends in Chrissy manically destroying his own piano. My kid Sofie goes nuts for all of them.
But not as nuts as one kid goes in the six-plus-minute live rendition of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" below. He's bonkers, and for good reason: You can barely catch a band playing live for six minutes on television at all these days, much less kids' television. Maybe he's bonkers because he could see the boring future coming his way.
Ultimately, it is up to the viewers of the future to decide whether or not Sesame Street is a great music show or the greatest music show ever. Chime in yourself by adding your favorites in the comments below. But whatever the viewers decide, it is nice to see, as MTV devolves to the vanishing point, that some shows can still teach kids how to bang their heads.
While they're filling them up with knowledge, of course.
Photo: TillyandtheWall.com
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