The 1981 Abomination Urban Chipmunk Exposes Alvin and the Chipmunks as Lame Posers Way Out of Their League Performing Hillbilly Music
There’s something special about your go-to karaoke song, the beloved ditty you have a go at any time the opportunity presents itself. This is particularly true if, like me, you aren’t into karaoke but have one song that you will always sing in front of other people if you are anywhere from mildly to excessively soused.
When you find a karaoke song that really connects with you, it becomes your song. You feel a sense of ownership over it as well as an intense emotional and spiritual connection. Your karaoke song says something about you and how you see the world. It’s a song you choose over and over and over again even when you have myriad other options.
My go-to karaoke song is, and has been for over a decade, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson’s “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love).” I fell in love with the crossover smash while researching the Waylon Jennings entry in my The A.V Club column Nashville or Bust and have kept it close to my heart ever since.
I sang “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” during karaoke night at Kid Rock’s Chillin’ the Most cruise back in 2011 and I sang it at my friend Erin’s chicken wings party a few weeks ago. Whenever I have an opportunity to sing “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” I go for it.
A few days ago a friend posted an image of himself at Waylon Jennings’ grave and it prompted me to look my favorite Waylon Jennings song up on Wikipedia, where I made a shocking and horrifying discovery.
I am unsurprisingly not the only one to have a go at “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love).” In 1981, “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” was one of a number of country classics mercilessly destroyed on talking cartoon rodent novelty group Alvin and the Chipmunks’ Urban Chipmunk.
Urban Chipmunk was the follow-up to the even more misbegotten, ill-conceived 1980 Chipmunk Punk, which is notorious for not containing any actual punk music, despite its name. Instead Chipmunk Punk featured covers of songs by such sneering provocateurs as Linda Ronstadt, Billy Joel and Queen.
Rumor has it Chipmunk Punk originally covered The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols in its entirety, with extra profanity thrown in for added transgression but the label nixed it as too angry and adult, so they diligently removed anything even remotely punk from the album.
Here’s the crazy thing about Chipmunk Punk: despite not being punk, or remotely appropriate for children, Alvin and the Chipmunks’ cover of The Knack’s “My Sharona” and “Good Girls Don’t” fucking rock. As the young people say, they “slap” despite, or perhaps because, the squealing rodents did nothing to tone down the raunchiness of either song.
It is bizarre and bracing hearing Alvin brag in his signature high-pitched squeak, “I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind” on “My Sharona.” Considering that Alvin is supposed to be eight years old that means he’s probably lusting after a fetus and/or baby. I’m not sure why Chipmunk Punk had to keep in lyrics about getting a raging erection groping underage women but they did!
“Good Girls Don’t” is arguably even filthier, with double entendres lyrics about sticky ejaculate and a promiscuous love interest who promises to do all the nasty, filthy things proper young ladies won’t. It should be noted, however, that Alvin and the Chipmunks’ tribute to young people fucking DOES change, “An in-between age madness/That you know you can't erase/'Til she's sitting on your face” to “An in-between age madness/That you know you can't erase/'Til she's sitting in your place.”
Chipmunk Punk had to draw the line somewhere, so they wisely chose not to have Alvin sing about enthusiastically performing cunnilingus on the horny human teenager of his dreams.
Conceptually and musically, it makes a shocking amount of sense to posit these filthy New Wave anthems as the product of squeaky-voiced cartoon rodents from TV. Alvin and the Chipmunks + New Wave is as inspired as Alvin and the Chipmunks+ country is disastrous.
The first new Alvin and the Chipmunks album after the death of creator Ross Bagdasarian, Chipmunk Punk re-introduced the brothers as a trio of posers cynically trying to cash in on the popularity of a genre of music they had no genuine affinity for.
Accordingly, when Alvin, Simon and Theodore would go to punk shows to try to ingratiate themselves with the scene, they would invariably get their asses kicked.
Here’s the thing about “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love).” I’m not really old or world-weary enough to do justice to the song and I am a VERY old and VERY weary forty-five year old who has SEEN SOME SHIT, I can assure you. Don’t believe me? Then buy some of the books I have written about some of the shit I have seen.
You really should be a Southerner in their fifties disillusioned with your empty life of wealth and privilege in order to sing “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love).”
Alvin is canonically eight years old and a fictional cartoon chipmunk. He has no business even listening to “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)”, let alone singing it.
Urban Chipmunk removes the most adult lyric from the song, about the only things that make life worth living being, “guitars that tune good and firm feelin’ women.”
The monsters behind Urban Chipmunk understandably did not want Alvin to enthuse that one of the only things keeping life from being completely meaningless are sweet-ass country honeys with monster jugs, sweet asses and legs that won’t quit.
So instead of singing the praises of honky tonk vixens, the insufferable helium-sucking trio squeaks their enthusiasm for food, Santa Claus, birthday parties, roller skates, movies and popcorn.
That’s all very on-brand for the Chipmunks in their various iterations but it could not clash more violently with the perversely adult, exhausted, adult lament on the emptiness of the lush but empty high life that follows.
Other than removing the phrase “firm-feeling women”, Alvin and the Chipmunks’ cover doesn’t change any of the other lyrics, including a reference to cult singer-singers Mickey Newbury and Jerry Jeff Walker that flew over the heads of most adult country fans and I’m guessing didn’t connect with the five year olds who got their parents to buy the album with the funny animal on the cover.
It’s similarly jarring hearing sped-up silly cartoon animals who are less than ten years old confess, “This coat and tie is choking me, in your high society, you cry all day.”
Listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks ruin my song was a surreal and nightmarish experience analogous to two of the subjects of The Joy of Trash that infect our cuddly cartoon animal friends with an unmistakably adult darkness that could not feel more wrong or inappropriate.
The infamous All-Star animated special Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue transformed all our favorite Saturday morning heroes into narcs, snitches lecturing audiences about the society-corrupting evils of marijuana.
The shockingly musically sophisticated 1986 McGruff’s Smart Kids Album, meanwhile, finds the crime-stopping canine painfully howling his way through anti-drug anthems with titles like “Marijuana”, “Inhalants” and “Cocaine & Crack.”
Country is all about sex and drinking and breaking the law and murder and everything else that makes life worth living (aside from guitars tuned good and firm-feeling women, of course). Kids love it despite it being filled with adult themes, but they also love it because it contains so much of it is aggressively non-family friendly.
In that respect country is a lot like rap, which makes it ironic that so many people see them as antithetical.
Urban Chipmunk is true enough to the outlaw spirit of country to make this dumb novelty nonsense for children wildly inappropriate and kid-unfriendly. You never realize how grim and fatalistic “The Gambler” is until it’s being sung by cartoon fourth-graders, though lyrics like “Every hands a winner and every hands a loser/and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep” betray an unmistakable darkness perhaps not suited for the eight and under crowd.
Songs like “The Gambler”, “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” and “Coward of the County” are nakedly philosophical anthems sung from a place of experience, age and wisdom. That makes them a very odd fit for cartoon animal children who think that Queen is a punk band and owe their entire worthless existence to studio trickery.
On “Made for Each Other”, Alvin tries to lure Brenda Lee into a romantic/sexual relationship. To her credit, she turns him down, not wanting to commit bestiality or child molestation, neither of which, needless to say, are appropriate subject matter for children’s music, except in the warped minds of the perverts who created this monstrosity.
In a failed attempt to make country kid-friendly, the album substitutes milk and soda for whiskey and beer and a school bus for a train in way that accidentally highlights the conceptual mismatch at the project’s core.
The primary “joke” of Alvin and the Chipmunks is that their father figure/manager Dave Seville hates his charges with a white-hot burning passion and is constantly screaming, with all the hellfire he can muster, “Alvin!!!!!!!!” in a manner that betrays that he’d like to throttle the little bastard within an inch of his life.
When I hear David yell “Alvin!” I’m not hearing a loving if sometimes gruff and exasperated authority figure lose his temper.
Instead I hear someone incapable of joy or happiness erupt with a fury that is, frankly, terrifying.
I get it: these kids are fucking annoying. They have terrible voices. They seem like miserable little shits. But it’s not healthy to live forever in a state of blinding rage. It’s toxic.
Like McGruff’s Smart Kids Album, Urban Chipmunk sounds fantastic because a bunch of brilliant and experienced studio musicians lent it their mastery. Legendary ringers like Hargus "Pig" Robbins, Bob “King” Moore and Jerry Carrigan, all of whom have played with people like Elvis and Johnny Cash and every country singer ever, picked up paychecks for Urban Chipmunk. Like MacGruff’s banger of an album, Urban Chipmunk would be swell if it weren’t for the vocals and overall concept.
Here’s one of the many depressing aspects of Urban Chipmunk. Despite being maybe the worst album ever made, it was an enormous success. It went gold and competed unsuccessfully against Richard Pryor and Mel Brooks for the 1981 Grammy for Best Comedy Album.
I would happily listen to an instrumental version of Urban Chipmunk without the “comedy” bits but that would defeat the whole purpose. The one time Urban Chipmunk connects is on “I Love a Rainy Night”, a joyous blast of country bubblegum so infectious that it survives even being sung by Alvin and the fucking Chipmunks.
Even that standout has an inexplicable burst of adult weirdness when Alvin hollers joyously of the rainy night, “Well, it MAKES me high!”
The people behind this album for stupid children did not have to leave in the bit about being high but they did so anyway, because that’s the kind of album this is: not fit for children or anyone else.
Urban Chipmunk was re-released on CD in 1993 with new artwork and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and “Boot Scooting Boogie” replacing “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” and “Made For Each Other.”
The CD reissue may have nixed “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” but I have heard what Alvin and his minions have done to my song and I will never forget or forgive them. Some things are sacred, and consequently should not be fodder for these monstrous musical rodents, who ruin everything they touch.
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