Music

NICE: Music and comedy get along

by Anne T. Donahue

In our annual festive Naughty and Nice feature, AUX compiles the best and worst of the year in music.

Any scroll through a music site will expose you to the contrived aesthetics that countless buzz bands seem to thrive on these days. But between the hair-in-eyes, dressed-in-black, staring-mysteriously-into-space, balancing-on-a-unicorn (not really, but), it-act of 2011 formula, there were the musicians that had the confidence to laugh in the face of themselves. While indie, punk, and hardcore labels like Sub Pop and Relapse continued to delve into the world of releasing comedy albums by alternative comics like David Cross and Brian Posehn, 2011 marked a even more official marriage of the two forms.

Portlandia set the bar. By ringing the New Year in with Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, not only was this “artistically-aware” subculture given an outlet for our own ridiculousness, musicians like James Mercer, Aimee Mann and Corin Tucker stepped in to get in on the joke.

With SNL it continued. Though musicians are no stranger to the coveted time slot, Nicki Minaj and Drake “crept” through fake interviews, rejecting the bravado aligned with their genre, and made Donald Glover’s bad-ass hip-hop endeavor seem a few years too late.

And finally, there was the recognition of the comedy/music mindmeld as a whole. Ten years after beginning WFMU’s The Best Show, Tom Scharpling and Superchunk’s Jon Wurster finally earned tangible acknowledgement, appearing in SPIN’s Patton Oswalt-edited comedy issue… which, in itself, was a testament to comedy’s increasing influence in music.

At least that’s what I learned from Weird Al’s Gaga-gate.

Return to the Naughty and Nice master list.