Gift: The Simpsons Sing The Blues (1990)

Believe it or not, today is twenty years to the day that the Simpsons Christmas Special first aired way back in 1989. Though the show remains popular, by Fox standards, it has never again reached the insane level of merchandise saturation it hit in that very first year. Nothing captures the way the Simpsons exploded into popular culture in 1990 more than The Simpsons Sing the Blues, a full length album of different Simpsons family members performing old blues and jazz standards. The Simpsons characters (with the possible exception of Lisa) have no connection whatsoever to blues music—odds are these songs were cheap to license, or else some blues fan on the staff was just dying to record an album. I have no inside knowledge on how this thing came about. It doesn’t matter. Knowing why it was created would only take away the magic. All that matters is that the album sold, going platinum in the US and making it to #3 on the Billboard charts. I got it on tape along with a glut of other Simpsons merchandise back in 1990, and I listened to it at least as much as I would one day listen to The White Album. Maybe even more.
The main selling point was “Do the Bartman,” a rap/rock/new jack swing song ghost written by Michael Jackson, a huge hit on the playground in 3rd grade. Bart Simpson was the coolest kid on the planet back then—the show centered around him, and he was marketed to death. If you were a fan of the Simpsons during that first huge rush of popularity the song is sure to hit you in face with a powerful slap of nostalgia. If not, it must seem a very sad relic indeed.

My favorite song, however, was and still is one of the few other Simpsons-original tracks on the album, “Look at All Those Idiots,” sung by Mr. Burns and Smithers. Unlike the rest of the album, which mostly consisted of the Simpsons voice actors singing real-world songs that I had never heard of, “Look at All Those Idiots” had a real story based around real Simpsons characters, and was, wonder of wonders, funny. Okay, so maybe it’s not side splittingly hilarious now, but if you’re in 3rd grade it’s top notch stuff. Mr. Burns and Smithers were probably the first Simpsons ancillary characters to break out of the pack—they were definitely the first ones I was aware of, and it was great fun listening to Mr. Burns complain about the incompetence of his inferiors to a groovy late 80s dance beat. It’s the one song on the album that shows the clever, intelligent direction the show was headed.

As for the rest of the songs, they were happy to cash in on the show’s status as a fad. Do we really need to hear Homer and Marge singing a duet of “I Love to See You Smile” or Lisa Simpson doing a cover of “God Bless the Child”? Apparently I did, because I listened to the album nonstop from Christmas Day until at least March. And it had some stiff competition: I also got Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em that Christmas. Come to think of it, I listened to that tape all the time, too. Damn, that was a good Christmas. It’s amazing how many things you can be passionately interested in when you’re eight years old, and somehow there’s time for them all.

So like many of childhood’s delights, The Simpsons Sing the Blues is a pretty sorry experience without nostalgia backing it up. It’s hard to explain in words why I had so much fun with it, and listening to it sure isn’t going to get the message across. It’s just one of those weird things that perfectly captures a specific set of memories—there’s something of the Spirit of 1990 alive in The Simpsons Sing the Blues. Or maybe it just captures that in 1990 there were millions of kids just like me who would buy absolutely anything with Bart Simpson’s face pasted on it, even a mediocre blues album. As happy as I was in 1990, I bet Matt Groening and The Simpsons producers were even happier.