The ‘Rugrats’ song that cast Beck, Patti Smith, and Iggy Pop as babies
In the early 1990s, Nickelodeon was a kids’ TV network with a very subversive, “alternative” edge lurking not too far below the surface. Ren & Stimpy, an absolutely unhinged cartoon inspired as much by the weird counter-culture aesthetics of Zap Comix as it was by Looney Tunes, debuted in 1991 and generated a lot of attention.
But another animated show that began the same year, the offbeat but far more child-friendly Rugrats, wound up having the much longer shelf life and greater impact on both Millennials and Gen Z.
Rugrats, ostensibly, was a show about talking babies, but it pulled off that important trick of entertaining small kids and their parents on two levels at the same time; a blueprint that subsequent “Nicktoons” like Spongebob Squarepants would follow in the years to come.
Music was a big part of the show’s appeal, as well, and both the theme song and overall scoring of the programme were handled by a familiar name from the world of new wave rock. Mark Mothersbaugh, frontman of DEVO, had already been working in the worlds of TV and marketing for a while following his band’s early ’80s peak, and had written the theme for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse prior to penning the memorable Rugrats tune. By 1998, when Nickelodeon decided to capitalise on the show’s success with a Rugrats movie, Mothersbaugh was again put in charge of the sound.
How DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh turned the Rugrats into rock stars
The production studio for the film, Paramount, had floated the idea of replacing all the voice actors from the Rugrats TV show with bigger name celebrity actors to give the movie a boost, but Mothersbaugh fought against this. “I said, ‘Six-year-olds watch this show. Let’s have the Rugrats sing’,” Mothersbaugh told the Boston Globe shortly after the film was released. “So we wrote six or seven songs that the characters do in the movie, so the kids can hear Tommy and Chuckie sing… We thought, ‘Let’s have them sing like they really would, warts and all’.”
Mothersbaugh was willing to take a different approach, however, when it came to casting some of the other “guest babies” that appear in The Rugrats Movie.
First, an idea was hatched to cast a guest actor with a bass voice to play one of the newborns in the maternity ward, knowing it would make for an easy laugh.
“I used to live with Iggy Pop,” Mothersbaugh said, “so I thought maybe I could get a favour out of him. And then someone had a number for Lou Rawls, and he’s got a great voice.” From there, he and his crew started going through their collective Rolodexes, and to their surprise, “every single person we called wanted to do it”.
The resulting star-studded infant anthem, titled ‘The World is Something New to Me’, includes an incredible line-up of guest vocalists, many of them from the same fringes of the art-rock universe that had hatched Mothersbaugh himself. The full baby supergroup included not only the aforementioned Iggy Pop and Lou Rawls, but Patti Smith, Beck, Jakob Dylan, the B-52s, Laurie Anderson, Lenny Kravitz, Lisa Loeb, Gordon Gano from the Violent Femmes, Dawn Robinson from En Vogue, B-Real from Cypress Hill, and Phife Dawg from A Tribe Called Quest.
It was basically a much cooler version of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ or ‘We Are the World’ in which everyone was a cartoon baby and everything was much easier to organise. To his credit, Mothersbaugh also made sure that ‘The World is Something New to Me’ and the rest of the new music for The Rugrats Movie—despite having the London Metropolitan Orchestra at his disposal—wouldn’t stray too far from the aesthetic of the TV show.
“You still hear those rubber-band boings and toy piano and jaw harps,” he noted, adding, “It works because it fits those characters, those kind of ugly, cute characters. It’s kind of ugly, cute music.”
