The strange case of ‘The Amanda Chronicles’: the pre-teen siblings who accidentally made an industrial music masterpiece
I think we’ve all had those childhood dreams of becoming a superstar. Whether it was putting on shows in your living room for your parents or roping your cousins into a full-scale musical performance, every kid dreams of fame and glory. But in the case of Amanda Whitt and her brother Joseph, their childhood musical experiments became an underground industrial rock sensation, dubbed The Amanda Chronicles.
Growing up in Alabama in the 1980s, Amanda Whitt longed to become a child star. Alongside her brother’s dreams of becoming a music video director, the pair became collaborators in an imaginative world, creating and pretending to release music on their own record label, Sky High Records. In essence, crafting a complete microcosm of the music industry while still in the catchment age of Scooby Doo.
It all began with a video of an eight-year-old Amanda singing Prince’s ‘Kiss’, with their cousins joining in as the band. Stealing the pots and pans from the kitchen while Amanda bashed them together, the event marked the start of their own distinct, wild style. Amanda’s southern drawl growled the words to subversive covers and subsequent original songs. Her own unique cookie-monster-inspired vocal, layered on top of distinctly 1980s beats, big pop hits and the chaos of kitchen pans, paved the way for their future fame.
After discovering long-forgotten cassettes and VHS tapes, WFMU began playing these recordings out on air. Featuring original tracks written by the pre-teen imaginary star, the songs included ‘The Pickle People’, ‘Me Swinging In Cookieland’, ‘Concrete Nipples’ and ‘Horrible Hybrid Tulips’, organised into albums and collections like Worship Me or Monumental Whopper Turmoil Jam. With song names seeming like they could be assigned to long King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard jams – you could say Amanda Whitt was ahead of her time.
Aligned with the breakout of industrial music in the 1970s and scenes surrounding artists like Monte Cazazza, Amanda and Joseph’s music accidentally sits in the lineage of noise rock. This fusing of industrial music and rock mimics the way the outbreak of electronic music collided with punk at the start of the ’80s, creating the harsh, mechanical sound you hear in The Amanda Chronicles.
Between 1986 and 1989, the siblings were prolific, creating new music videos almost daily. But as Amanda turned 11 and grew towards her teenage years, becoming uninterested in her brother’s attempts to get her to perform, her music career was abandoned, and the tapes sat in forgotten shoeboxes for years. Then WFMU discovered them when Joseph, a long-time fan of the station, began sharing the recordings with R. Stevie Moore and revealed the chaos of Amanda to the world.
There is something so distinctly charming about this outsider universe. The fun spills out of every track, with Amanda playing the rockstar and her family bashing away on pots or cheap synthesisers. It’s silly and sweet, but under it all, there seems to be a current of genuine talent. Despite being a child, her gruff voice is reminiscent of Janis Joplin with the same type of uninhibited rawness. Boiling both imagined rock rage and palpable childhood joy down into their music, the Whitt siblings captured the elusive sound of kids’ dreams.
Long since retired, Joseph now lives and works in Brooklyn while Amanda remains in their hometown of Alabama. Reuniting to talk about their musical project on WMFU, the siblings said of the records: “No one else that we grew up with or anyone in our hometown really understood them. They just thought something was wrong with us… seriously!” But they hold the forgotten tapes dear, “We always loved them”.
