Who was the first virtual band to top the charts?
Virtual bands are big business in the contemporary pop world.
The idea of a fictitious artist or group could be on the cusp of a whole new, lucrative, and dismal possibility in the AI age. It’s not hard to envision works underway in the industry of an entirely fabricated digital pop sensation offering hits entirely birthed from the algorithmic soup, perhaps even beginning to handle its own media appearances, artistic direction, ‘touring’ dates, and marketing campaigns ahead of each new highly prized album.
As we know, AI cannot create, only regurgitate. Prior to the threat of automated art and music, virtual bands can be a fun and creative outlet to mask new ideas and ventures.
Take the most famous virtual band of all time. Standing as the grandaddy of fake groups, Gorillaz has shown there’s a serious market for virtual bands, helped in no small part by the fact that the tunes are good. Dreamed up by former Tank Girl illustrator Jamie Hewlett and Blur frontman, Gorillaz has eclipsed the Britpop stalwarts in sales by tens of millions since their debut album over 20 years ago.
The first virtual band is generally agreed to be Ross Bagdasarian Sr’s Alvin and the Chipmunks in the late 1950s, the novel but hugely successful franchise born from speeding up his vocals to sound like small rodents. Years later, the likes of Banana Splits and Josie and the Pussycats would enter the charts behind their TV guises, albeit not riding high on the Billboard charts.
Japan would prove instrumental in showing the potential for chart success for a virtual star. As far back as the mid-1980s, the Macross robot series launched the pop career of Lynn Minmay, a character from Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love? who treated fans to the ‘Do You Remember Love?’ single, reaching the top ten across the official song charts. Japan would cultivate a minor virtual industry, later spawning the likes of Sharon Apple and Fire Bomber, ‘artists’ that entered the pop world off of anime and sci-fi series.
So, who was the first virtual band to score a number one?
A staple of the US comics landscape, The Archies found themselves making the leap to the small screen via the Filmation cartoon series for CBS in 1968. Ostensibly forming a band, the Riverdale characters Veronica, Reggie, Jughead, and Betty had dropped a record of songs heard on the show.
It was ‘Sugar, Sugar’ that propelled the animated band to stardom. A classic of the bubblegum era, the irresistibly hooky puppy love hit would top the charts all over the world, including the UK and the US Hot 100.
Behind the hit was the pop team of Andy Kim and Jeff Barry, the latter helping some of Phil Spector’s much-loved songs from Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep – Mountain High’ and The Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’. But for many teen pop buyers, Barry’s immortal work was ‘Sugar, Sugar’, still standing as a frothy and infectious gem of bubblegum pop’s classic heyday.
