I Am Curious (Yellow): The Vexing Case of The Yellow Album (aka Things That Make You Go Hmmm!)

So, speaking of vanishing Prince numbers in projects associated with James L. Brooks...isn't it about time we discussed The Yellow Album, the Simpsons' lesser-known and (much-belated) follow-up to their 1990 hit record The Simpsons Sing The Blues?

Back in 1989, The Simpsons debuted as a standalone series and the world fell in love with it almost immediately. In particular, they fell in love with Bart's anarchic, t-shirt slogan-ready irreverence, and you can bet that corporate America was all poised to turn Bart's one-kid rebellion to their advantage. One of the most infamous products of this initial bout of Bartmania was a novelty pop song, "Do The Bartman", which spawned a popular music video and some years down the line was confirmed to have been co-written by Michael Jackson, who is referenced explicitly in the lyrics. (I hesitate to raise the question, but what exactly is the status of "Do The Bartman" in light of the decision made by the Simpsons heads back in March of this year? Has it gone into the same sin bin as "Stark Raving Dad"?). A worldwide smash, "Do The Bartman" wound up becoming the headline act for the album The Simpsons Sing The Blues (the brainchild of producer David Geffen, who later convinced Jackson Browne to take a stab at writing the title song to James L. Brooks' attempted musical I'll Do Anything), which appeared on shelves in December 1990 in time to exploit the lucrative Christmas markets and swiftly went double platinum. Nowadays, it's easy to dismiss the project as a cynical, meritless attempt to cash in on what at the time was foreseen as being only a momentary fad, but back then we all thought that The Bartman was the height of cool. In the years that followed the Simpsons themselves had absolutely no qualms about poking fun at this particularly gaudy chapter in their careers, the first really transparent example occurring in the Season 3 episode "Treehouse of Horror II", where the family become overnight sensations through the malefic powers of a severed monkey paw and put out an album entitled The Simpsons Go Calypso, complete with Homer and Marge singing a duet of "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)". The show took an even more viciously self-deprecating turn in the Season 5 episode "Bart Gets Famous", where Bart experiences an intense but ultimately short-lived period in the limelight through the equally malefic magic of hollow, easily marketed sloganeering, and gets to record an ersatz MC Hammer track in which he blathers his catchphrase over and over (elsewhere within the same season, Lisa laments that she would be mortified if anybody ever made a lousy product with the Simpsons name on it). Meanwhile, Krustophenia sits on the shelf.

The Simpsons Sing The Blues was such a runaway success that it was basically inevitable that talk would eventually turn to the possibility of a sequel. For a time Dame Rumour was all abuzz about a second Simpsons album being in the works, with contributions from Prince, Linda Ronstadt and C+C Music Factory, but this was nothing more than vaporware...until November 1998, when The Yellow Album randomly showed up out of the blue (albeit without a Prince track in sight). This prompted a few new questions as to what had taken it so long and why it had suddenly appeared now, long after the initial "Do The Bartman" star had faded (although the TV series was still going strong). The story Dame Rumour was now telling was that James L. Brooks was pushing for the album to be released back in 1993, whereas Matt Groening was extremely eager to can the entire project (although he co-wrote one of the tracks, "Ten Commandments of Bart"). From the looks of it, Groening had won out for years, and managed to keep the general populace from experiencing the delights of The Yellow Album, but I guess that in 1998 someone noticed that they had this album lying around and figured they might as well use it. Actually, Robert W. Getz, author of Unauthorised Guide To The Simpsons Collectables and Further Adventures in The Simpsons Collectibles, speculates that what finally enabled the album to see the light of day was the success of Songs In The Key of Springfield, a soundtrack album comprised of songs taken directly from the TV series, released by Rhino Records in 1997. A sequel, Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons, followed later in 1999, but I find it plausible that they yearned for something to fill that gap and keep the public's appetite for Simpsons music whetted, and The Yellow Album was all there and ready to go. If so, then The Yellow Album was effectively put out, not as a follow-up to its spiritual ancestor The Simpsons Sing The Blues, but to the first soundtrack album, despite their being such drastically different animals. With one, you get the multitude of affectionate Broadway parodies and general pop cultural riffing that encapsulated so much of the zest and spirit of the series over the years. The Yellow Album, by contrast, is a slickly-produced pop product, assembled with a clear air of bubblegum disposability that many are inclined to dismiss as contradictory to the entire Simpsons ethos. Make no mistake, this is not a universally beloved album among fans.

My parents bought me a copy of The Yellow Album for the Xmas of '98; back then, I had no idea that there had been a follow-up to The Simpsons Sing The Blues in the works, but even without knowing the backstory, I figured out very quickly that this album's existence was the result of a freaky tear in the space-time continuum. Several details betrayed the fact that it was intended for consumption by denizens of a much younger time in the 1990s. Firstly, there are numerous references made to the TV series throughout, although to nothing further than Season 4. Secondly, on the album cover we see a Krusty doll wearing a t-shirt with the slogan "Welcome Ren & Stimpy", although by 1998 The Ren & Stimpy Show had been out of production for three years and was already yesterday's news. Finally, there's the issue of the music itself, which feels like a perfectly-preserved time capsule of the kind of synthy, dance-orientated filler material you'd have found on many a pop album from a few years prior. Listening to The Yellow Album in the final days of 1998 was a disconcerting experience, like socialising with someone who'd been in a coma for years and was now staggering around, dazed and bewildered at how much the world had changed since they last laid eyes on it. I liked it, but it was so square.

Still, it has to be said that, however much mud fans and music critics were inclined to sling at The Yellow Album, the cover, a mock-up of The Beatles' 1967 game-changer Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, is undeniably brilliant. The album itself might have fallen through the cracks of zeitgeist and into an oblivion of general indifference, but the cover has a degree of cultural iconography all of its own. It was recreated as the couch gag for a couple of Season 8 episodes ("Bart After Dark" and "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" - although it was later swapped out in the latter for a Flintstones gag, in order to commemorate The Simpsons surpassing The Flintstones as the longest running primetime animated sitcom). In 2005, US artist Brian Donnelly, aka Kaws, created his own version of the cover, "The KAWS Album", in which the characters were all modified to have freaky X's over their eyes, and which in April 2019 sold for 14.8 million at a Hong Kong auction. They've got Sideshow Bob on there, which definitely makes me happy, but what's lovelier still is that they also have Karl (from "Simpson and Delilah"), making this one of the rare pieces of Simpsons merchandise out there to acknowledge his under-championed existence. Ditto Herb Powell. I'm aware that their being featured here is yet another symptom of the album being intended for a slightly earlier era, for back in 1993 their episodes were still relatively recent and there was a host of more prominent supporting characters who had yet to be introduced or cemented as series regulars, but in 1998 it was still pleasantly surprising to see such a loving throwback to some of those Springfieldian faces who hadn't been seen for so long.

The biggest mystery of The Yellow Album is of course the fate of that phantom Prince song. The track, entitled "My Name Is Bart", was a pastiche of Prince's own 1992 single "My Name Is Prince". Obviously, the Prince collaboration would have been the album's heavy-hitter, intended to equal their earlier success in working with Michael Jackson (even if they were unable to publicise Jackson's involvement at the time), so it seems egregious that this particular track should be the one unaccounted for when The Yellow Album finally clawed its way out of limbo. We know that the track was featured as part of the original package; it was included on some promo copies of the album, but for whatever reason was yanked from the commercial release. I'm not convinced that its inclusion would have enabled The Yellow Album to resonate any better with the general public - "My Name Is Prince" was already six years old by the time it appeared, and the album had certainly missed its opportunity to ride along on its coattails - but it feels incomplete without it. What The Yellow Album really feels as if it needs is some kind of a hook, an obvious stand-out track to give the project a better sense of structure and identity than just a random assortment of Simpsons-orientated pop.

Nathan Rabin of The AV Club covered the album as part of his Bureau of Regrettable Ideas, and made no bones about how little he cared for it. Much of what he says is entirely valid, although some of his criticisms are a little...peculiar? Specifically I'm talking about this one line:

"...remarkably, the title, redolent of hot, steaming urine, is one of the lesser miscalculations involved."

Err, you feeling well there, Rabin? At the very least, I hope that Rabin is consistent and had the exact same criticism of Yellow Submarine. I'm not even going to ask what kind of imagery The White Album must conjure up for him.

Rabin reserves most of his vitriol for The Yellow Album, although he is every bit as scathing toward The Simpsons Sing The Blues, which he dismisses as "ancillary merchandise, the equivalent of a poorly constructed Bart Simpson giveaway doll from Burger King." My response to that would be that even poorly constructed giveaway dolls from fast food outlets can have their pleasures. I'll confess that, although I'm well aware of the mercenary, corporate intentions behind the product, I actually do like The Simpsons Sing The Blues. It is something of a guilty pleasure, my perspective is undoubtedly coloured in no small way by my personal nostalgia, and I freely admit that there's a mind-numbing amount of filler in the track list, but absolutely nothing in me will ever allow myself to spurn it as a bad album. I'm enough of a sap to feel strangely moved by Lisa's rendition of Billie Holliday's "God Bless The Child", and Smithers gets an improvised guitar solo, so that's a plus point. And while "Do The Bartman" itself does sound unmistakably like a product of its time, the music video still has a special place in my heart (I mean, why wouldn't it? Sideshow Bob puts in an appearance, Jacques and Karl have a queer-baiting moment, and there's even a Willard reference, although you'd have to be particularly eagle-eyed to spot it).

The Yellow Album on the other hand...well, it doesn't have quite the same luxury of nostalgia. Nor did it come with any fun or witty visuals to help inject fresh life into any of its overproduced pop numbers (music videos were planned for the proposed 1993 release, but by 1998 those plans had obviously been ditched). Honestly, I think the album's best niche is as a simple curiosity piece. If you look at it less as a serious attempt to add something meaningful and innovative to the Simpsons legacy and more as a strange side-project that never quite came to full fruition, then perhaps it can inspire some degree of affection in you. It's an album that arrived so conspicuously in the wrong time and place as to suggest a disrupted or alternative universe, and not necessarily as bleak as the one Rabin identifies where "The Simpsons wasn’t a searing, trenchant satire of American culture and the hypocrisy and greed of our cultural institutions, but rather a cheesy vehicle for a novelty joke band." This is a bizarre case of an album that only half-exists; a puzzling paradox of What Might Have Been vs What Was But Not Really. Above all, The Yellow Album is just bemusing.

The opening track is "Love?", which is loosely based on the events of the Season 3 episode "Bart's Friend Falls In Love", and which was co-written by Robert Clivilles and David Cole of C+C Music Factory. It makes for an appropriate enough opener, since it's emblematic of the kind of problems that beset The Yellow Album as a whole, not least its obsolescence. By 1993 C+C Music Factory's sound was already starting to sound kind of dated, and by 1998 this obviously stood no chance of holding up. There is also a deep-rooted underlying weirdness that pervades this song, which I don't think is limited to Nelson Muntz's inexplicable cameo as Bart's mirror reflection, or that the refrain of "What's this word called love?" for years sounded like, "What's this spread called love?" to my ears (in fact, that's what I still hear). Something seems fundamentally off-kilter with the entire Simpsons universe, and that's a feeling that doesn't quite go away when the second track kicks in and Lisa starts singing her rendition of  "Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves", originally a 1985 hit for Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin, here with Ann & Nancy Wilson of Heart. With "My Name Is Bart" excised, the album doesn't have an obvious successor to "Do The Bartman"; the closest offering would be the Groening-written "Ten Commandments of Bart", which might have done the job had it only managed to be a couple of minutes shorter.

The Yellow Album boasts some weird-ass collaborations; for one, there's a more-or-less straight love duet between Homer Simpson and guest artist Linda Ronstadt (um?) but it doesn't compare to the penultimate track, "Every Summer With You", which is by far the most baffling song in the listing. Marge and Abe are apparently now an item (um?) and are singing about their desire to take a vacation at San Diego bay, and...oh wait, that's supposed to be Homer? So I guess the real mystery would be just what the heck was up with Dan on the day he recorded this (edit: it has since been brought to my attention that the track has actually been presented in the incorrect speed, so Dan's presumably not to blame, although he benefits the least from this particular inexplicability). Actually, despite just how distractingly off-colour Dan's performance sounds, this is probably my favourite track on the album; it's sweet, gentle and hasn't aged too hideously. It's also the only track in the album in which Marge appears (since "I Just Can't Help Myself", which features verses from the other three vocal family members, doesn't see fit to include her...that track is probably my least favourite, despite Bart referencing The Twilight Zone). My second favourite would be "She's Comin' Out Swingin'" by Lisa and The P-Funk All-Stars, which like "Ten Commandments" suffers from being overlong, but does at least incorporate the novelty of hearing Lisa converse with Dr Funkenstein about social security cards.

Elsewhere on The Yellow Album, we also get "Twenty-Four Hours A Day", a vaguely Bollywood-infused dance track performed by Apu, which was presumably intended to be the album's counterpart to its predecessor's "Look At All Those Idiots", in being the only track to momentarily peer at life outside of the Simpson household. I suspect that they purposely penned a song dedicated to one of Hank Azaria's characters to compensate for that fact he was left out of The Simpsons Sing The Blues. I happen to think that "Look At All Those Idiots", a surprisingly successful combination of contemporary dance-pop and Burns' searing contempt for his fellow man, is the superior of the two. Unlike The Simpsons Sing Blues, where only three supporting characters appeared - Burns, Smithers and Bleeding Gums Murphy - The Yellow Album pools from the show's ever-growing supporting cast fairly often, and numerous cameos abound, whether they make sense or not (although that aforementioned Nelson appearance is by far the most confusing).

The final track on the album is "Hail To Thee, Kamp Krusty", which was lifted from the Season 4 episode "Kamp Krusty", and closes this otherwise upbeat album on a bizarrely dark and unsettling note, in which Bart finally sees through the money-grubbing callousness of his idol Krusty The Clown and incites rebellion among his fellow campers. Nowadays the track inevitably carries a melancholic tone, thanks to the participation of the late Russi Taylor. For you see, The Yellow Album DOES feature a Prince, and his name is Martin. If nothing else, then "Hail To Thee, Kamp Krusty" is a wonderful place to hear Taylor deliver a star performance as her most prominent Simpsons character. Krusty, Otto, Lisa and Bart all get their turn in the spotlight, but it's Martin who really steals the show, as he belts out an indignant tirade after being subjected to the horrors of Krusty's weight loss program: "A pox on thee, clown Krusty/Your behaviour gives us pause/Your heart is hard/You have no regard/For the state's child labour laws!"

Perhaps the track's most vexing curiosity lies in Rabin's most astute criticism of The Yellow Album as a whole, namely that it is "a non-ironic version of the kind of mercenary cash-in The Simpsons has satirized mercilessly over the years, most notably via Krusty The Clown." This track, after all, does climax with Bart's disillusionment as a beleaguered consumer whose brand loyalty has caused him to suffer the ill-effects of one crummy tie-in product too many. As the track fades out, with the tortured cries of an enraged and malnourished Bart demanding the total annihilation of Kamp Krusty, it feels so dissonant, like the album suddenly took a sharp turning into a very run-down neighbourhood and decided to settle there. It's almost as if The Yellow Album has, on its death bed, become painfully self-aware and wants out.

What The Yellow Album ultimately offers is a beguiling collection of oddities, each more head-scratching than the last; its entire being is just way too perplexing for me to possibly dislike it, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the series' stranger, less successful offshoots (along with "Springfield's Most Wanted"). Coincidentally, The Yellow Album dropped on 24th November 1998, the exact same day as Chef Aid, that baffling tie-in album for the young and impudent South Park, which was currently enjoying its own equivalent of Bartmania and, like The Simpsons before it, desperately trying to squeeze out every last attainable dime while it lasted. I can't decide whether that put The Yellow Album at a disadvantage or not. On the one hand, South Park was very much the hot and edgy cartoon of the hour, and The Yellow Album must have seemed hopelessly dated and inept, a retroactive fad with a sound from yesteryear throwing itself into the same arena as those fresh and funky foul-mouths from Colorado. On the other hand, Chef Aid was such a poorly-assembled, unlistenable mess of an album (a disappointing proportion of the tracks had nothing to do with South Park and amounted to blatant guest whoring, linked in under the tenuous banner of a fictitious benefit concert) that The Yellow Album could only have scored points for being the lesser anticlimax. You may think that The Yellow Album had something of an identity crisis, in being very conspicuously born out of time, but Chef Aid is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring.

Finally, am I the only person out there who would actually love to have heard the rendition of "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)" by Homer and Marge in full? Might have made for a wonderful hidden track on any subsequent Simpsons releases.