Political comedies may be a dime a dozen, but political musicals are more rare. Donick Cary's new cartoon Lil' Bush features the current administration as a rockin' teen band, with music by some of today's hottest musicians.
Cary on the Music of Lil' Bush
"I wrote about 90% of those lyrics and I found a great guy who’s actually, our daughters were in Mommy and Me Yoga together at two years old," said Cary. "I went to the party and this guy Chris Phillips who was the drummer for the Squirrel Nut Zippers happened to be one of the dads. And we started talking and I was like, 'Hey could you put together a little punk pop band and record some songs?' And he did it in a second and we’ve gone in and now we’ve probably recorded about 20 of these silly sort of fun, crazy songs."
Now Cary gets to spoof music as well as politics. "The songs cover a lot of ground. We’re trying to make very song have sort of a different feel. It’s all the Lil’ Bush band so it's always the same four 'musicians' but it’s inspired by The Archies or the Cartoon Beatles or The Monkees or it’s all that kind of thing. But we’re doing parodies of The Sex Pistols and Guns n' Roses and The Grateful Dead and anything from Kiss to Wham, little music videos in each of the shows that are from all over musicdom."
More music superstars have signed up to contribute to Lil' Bush, but as voice actors. "A number of people are doing the show. Dave Groll, Flea and Anthony Kiedis are all playing themselves in an episode that’s a Lil’ Live Earth concert where our little gang sort of infiltrates the Live Earth show and takes it over to convince everyone that global warming is awesome. Frank Black from the Pixies is doing voice of Satan in an episode where Lil’ Cheney has a heart attack and goes to hell and then bugs Satan so much that Satan has to kick him out of hell. Jeff Tweedy from Wilco is doing a voice. He’s doing the voice of God or as Lil’ Bush calls him Goddy and tries to help Lil’ Bush understand evolution. Henry Rollins did a voice for us where he’s playing an Iraq war veteran who gets stuck in Walter Reed and the kids come in and try to fix the place up and annoy him. And Colin Meloy from the Decemberists is doing a voice where Jeb Bush, who is played fairly dumb in this, he gets hit in the head and becomes smart and his smart voice is going to be by Colin Meloy from The Decemberists. And then the weirdest one which we’re about 90% closed on is it looks like Boy George is going to do the voice of Tony Blair. He and Lil’ George have a special friendship and not gay exactly but they do a duet about being buddies."
Getting any of those artists' original music would have been cost prohibitive, but as voice actors they cannot demand such high salaries. "It was one of the things where, for me it was like I wonder if Iggy Pop would do that. That would be the funnest, that would be my dream booking. Would he be interesting in doing this? And then he said yes I was like, wow I wonder if anyone else would want to do some little parts in this. And then, the show had a natural rock and roll element because the gang have a little band and there’s music in every week. So it sort of was a natural progression to just putting calls to everyone we either knew or had a connection to and seeing who wants to do something."
Lil' Bush begins today, June 13th on Comedy Central.
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