Pop hit writer of Neutron Dance and Boogie Wonderland continues to innovate

Allie Willis and Pomplamoose recording Jungle Animals

When Bob Lefsetz was extolling the virtues of Pomplamoose recently, he dissed their collaborator Allee Willis as “You know Allee, the eccentric who writes hit tunes.  Does anybody need a hit tune anymore?”

Allee Willis more than eccentric. She is one of the original innovators of music on the internet and a very creative multi-discipline artist. Songwriter Bruce Roberts jumped to Allie’s defense. Lefsetz posted his comment as well.

“I read your Pomplamoose with Allee Willis piece and think that you’ve mischaracterized Willis’ role by just portraying her as an old-school pop songwriter who came into write with the Internet savvy Pomplamoose. Or worse yet “an eccentric who writes hit tunes” and you wonder what would happen if they brought Diane Warren in.”

“Willis was absolutely the first, no exaggeration here, THE FIRST, pop artist to preach the collapse of the record industry because of the impact of the Internet as early as 1991. She was the first to think about and experiment with music as a social and interactive art form.” 

“In 1992 she was designing the first social network and as early as 1993 was going around to music publishers and record companies with her then partner, Marc Cuban, trying to get them to take the Internet seriously by mapping out the future, including things like music delivered over the Internet, social networks and nothing short of a people’s revolution that would lead to the downfall of the entertainment business as we knew it.”

Pomplamoose with Allee Willis – Jungle Animal

“I started writing songs with Willis when she first started writing songs. She has always been a multimedia artist, combining her music, art, video, technology and social skills as a world class party host to be waaayyyyy ahead of the curve. She’s a social artist of the first order and has been expressing herself via the Internet for 20 years. She has more fun in her work than anyone I’ve ever known at her songs and videos and websites show it.”

“She’s also completely self-funded, a habit that began when she gave up her publishing deal in 1994 because she believed so much in the Internet. She spends every time she has making her art and is the last person you would ever accuse of doing anything just for the money or commercial purposes.”

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“She’s one of those artists who has worked with a trillion other artists, always bringing her distinct vision to the project and rarely getting the credit, most of which goes to the artists whose record it is. I felt like this is happening again when i read your piece yesterday.”

“Pomplamoose is no doubt a great and talented group with a ton of YouTube views but they use an old record company model of using YouTube as the distribution channel and making money merely by selling songs on iTunes. From what I see, they have very little interaction, if any, with their fans other than the vlogs they put at the end of their videos.”

“I don’t know if you know that Willis, in addition to writing, recording and producing the song with the group, did all the “Jungle Animal” animation and designed the matching “Jungle Animal” game? I was writing with her last week and she was up to her eyeballs in code, doing that part of the collaboration completely on her own. She’s a social artist and I would bet that if this were her own project, the video and the game would be integrated with a lot more on the web and hand-held digital devices than simply putting it up on YouTube and waiting for the views to rack up. I read your newsletter all the time and know you think that the revolution in the music industry is driven by youth but in this one case I would encourage you to get a little familiar with not only Willis’s accomplishments in so many different fields of entertainment, all of which she constantly tries to integrate online and spends her last dime doing, but also understand that she’s also a true revolutionary here.”

Too bad he felt it necessary to dump on Pomplamoose who are a fun and innovative musical duo.

For more on the very talented Allee Willis, Lily Tomlin has posted a short but comprehensive biography on her website.

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