7/4/2025 - Chipmunk Punk

 Alvin and The Chipmunks are a strange thing. They were arguably the first fictional band, way before Gorillaz or even The Archies or The Monkees (I say with the utmost respect!) They were wildly successful in the early 1960s with their signature Christmas song & their cartoon, although it seems as though they fizzled out by the Summer of Love. Probably because Alvin’s a square & didn’t wanna burn his guitar on stage - but really, who knows… Despite that, The Chipmunks returned with a bang in the 80s with a buncha albums, a rad new show, & eventually a series of movies in the 2000s that would kick off the live action / CGI trend that’s appeared in many bad children’s movies since then. And that revival all started with this album, Chipmunk Punk. But why?

Well…

Picture yourself as a music fan in Los Angeles in early 1980. You’re tuned into your favorite rock station & you’re hoping the DJ plays the new single by Blondie. Wow, he does! Though he plays it at the wrong speed… and labels it as the new Chipmunks single?

Huh. It’s a fun novelty but surely nothing will come of it, right?

Now picture yourself as that same music fan in a record store a few months into 1980. You’re flipping thru the new releases, new wave, real oddball stuff and whatnot, until you come across a record with The Chipmunks standing in an alley next to a trash bin adorning the jacket. You’ve officially intrigued me. Shut up & take my money.

Now stop picturing yourself. *I* wanna talk about the record now!

Despite the name of the record, you can barely call any of this punk…it’s power pop at the most. Not that power pop’s a bad thing, but you shouldn’t expect Alvin and The Chipmunks doing Sex Pistols or The Clash. More like Queen, Billy Joel, The Cars, and The Knack. There are a surprising amount of Knack songs, in fact 3 out of the 9 songs here are by them. Yes, including ‘My Sherona’. You freaks can hear Alvin singing about how he ‘gets it up to the touch of a younger kind’ here. What a sicko. Other than that, the album is inoffensive. It’s sonically how you’d imagine it - high-pitched squeaky voiced over not quite as good as Weird Al but serviceable instrumentals.

The REAL cool thing about Chipmunk Punk is what it inspired. In 2015, Canadian musician Brian Borcherdt found out that if you played the album at 16 rpm you’d get some really cool sludgy results. He then arranged those versions into an album under the name Chipmunks on 16 Speed - and a small but dedicated fandom formed around it! There are over 50 fan albums and some pretty dark lore associated with this version of The Chipminks. It’s a really weird but fun rabbit hole to fall down, plus the albums are all really cool listens. My favorite 16 Speed fan albums are “Sludge Never Dies” and “The LSD-Sides,” both by johngojohngo - but I would recommend checking out the original two volumes from Borcherdt before you delve into anything else.

As for the original album, if you’re already into novelty records or the concept of a punk album by Alvin and The Chipmunks amuses you I would give it a shot. It’s not gonna cost you anything if you get it used (my copy was 3 dollars i think), so the worst outcome is that you don’t care for it. And if this review didn’t intrigue you, then you probably won’t like it! Thank you for reading, though!