The Annals of Cooper B. Handy
And a Virginal Viewing of Disney's 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'
Today, June 22nd in this Year of the Rabbit, is the 35th anniversary of Disney’s ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,’ a film revolutionary both in its live-action animation technology and in its co-mingling of characters from the competing animation studios of Disney and Warner Brothers. One early scene that particularly winks at this decades-long cartoon war takes place in a nightclub where Disney’s Donald the Duck an Warner’s Daffy Duck are engaged in a dueling piano set that quickly escalates into a proper arms race. In the film, humans and cartoons live together in 1930s Los Angeles (there’s an adjacent city called Toontown) where a studio called Maroon Cartoons is a powerhouse alongside the two heavyweight studios named above. The film is about an alcoholic private eye hired by Maroon Studios to follow the voluptuous cartoon wife of the titular rabbit only to find her playing pattycakes (the cartoon version of a sexual act, I guess) with Marvin Acme, the owner of Toontown. Soon enough, Acme turns up dead and Roger is the prime suspect, sought after by this immediately evil character named Judge Doom who’s actually an evil toon in disguise and who’s found a way to kill cartoons with a toxic green chemical known as “The Dip.” However, the film is really about the seedy efforts of the automobile industry to destroy LA’s once great public transit system for to introduce as many cars as possible to the region’s truly twisted urban sprawl. Spoiler alert: the car industry wins.
We asked Mass.-based DIY legend Cooper B. Handy, who’s been making music as LUCY for the last decade+, to watch the film this week and have a little conversation about it as a conceit for us to share a playlist of our favorite Cooper B. Handy songs.
“Oh woah. So wait, did you know all that about the before?” Handy asked regarding the public transit element. He ponders the deeper theme for a minute. “Yeah, I guess at the end where Eddie [the aforementioned private dick played by Bob Hoskins] is like ‘An idea so crazy only a toon could have thought of it’ — yeah, that makes sense, I guess. Car-toon.” I admitted to him that the municipal corruption plot point was initially lost on me as a seven-year-old.
When we decided on ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ as the movie we should watch for this post, we didn’t realize this week was the eve of film’s premiere. We’ve been in contact with Handy so much over the last six months that a classic interview would have felt kinda fake and lame. Handy jumped at our suggestion of basing the thing around the film because, as it turns out, he’s only seen about 40 movies (?!?!) in all his 29 years of life. No, now that can’t be true, we say.
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad, I guess” Handy admitted of his cinematic naivety. “It’s probably an ADD thing. Getting to the point where I’m sitting down and watching a movie is a whole ordeal. It’s rare. I’m naturally going to be moving around and making things.”
We’re dumbfounded by this lack of filmic knowledge, so we poke around a bit on the matter as it relates to ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’
Was ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ on his radar in any way before this prompt? “I think I had it confused with ‘The Fantastic Mr. Fox,’” said Handy, who mostly speaks in one-sentence answers that almost always leave you expecting another to follow — yet never does.
Does he recognize a single actor from the film? “I’m thinking the Judge Doom guy is from ‘Back To The Future’ maybe? The Professor guy? There are sequels of that, right?” Yes, Judge Doom is played by Christopher Lloyd.
Okay, how about the characters themselves — the busty cartoon sexpot Jessica Rabbit? “I’ve seen her around,” he deadpans.
This whole revelation about Handy’s movie illiteracy gets us thinking about his astounding music output in a couple ways. First, he’s not fucking around when he says he’d rather be making things than watching a flick. He’s got 15 albums and EPs under his belt as LUCY, not to mention releases as his electronic duo Club Casualties, his punk duo project Taxidermists and a pretty badass collab with Mass. goth heavyweights BOY HARSHER. Then, there are the music videos he makes with various collaborators — mostly lo-fi and handheld, they’re inventive and slapstick. There’s even a bird singing animated music notes in one of them. He’s relentless in all this making.
But more importantly, when thinking about the lyrical content of his odd-pop and Cloud Rap adjacent music, we note that it’s almost totally devoid of pop culture references in the way that most hip-hop is rife with such a thing. No references to actors or to movies. No references to Sponge Bob or Family Guy! No proper nouns at all really. His lyrics are part Buddhist koan, part non-sequiter, part heartfelt and stoned revelation. He pulls banal phrases from everyday life — something a gas station attendant might say to you; something you’d hear in line at McDonald’s — revealing its absurdity, its humor and sometimes, its hidden sadness. Every so often there’s an ecological concern hidden it what may initially come across as dada. If there are any pop cultural references in Handy’s songs, they come as interpolations of pop music. A line from Carly Simon’s chorus from “You’re So Vain” becomes the refrain in LUCY’s song “Radiation.” LUCY’s “Beauty + Beast” is an almost-but-not-quite cover of Disney’s theme from ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ which he’s probably never seen.
Sonically, we always tell people that Handy’s music is the intersection in the Venn Diagram between Cloud Rap and Lindsay Buckingham’s mid-fi paranoid, restroom romper pop on ‘Tusk.’ We even considered a playlist rotating LUCY tunes with Buckingham cuts of that ilk.
Handy got his start as part of the Massachusetts collective Dark World in the early 2010s, a group that would churn out other legends like Sen Morimoto, DJ Lucas and God’s Wisdom. There’s this great photograph of the whole Dark World crew in The Fader from 2016 where they’re all shirtless in a living room and drinking Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffees. It was a Dark World collaborative track between LUCY and God’s Wisdom called “Beep Beep,” that first piqued our interest in Fall 2016. Its an outsider dub cut about driving around blazed, with God Wisdom’s breathy smacked-out drawl and the higher end of Handy’s oddly charming voice engaged in a languid call-and-response. “Beep Beep” has flattened horns and the lyric “Gasoline is free” that I still sing to myself once a week seven years down the road. God’s Wisdom is Handy’s most frequent collaborator. They even have a two-song jazz EP that showcases some chops in spite of a penchant for fucking about.
Despite its rather brief flash in the pan — albeit glorious and bright! — there’s an argument to be made that Dark World was a foundational inspiration for Drain Gang, the now widely influential collective of Bladee, Yung Lean, Thaiboy Digital and others. Dark World has a 3-4 year head start on Drain Gang and is an obvious North Star for the Swedes. And there remains a connection between the two: Last year, Drain Gang in-house producer Whitearmor collaborated with Handy on the powerful single “Even The Score,” which might be one of the high water marks across his catalogue.
And speaking of influence, there’s also a case to be made that the 2015 single “392-2509: Walk This Way” by Club Casualties, Handy’s project with Nick Atkinson, is an early influence in the pervasive genre of Hyperpop. In fact, that very case has case been made on Discord, we’re told. “That song has a sort of incel fan base,” Handy laughed. Club Casualties has a string-laden new album set for self-release later thiss summer. LUCY (Cooper B. Handy) has a new album taking shape as well. And yes, Taxidermists have a new one too. Recently, he opened for post-banjo hardcore band Show Me The Body across Europe and has, for not obvious or even intellectual reason, been lumped in with the Indie Sleaze/Dimes Square scene in NYC. No press is bad press and it’s led to more gig opportunities (“Some of the DIY gigs I play you would truly find comical,” he says at one point). And he just keeps posting new things to his Soundcloud with zero reverence for (label suit voice) “How things are supposed to be done.” Truly no time for something as trivial as a movie. Oh, yeah, that Roger Rabbit bullshit…
We ask if there are any characters in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ with whom Handy especially identified. We both agree that we felt kinship with the ADD of Roger’s character, his nervous energy revolving around a desire to please and entertain.
“Honestly, I also really loved the bartender, Eddie’s girlfriend,” Handy said. “When he tells her that she should go out and find a good man — and she says, ‘I’ve already got a good man.’ She’s such a sweet character.”
I admit that I strangely sympathized with the villainous gang of weasels (one of which wears a zoot suit; one of which is in a straight jacket) that serves as Judge Doom’s henchmen. They’re patsies trapped between two worlds — an anvil and a hard place. They’re cartoons forced to participate in the capture and execution of other cartoons. In the end, Eddie does a slapstick routine that causes the weasels to literally laugh themselves to death, their blue, harp-playing translucent cartoon angels escaping their cartoon bodies.
“That was the wildest part of the film, so much chaos happening all at once. I took some videos on my phone,” Handy said.
But wait, how do the weasels get cartoon angels ascending to Heaven but the cartoons killed by Judge Doom’s The Dip don’t get angels?
“Yeesh, yeah, I guess The Dip is some sort of hellish void. Quickest and easiest way to get rid of a toon,” Handy half-winced, half-laughed, quoting the Judge Doom character. A moment of silence followed where I think we both wondered what a hellish void might be like for a cartoon. I think about asking what he thinks that might be like but then I don’t.
Fuck, and we forgot to talk about the Benny the Self-Driving Cab and “Beep Beep” and other LUCY songs about gasoline. Oh, well. Please enjoy this Award Winning Cooper B. Handy Spotify Playlist courtesy of ULYSSA TV, a subsidiary of Certain Death Mitigation Services LLC doing business as ULYSSA coming to you live each week from Toontown, a Marvin Acme™ Property under exclusive license to Toons the world over.