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The music of ‘Hey Arnold!’ stuck with '90s kids. Now it’s going on tour
The music of 'Hey Arnold!' is going on tour.
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Lucky Tennyson
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Love 'Hey Arnold'? The composer behind the show is taking its music on the road
Robert Garrova talks to Jim Lang.
For many millennials, '90s Nickelodeon shows such as Hey Arnold!, Doug, and Rocko’s Modern Life represent a golden age of animation, with theme songs and music scores often just as weird and offbeat as the characters and storylines.
Take the theme song of Hey Arnold! — an earworm that introduced a generation of young TV viewers to acid jazz, funk, hip-hop and more, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.
Hey Arnold! composer Jim Lang is taking the show's music on tour, with a few stops in SoCal.
LAist’s Robert Garrova caught up with Lang to talk about the show’s endearing music legacy.
On whether he and the other musicians on the show set out to introduce young people to new musical genres
Lang: I wish I could take credit for being that intentional about it. But we weren't really hoping to introduce anybody to jazz. That was just a wonderful kinda side benefit of the way the show played out.
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Was the music too good for a kids' show? Take for instance the theme music for the fan-favorite Pigeon Man episode
Lang: I don't think there's any such thing as music that's too good for a kids' show. I think children have the hugest imagination for absorbing things that they've never seen before, for being delighted by the unusual.
Those things [music scores] all work because the writers and the animators and the background artists and everybody did such an incredible job before it ever showed up at my studio. That's it. You just kind of shut up and get out of the way and let the image kind of play through you in a way.
The music of 'Hey Arnold!' on tour
Jim Lang and his P.S. 118 All Stars band will hit a number of SoCal venues this fall and winter, including Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown on Oct. 26 and The Observatory in Santa Ana on Nov. 29.
Tour dates and more on their Instagram.
On what it felt like being at Nickelodeon in the '90s when the bosses were saying, 'Hey, yeah, let's do some acid jazz on a kids show'
Lang: Well, the women that started Nickelodeon and that ran that company in that era were a really unusual breed, and they were super adventurous. They didn't discourage, you know, people doing crazy stuff.
On what fans' reactions are at the live shows
Lang: Oh, it's just such a love fest. It is nostalgic. The music is meaningful to them because the show, after five seasons, there was a sound to it, and people found it relatable. So getting to hear a band actually play that stuff live, it sounds familiar to the audience in a way that I think people were just thrilled by.
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