Allee Willis--Celebrity Queen of Kitsch
Are you a fan of Allee Willis? You may be without realizing it. Allee has written and produced some of the most famous songs, and musicals that have been household names. I have been her fan for most of my life because Allee Willis is my cousin, and one of the most creative people that I know.
Allee Willis, is a singer, composer, songwriter, and producer. Allee's alter ego, Bubbles the Artist,.is an African American folk artist. It is hard to believe that Allee Willis is from my mother's generation, because her life is one of creative frenzy, and she is a workaholic.
Allee Willis has worked with many celebrities including--Lily Tomlin, Oprah Winfrey, Earth,Wind,and Fire, and Cheesecake.
Allee Willis is the kind of person who has to be experienced to be believed, and even then it is impossible to keep up with her. This article is a combination of information and links to Allee's various sites, and letters from Allee to her fans with links to her newest projects. Have fun discovering the crazy and wonderful world of Allee Willis.
Contents at a Glance
- Allee Willis and The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch on NBC News
- Join the party at the Allee Willis Museum of Kitsch
- Earth, Wind & Fire, Luenell and Allee Willis sing September and Boogie Wonderland - Part 1 (of 3)
Allee Willis and The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch on NBC News
Join the party at the Allee Willis Museum of Kitsch
Fun and nostalgia at the same time
It's with great pleasure that I announce the opening of AWMoK.com, The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch (Allee's Legendary Landfill of Esthetic Essentials With Intrinsic Life Lessons In Soul).
As many of you know, I have one of the largest and most documented collections of Kitsch artifacts in the world. I've always used these in my work, whether as part of a set, design or art piece or tapping on something and using it as a percussion instrument.
You also probably know that I love to throw parties. I've always been acutely aware of the effect the environments I create, filled with the objects I collect, have on my guests, loosening them up for optimum partying pleasure!
Now I'm going for that same effect online at awmok.com, a budding social network fueled by an ever growing, mind expanding panoply of stuff from my own private collection as well as prized kitsch treasures submitted by like-minded "aKitschionados" from around the globe. And just like at my parties, these images can trigger some really great conversations.
There's also my 'What Is Kitsch? short film festival', press and video and photos from The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch opening parties, where members of Earth Wind & Fire backed up anyone who wanted to sing "September" or "Boogie Wonderland" (which, as most of you know, I co-wrote).
So grab your camera and take a photo of your favorite object of Kitsch (be it a cherished coffee cup, your cat dressed up for Halloween, or that new Snuggie you've been wrapped in watching Dancing With The Stars) and put it on AWMoK.com. Or just go and check out the conversations going on in the Kitschenette wing of the Museum inspired by these nostalgic and oftentimes nutty objects.
I hate following technical directions or, worse yet, attempting to figure out how to do anything on a website. I slaved over this interface to make it SO incredibly EASY your goldfish could get around so come on down!
And, oh yeah, if you're on Facebook, please join the Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch fan page.
Hope you enjoy your trip to the Museum!
Thank you from the bottom of my kitschy heart,

Allee Willis
Earth, Wind & Fire, Luenell and Allee Willis sing September and Boogie Wonderland - Part 1 (of 3)
Funky, Fun, Crazy and Wild World of Kitsch
Peter Ward explores the global culture of kitsch and charts a course through the shallowest waters of trivial bad taste that encompasses all aspects of life - from fashion to furnishings, art to artefacts, through movies, TV, pop and personalities.
Bubbles and the Stalliionaires

Announcing "Pigmy Will" - See him now on YouTube
Letter from Allee
As many of you know I'm a gal with not a lot of spare time on my hands, especially as I'm in the final throes of planning the grand opening of the Allee Willis Museum of Kitsch on Sept. 14, the virtual wing of my already world's largest collection of Kitsch that will incorporate my friends and acquaintances greatest kitsch as well.
Any spare time I've managed to have over the last few months has been spent with Pigmy Will, a brand-new character and private joke for 15 years between me and Prudence Fenton, who most of you know (and worth the google if not). We finally committed Pigmy Will to film and wanted you to be the first to see him.
On the occasion of Pigmy Will's big-screen premiere at the Don't Knock The Rock Music and Film Festival in Los Angeles last night, Aug. 6, and his launch on YouTube I now invite you to:
a) See Pigmy Will (multiple bite size videos, under 30 seconds each, and more coming weekly)
b) Be Pigmy Will's fan on Facebook
c) Be the Pigmy's friend on Facebook
d) Follow pigmywill on Twitter
e) Visit pigmywill.com
I hope you enjoy this stunning achievement in animation and voice control.
Communicate with the Pigmy please! Deet, deet, deet, deet!
Love, Allee
PS: Shut up, Feathers!
Editing Is Cool", the follow-up to Bubbles & Cheesecake "It's a Woman Thang"
Just got an email from Allee and this is what she says

Just a quick blast to let you know that "Editing Is Cool", the follow-up to my Bubbles & Cheesecake 900,000+ YouTube views and Webby Award honored "It's a Woman Thang" song/video/web smash-up, is finally up on youtube, facebook, myspace and all the other obligatory residential areas.
I'm incredibly proud of this one as there's total integration between all the art forms I work in, my life philosophy, creative process and lifestyle. It's the most personally satisfying work I've ever done and it sho be funky on top of it!
To see Allee Willis Presents Bubbles & Cheesecake "Editing Is Cool" on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M4Um48vPGU. Make sure and hit "watch in high quality" under the bottom right corner of the video to see a MUCH clearer version. Bubbles also insists I ask that if you like what you see, please rate the video, leave a fantastic comment and please, please, please send the link to everyone you know. This helped make "It's A Woman Thang" a smash.
To see all 8 parts of "Editing Is Cool" where you can track the song, video and creative process as everything came together as well as see a higher res version of the video:Editing is Cool
To read a great salon.com blog by former New York Times columnist Denise Caruso chronicling me and "Editing Is Cool":Salon
To see "Editing Is Cool" launch party photos: Photos
Facebook: Allee Willis
Myspace:
Allee Willis
Available on itunes, of course.
Also, Bubbles finally got off her butt and helped me redesign alleewillis.com. New look, simplified navigation and tons of new stuff. Make sure and check out the music link where I have tons of youtube videos of people doing my songs. And if you're on this list you should know enough about me to know that I don't mean just by the artists who made the songs famous.
Hope you enjoy all this. It's very life, soul and happy happy affirming.
Thank you all,
Allee
Bubbles and Cheesecake Songs
Bubbles and Cheesecake
Allee Willis Presents Bubbles & Cheesecake "It's A Woman Thang"
2008 Webby Award Official Honoree Check out Editing Is Cool - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M4Um48vPGU and I Confess - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uphd06xbozY Bubbles & Cheesecake celebrate their woman thang with their alter-egos, Grammy winning songwriter Allee Willis, whose songs have sold more than 50,000,000 records and who also co-wrote The Color Purple musical and singer songwriter Holly Palmer of Gnarls Barkley and David Bowie live band fame. BLOG: http://www.alleewillis.com/blog/ see a hi res - stereo version of this video http://www.bubblesandcheesecake.com/ 1, 2, 3, let's go/ we's at the door When you think that you don't know what you know when you know that you really do know It's a dirty ol shame in a dirty ol game that you let your power go. That's a woman thang. oh yeah That's a woman thang. Now when I say it's a woman thang my mama did it, your mama did it, My mama before her mama did it. But what I mean's you got the strength inside to speak your mind and turn the tide. The first time hard, the second time easier, the third time easier still. When you think that you don't know what you know when you know that you really do know. It's a dirty ol shame in a dirty ol game that you let your power go. That's a woman thang. That's a woman thang. you gotta fight that girl Now ask yourself this very thing, am I a woman? Am I a waif? Am I the one that I forsake? And if someone come and try and mess with me can I count on the love and the blessings in me? The first time hard, the second time easier, the third time easier still When you think that you don't know what you know when you know that you really do know. It's a dirty ol shame in a dirty ol game that you let your power go. That's a woman thang. That's a woman thang. That's a woman thang. (You gotta fight that, girl.) 1, 2, 3, let's go/ we's at the door Na na na na na na na na Na na na na na na na na Na na na na na na na na Na na na na na na na na Give a woman what she want Give a woman what she need Give that woman her due so her heart don't bleed. Give a woman what she want Give a woman what she need Give that woman her due so her heart don't bleed. It's a a woman thang...
Runtime: 179
928923 views
962 Comments:
curated content from YouTube
Allee Willis and Lily Tomlin are Good Friends
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Allee Willis
Bubbles the Artist
Allee Willis is a one-woman creative think-tank. A multi-disciplinary artist and visionary thinker whose range of imagination and productivity knows no bounds, her success exuberantly defies categorization; 'unique' pales as a descriptor. Willis is a GRAMMY®-winning and Emmy- and Tony- nominated composer whose hit songs - including Earth, Wind & Fire's "September" and "Boogie Wonderland," The Pointer Sisters' "Neutron Dance," Pet Shop Boys with Dusty Springfield's "What Have I Done To Deserve This," and The Rembrandts' "I'll Be There For You (Theme From Friends)" - have sold over 50 million records. In 2006, Willis' songs were also featured in three of the top grossing films of the year, Happy Feet, Night At The Museum and Babel. Her first musical, the Oprah Winfrey-produced The Color Purple, written with Brenda Russell, Stephan Bray and Marsha Norman, opened on Broadway in December '05 and recouped in less than a year, a rare accomplishment for any musical; a national tour launched in Chicago in spring '07, and continues through 2009.Willis is also a prolific artist who has sold over 1000 pieces of art, including paintings, sculptures, motorized work and furniture. In tandem with her fearless alter-ego Bubbles the artist, Willis has long braved new worlds of creative endeavor integrating music, art, video, multi-media technology and lifestyle, most recently via the phenomenon known as Bubbles & Cheesecake, whose first video, "It's A Woman Thang," which Willis co-composed, drew, animated directed and stars in, exploded on YouTube with close to 1,000,000 views and was selected as an Official Honoree in The 2008 Webby Awards.
Willis is also a seminal cyber-pioneer who conceptualized Internet realms and was an outspoken advocate for them back when "new" media was an unknown to most. From 1990 until 1997, she and partner Prudence Fenton dove headlong into developing willisville.com, the first social networking portal and radically new approach to interactive content, employing narrative frameworks to navigate the site intuitively, merging multiple technologies and platforms into one story-driven environment. In 1994, willisville's CEO was seminal digital realm entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Early on, Fortune Magazine cited it as one of the emerging Internet's most exciting companies, and its progress was also tracked by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
She went on to consult for Intel, Microsoft, AOL and Disney, and created virtual worlds for a variety of other entertainment and technology companies. In 1997, representing 3,000,000 BMI songwriters, she addressed the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property regarding artist rights in cyberspace. Regularly called upon to speak on the nascent Internet, she lectured on interactive journalism at Harvard University in '96. Willis' heralded cyber-artistry also devised the acclaimed lilytomlin.com in collaboration with Lily Tomlin
Allee Willis is also an impresario of inspired parties and events-as-performance art, many of which take place at her architecturally historic L.A. home, a William Kesling-designed Streamline Moderne gem often called "the house of atomic kitsch" and known as "Willis Wonderland." It's filled with Willis' various collections, which represent one of the world's largest assemblages of kitsch - Willis was actually in the dictionary.com definition of kitsch. Beyond all that, she's an internationally shown visual artist whose paintings, ceramics, motorized sculptures and furniture are widely collected. Her first solo gallery exhibition, 1985's Wear The Right Clothes Even At Home, featured kinetic sculptures, many named after her hits, including "Neutron Dance" and "Boogie Wonderland". Her expansive vision further extends to art direction, set design, and animation. In a feature on Willis, People Magazine once called this artistic overdrive, "a multi-threat creativity that itself seems like a Godzilla out to conquer Lalaland."

Looking ahead, Willis' intent is to undertake projects that integrate the many mediums in which she delves to create veritable symphonies of innovative interactivity. Via her collaborations with Bubbles you could say she's accelerated way beyond overdrive and achieved lift-off. Bubbles & Cheesecake, a six song collaboration with longtime collaborator singer-songwriter Holly Palmer aka Cheesecake, former vocalist with the Gnarls Barkley live band who's also worked with David Bowie and Dr. Dre, is the first in a series of multi-media collaborations with artists in various fields. The "Bubbles" series is centered around the hyperactive website, alleewillis.com, an integrated music, art, multi-media technology, shopping and lifestyle experience, a kitschy and soulful domain that grew out of willisville as well as other recent projects Willis was developing that explored the dynamics of the creative process and the universal question, "Has it got soul?"
Willis' foray into theater began in 2001 when she started consulting on musical direction and then composing the ultimately Tony-nominated music and lyrics for the show (the soundtrack album was also GRAMMY nominated). As reported by the New York Times, Willis, Russell and Bray "worked in their idiosyncratic style, mixing high-tech tools - Ms. Willis' 17 networked Macs, which they used for research, and programs that allowed them to digitally record complete orchestrations - and very low-tech instruments like an old manual eggbeater or sandpaper." The process the Times mentions echoes Willis' own evaluation of her fundamental style - across all the disciplines - as, "a blend of the highest tech and design and the lowest kitsch."
In 2006, Willis also contributed seven of her classic hits for Earth, Wind & Fire to the EWF-themed "jukebox" musical Hot Feet, which helped her make Broadway history as the first woman - and only fifth person ever - to have written music for two shows opening on the Great White Way in the same season. It's a distinction placing her in an elite group including Georges Gershwin and Cohan, Irving Berlin and Marvin Hamlisch.
Tracing back to her roots, Willis was raised in Detroit where the music of Motown got in her blood. She earned a degree in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin before moving to New York in 1969. She landed a copywriting job at Columbia and Epic Records, and turned to music and songwriting herself. Her first ten songs were released in 1974 on Epic Records as Childstar. Bonnie Raitt, a fan of the album, gave Willis her first cover that year as she was working as a hat-check girl at the fabled Manhattan nightspots Catch A Rising Star and Reno Sweeney's. Willis then moved to Los Angeles, where she landed a publishing deal at A&M in 1977 after being turned down by just about every other publisher in town. In 1978, she sold ten million records, and has since collaborated with Bob Dylan, James Brown, Herbie Hancock and countless other music luminaries. A GRAMMY® winner for soundtrack music for 1985's Beverly Hills Cop (a #1 album), Willis is one of contemporary music's most prolific songwriters - and, one with a keen eye for talent in 1987, Willis authored a column for Details Magazine, "Some Like It Smog," in which she introduced her musical discovery the Del Rubio Triplets, mini-skirted octogenarians who went on to tour the world and appear on over 20 network television programs.
It was at the same time that her music was regularly climbing the charts that Willis became a sensation for the performance art events she masterminded at Willis Wonderland which, in the late 1930's, was a major film studio's official party headquarters. Her thematic soirees draw A-list celebrities, art world stars, pop culture icons and notables the world over who would jet in to attend. Always press magnets, the parties were early vehicles through which Ms. Willis freely expressed all her multi-media talents to serve one fabulous end. Among the most memorable are "The Night of the Living Negligee, 1-3," a series of all-girl pajama parties and the "Borscht Belt Birthday Party," a wry-on-rye affair commemorating Willis being named, "one of the most dangerous subversives living in the U.S." by Russian newspaper Pravda because they mistranslated her hit song "Neutron Dance" as a nuclear-themed "Neutron Bomb".
In addition to causing Communist Russia-era angst, that song was a #6 Billboard smash for The Pointer Sisters. ""Neutron Dance" was part of the Grammy®-winning Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack as was "Stir It Up", one of the many songs she's penned for Patti LaBelle over the years. Willis' top hits also include: Earth, Wind & Fire's "September" (featured in Babel and Night At The Museum) and "Boogie Wonderland" (a set piece in the animated smash Happy Feet), Pet Shop Boys with Dusty Springfield's "What Have I Done To Deserve This" and Maxine Nightingale's "Lead Me On." The Cold War ended, and Willis later went on to also pen the Emmy-nominated #1 hit and top-selling television theme "I'll Be There For You" from Friends.
Allee Willis Partying at Her Home

A typical Allee Willis party - Smock It To Me, 1991
The Color Purple

This image is from the musical The Color Purple.
The Color Purple (2005 Original Broadway Cast)
Release Date: 01/24/2006
Amazon Price: $14.99 (as of 12/05/2009) ![]()
List Price: $18.98
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Allee in Her Own Words
I'm Allee Willis.I'm a songwriter. My songs have sold over 50,000,000 copies, including "September" and "Boogie Wonderland" by Earth Wind & Fire, "What Have I Done To Deserve This" by Pet Shop Boys with Dusty Springfield and "Neutron Dance" by The Pointer Sisters.
Isn't Allee Unique?
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Reply
- Jewelsofawe Jewelsofawe Nov 17, 2009 @ 5:53 pm
- How cool! She is fun! And she is your cousin? Pretty cool! Blessed by an angel!
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Reply
- lakeerieartists lakeerieartists Nov 17, 2009 @ 6:48 pm
- Yep, first cousin to my mom.
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Reply
- nightbear nightbear Nov 17, 2009 @ 1:08 am
- She looks like a very interesting lady, who lived life large and had fun doing it. Great lens.
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- lakeerieartists lakeerieartists Nov 17, 2009 @ 7:57 am
- And she is long from done living it. :)
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- Ramkitten Ramkitten Nov 16, 2009 @ 3:35 pm
- Gee, I guess I AM a fan who didn't know it. I recognize some of her work but didn't know the name. What a fun, interesting, talented cousin you have!
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Follow These Links for More Allee

- Allee's Facebook Page
- Here is a great way to see Allee's pictures, links, and other fun facts.
- Another Facebook Page
- More Allee here!
- Allee's website
- Crazy, creative and full of pictures and information.
- Bubbles The Artist
- Allee's alter ego.
- Bubbles and Cheesecake
- Allee has partnered with Cheesecake for some new music. The video of one of their songs is here on this lens.
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- AWMOK Kitschenette» Blog Archive » South of the Border Stores & Hotel
- The Allee Willis Museum of Kitsch. « Previous ... Allee Willis Home · Blog Home. login. pedestal 1, Login ». pedestal 2, Register » ... Get the Allee Willis Blog widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox! Pigmy Will Videos ...
- Allee Willis' Kitsch O' The Day – 1950's Jolly Chef Spoon Rest
- Plastic chef kitchen aids were all the rage in the 1950's. Most popular among the S&P's, note pad holders and mixing spoon hangers were these double spoon Jolly Chef spoon rests. In the postwar leisure class spending fury that ...
- AWMOK Kitschenette» Blog Archive » Sarah Palin Gets Out Of Dodge
- 3 Responses to ?Sarah Palin Gets Out Of Dodge?. Allee Willis says: December 2, 2009 at 2:27 pm. I think this piece is 100% factually true! The only thing missing are a couple of dead wolves strapped onto the hood of the car. ...
- AWMOK Kitschenette» Blog Archive » Star Wars Early Bird ...
- Allee Willis says: December 2, 2009 at 2:16 pm. Yeah, get the money in however you can. We should all be as lucky as the Star Wars folks and be able to sell certificates whose only purpose is to enable you to spend more money. ...
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