Rich here, betting that you know of the composer Danny Elfman -- and that if you don't know his name, you've surely heard his soundtracks in the past 40 years, including in more than 20 Tim Burton films. He's been nominated for numerous Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy Awards.
Maybe you didn't know that Elfman's been composing music since he was a teenager. In the early '70s, he became the music director for his older brother's street theatre art troupe, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, which by 1979 had evolved into an the 8-man rock band Oingo Boingo with Elfman as the lead singer and primary songwriter. Oingo Boingo's music was wildly eclectic with Elfman's angular compositions that careened all over the musical landscape while combining sophisticated arrangements and bizarre subject matter. It wasn't everyone's cup of tea, and though Oingo Boingo had a taste of mainstream success with "Dead Man's Party" and "Weird Science," Elfman's quirky ska-meets-new wave-meets-jazz-and-pop was more suited to a quirky new wave cult audience -- the kind of audience sought by Tim Burton when he recruited Elfman to compose soundtracks for his equally quirky movies, starting with "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" (1985) and "Batman" (1989) and to the present day.
Meanwhile, here's an emblematic taste of Elfman's work with Oingo Boingo, "Insects," from their 1982 album "Nothing to Fear."
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