Far Out There: Character Soundtracks - The Kid

Well, THIS one won’t take long to write. At least, the intro bit about the character won’t, ‘cos I don’t really have anything to say. The Kid was introduced in the Christmas 2020 comics as a figure of totally mystery: a little girl in a trenchcoat and fedora who seems to have strobing Homestuck powers and inexplicably intimidates everybody. Who is she? Where did she get her blinky seizure powers? Why do all the rest of the Nitpickers treat her like this mysterious figure? What’s even her real name? …I dunno. No, seriously, this isn’t me playing coy to avoid spoilers or build suspense, I literally have no idea what this character’s backstory is. That’s not to say that I don’t have plans for her in the future, but all those plans involve using her in other stories, as just as much a mystery figure as the currently is. I specifically want The Kid to be an enigma, something weird and unknowable that operates on a different level than everybody else. Maintaining the mystery would be essential to making a character like this work, and if even I’M not sure what she is, then there’s no way anybody ELSE should be able to figure it out.

Of course, there’s also the fact that this is another character where I made the playlist first and then drew the character to match. It’s easy to not have much backstory figured out when you’re operating on such an intentionally superficial level. That goes double for The Kid’s soundtrack, which is all about moody Jazz. What good film noir detective DOESN’T have a mysterious past? Then again, I shouldn’t really bring up film noir, because this isn’t THAT kind of Jazz. In fact, to be honest, I’m not sure WHAT to call the collection of songs I’ve compiled here. I must confess that Jazz has been a bit of a blind spot to me for a long time. I know there’s Jazz I like, both because I’ve heard it and because I’ve heard even more Rock I like that incorporated Jazz elements, but… well… Okay, I’ve listen to Rock pretty much my whole life, and pretty much know all the genres and sub-genres like the back of my hand. I’ve been such a dork for Classic Rock history for so long that, at this point, I can just look at the COVER of an album from anywhere between the late 50s to mid 90s and know what it sounds like by deducing the style and scene it hails from. But Jazz? I don’t know ANYTHING about Jazz history or the various trends and styles to come and go over the decades. Thus, when I find something I like, I can’t just say “I like this kind of Jazz” and go find more like it the way I do with Rock, because it’s all a foreign language to me. Worse, while there’s definitely Jazz I like, there’s also a lot out there I DON’T like, and not knowing what I’m doing means that any time I think “I should listen to more Jazz!” I’m very prone to stumbling into stuff that does nothing for me without realizing it. And that gets old really fast, so I end up not ever learning anything except when it’s by accident. Like, say, when I first heard “Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim” by Harold Budd.

I first stumbled onto Budd’s The Pavilion of Dreams album while on a major Ambient kick, and Brian Eno produced the album right around the same time that he was working on his own early Ambient albums (it came out the same year as Music for Airports), so I scooped this one up as well. While the songs on The Pavilion of Dreams definitely are of a piece with the slow, minimalist, percussion-free soundscapes of Eno’s post-Discreet Music works, “Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim” immediately struck me as something more focused and concrete. The difference maker, between Budd’s piano and Eno piling layers and layers of vibraphone and glockenspiel and celeste players behind it, is Marion Brown’s saxophone. He doesn’t do any flashy jamming or squawky improv, he just highlights the melody that’s already there in the piano line, but doing so crystalizes the arrangement in ways I hadn’t heard in the Ambient genre before. Part of the point of Ambient is to be background noise, but the sax is so distinct that it allows all eighteen-plus minutes of the song to stand up under active listening. What’s more, I’ve seen enough detective parodies to immediately associate the saxophone with “grit” and “sleaze” and “creepy rainy alleyways” and other film noir tropes. But that’s not what “Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim” evokes at all. Eno’s soundscape sounds more like a lullaby, or some kind of ethereal dream sequence, but then there’s Brown’s sax line to draw out the Jazz foundation of Budd’s piano. The end result is a cross-pollination of style and genre that I still don’t really know how to properly define. When I did my “Top 25 Most-Played” list (which this topped), I suggested that this is what a film noir in a fairytale would sound like, and that’s still about the best I can do. I ALSO suggested that this is what Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack would have sounded like if he replaced the wall of Casios with a wall of xyolophones… but we’ll come back to that in a bit.

So, yeah, “Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim” has been one of my go-to Happy Place songs for many years now, and I wanted to make a whole playlist out of other songs like it. But as I said, I don’t know the first thing about navigating the web of subgenres within the Jazz world, and I’m still not really sure what you’d classify this song as. The easy answer was, of course, to grab more Harold Budd songs, so “Madrigals of the Rose Angel” and “Juno” appear off of The Pavilion of Dreams as well. Neither song hits quite the same heights as “Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim,” but they both carry on the same ethereal atmosphere to some degree via Budd and Eno’s swirling arrangements. In particular, “Madrigals” is punctuated by wordless vocals that almost sound like they belong in the love scene from a scifi movie, just adding to the otherworldly atmosphere.  Also, Marion Brown actually recorded a second version of “Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim” on his own, which also shows up here because I’m a total sucker for bookends. Brown’s arrangement is a lot less lullaby-ish, but still manages to evoke that general dream-y noir mood. Think of his version as the grounded waking world before Budd’s dream kicks in.

So, that’s forty seven minutes of music between those four tracks, right there. Is there even ROOM for anything else? Yeah, I have stumbled across a few more tracks that fit the mold of this mysterious not-genre I don’t know the name of. For one, there’s “Breathin” by Joe Pugliese. This thing is from a Jazz-themed aerobics album, and I must confess to having NO idea how I first encountered it (‘cos I can tell you right now, I weren't doin’ no aerobics). I guess it was just a random YouTube fluke. “Breathin” is a short electric piano workout, and I think the inherently odd sound of the instrument blends in very nicely with the spacier sounds of other parts of The Kid’s soundtrack. Electric in a different way is “While The City Sleeps” by perennial Far Out There soundtrack favorite Group 87, whose very 80s synth keyboard foundation is offset by layers and layers of Mark Isham’s trumpet. There’s a big difference between saxophone and trumpet, but they end up in about the same place here. Even more 80s is the one vocal track (well, one track with LYRICS at least) “The World Spins” by Juliee Cruse. Written by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch and used in a few episodes of Twin Peaks, that connection alone should make “The World Spins” a safe pick for a character with the “noir but weird” feel of The Kid. While the song is really more Dream Pop than Jazz, it never the less fits the overall mood. Or, at least, I think it does, and apparently I make the rules here. If nothing else, the simple keyboard riff of “The World Spins” blends so seamlessly into the beginning of “Madrigals of the Rose Angel” as to be almost freaky. I’d be a fool Not to take advantage of such a smooth transition. Oh, and remember how I compered “Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim” to Blade Runner earlier? Well, guess what? “Love Theme from Blade Runner” is here too! But not the familiar Vangelis version, even if that was under consideration at one point. No, this one is a different version by a fairly anonymous collective of cover artists called Jazz Urbaine, and while it’s not TOTALLY free from Casios, it is nevertheless much heavier on “real” instruments than Vangelis’ original, which brings it that much more in line with the mood of the Harold Budd tracks.

“BUT WAIT!” I hear none of you ask “WHERE’S THE TOKEN JAPANESE TRACK?” Well, you’ll be happy to know there’s actually SEVERAL Japanese tracks spread out across The Kid’s soundtrack, and they’re all from every weeb’s first introduction to Jazz: Cowboy Bebop! Yes, Yoko Kanno and Seatbelts actually show up on The Kid’s soundtrack more times than Harold Budd does, even if their four songs take up much less time than is three. The big climactic piece is “Space Lion,” a seven minute audio journey that begins with a sparse noir saxophone melody before somehow ending up on a lengthy New Age chant thing. It’s admittedly a bit atypical for this soundtrack (in fact, “Space Lion” is the ONLY song with noticeable percussion) but being the last song, it’s not like anything needs to follow it. Besides, like I said, The Kid is meant to be a figure of mystery, so why NOT end her soundtrack in a weird way? Before that odd conclusion, though we open with a music box version of “Space Lion,” because once again, I’m a sucker for bookends. What’s more, “Goodnight Julia” pops up in the middle of the soundtrack, and that’s just another arrangement of the “Space Lion” melody without the chanting bit. And also thrown randomly into the mix is “ROAD TO THE WEST,” which is the one Cowboy Bebop track present to NOT quote “Space Lion” in any way. All throughout, we find a conscious effort to evoke the trappings of a film noir soundtrack, but leaning more and more into a strange, spacy, dreamlike atmosphere. You know what? I’m just gonna call this “Dream Noir” until somebody comes along and explains to me what The Kid’s music is ACTUALLY called.

(Very little to report on the YouTube front for this one. I’m sure it helps that so many of the tracks featured here are really freakishly super long, so I ultimately didn’t have to brave the Region Lock Overlords all that often. Also, most of this stuff is old enough that I guess there’s not as much of a scramble from the copyright bots to flag any of it. Heck, even the Cowboy Bebop tracks were super easy to find in unrestricted form! About the only frustration I encountered was the video for “The World Spins,” which I desperately wanted to include in its official music video form rather than just a fanvid with some random Twin Peaks screenshots. And while I found one, it’s NOT a new posting at all, so the quality’s the lowest of anything on the playlist. But dang it, I had to make sure more people got to see Juliee Cruise swinging over a cluttered stage by a wire harness because David Lynch. Oh, but there IS one other point of confusion: the spelling of “Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim.” See, that’s how it’s spelled in my iTunes, and I’ve seen it that way elsewhere, but I’ve ALSO seen the middle part spelled “Rrahmani,” both on covers of the song and even on certain pressings of The Pavilion of Dreams. Now, I can barely spell words in English correctly, so I am in absolutely no position to know when a word transcribed from Arabic is right or wrong. I’ve defaulted to the iTunes spelling I have, but it still annoys me that the Marion Brown version of the same song is spelled differently and I can’t tell which one is right. I mean, as long as they’re written in English letters, neither one is really “right,” but you still get my frustration, don’t you? The details matter, dang it!)

The Kid's YouTube Playlist