Far Out There Character Soundtrack: Kiki

So, last time we looked at the hastily-assembled soundtrack for Madam Ventricle, and if she’s gonna pop up, Kiki’s sure to be right behind. Again, these two characters REALLY deserve to show up in Far Out There more often, and I really wish I could mind more opportunities to flesh the pair out more. As I said last time, it’s easy to look at the “grumpy short girl, happy tall girl” dynamic and think it’s just the Layla/Tabitha act all over again. While I like to THINK I’ve got enough ideas to make both relationships more distinct, it’s hard to say until I actually get the chance to put it all on a comic page and see how it works in practice. In the meantime, at least I can try out some of these character concepts via mixtape liner notes. Wheee!

The most obvious difference between Kiki and Tabitha, musically speaking, is that the bright and bubbly Tabitha actually likes listening to doomy Stoner Metal. Kiki, on the other hand, likes Indie Pop music every bit as light and colorful as her perpetually pink wardrobe… on the surface. The thing about Indie Pop, as opposed to the more straightforward mainstream version, is that its practitioners LOVE to be subversive and deceptive about their music’s seeming cheerfulness. Likewise, I like to think that Kiki is actually a lot more unhinged than she lets on. Sure, Tabitha can get too wrapped up in her work and go a bit off the deep end, but nothing compared to the legit madness of somebody like her Dad. In the end, her predilection for dark music and edgy clothing ends up being an obvious contrast to her personality, like she’s venting all that stuff and moving on without it. Kiki, on the other hand, I think is waaaaaaaay more unstable than Tabitha, but does a much better job of hiding it. Everything about Kiki’s persona, from the bright pink clothes to the bouncy music, are an attempt to bury a potentially dangerous lunatic, and the songs themselves suggest hints of that.

I was trying to have a common denominator between Madam Ventricle and Kiki’s playlists, since they’re supposed to be pals and all, and the intention was for that shared artist to be The Flaming Lips. However, while The Flaming Lips do make a pare of appearances on this soundtrack with “Vein of Stars” and “Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung” (thank GOD for the copy/paste command to help me out on that one), the MVP of this playlist turned out to be of Montreal. They’re the only act to make it to three songs on Kiki’s soundtrack, and all of them –“Enemy Gene,” “Like A Tourist,” and “Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse” –are all about Kevin Barnes’ seemingly endless struggle with about a million different emotional disorders, all wrapped up in a catchy Pop sheen. And they’re not the only ones, either. April March provides the songs “Somewhere Up Above” and “There Is Always Madness,” both songs about embracing the absurdity of life, and the latter a seeming candidate for a Mad Scientist theme song. And then there’s “Wake up Boo!” by The Boo Radleys, which is supposed to be a dialog between an optimist and a pessimist but since it’s all one singer just comes across like an unhinged psychopath having an argument with himself. That’s the kind of stuff I think Kiki’s got locked away behind those pink goggles. Remember, the first time we really got introduced to Kiki was Madam Ventricle casually mentioning that the blew up a planet once. Oh, excuse me. It was “just” a moon and she “only” destroyed its atmosphere. My mistake.

The point is, I think Kiki is one of the most potentially dangerous and destructive mad scientists in the known universe, and Madam Ventricle knows it. She keeps Kiki busy as her “assistant” to make sure she doesn’t have a chance to act on her apocalyptic potential, but the damaged, demented Kiki interpreted this interest as friendship. Probably the only friend she’d ever had, and thus Kiki now tries to be as aggressively, obsessively, terrifyingly happy as possible because that’s what she thinks “normal” looks like and she fears anything less will ruin her friendship with Ventricle. Of course, because this is Far Out There, they actually ARE friends for real, but that doesn’t make Kiki any less crazy. And who knows, maybe one day I’ll get to write some of this in a comic!

Anyway, back to the music. In case you couldn’t pick it up from the tracks already mentioned, Kiki’s Indie Pop soundtrack specifically leans heavily on the early 00s version of that style. As I’ve already said in both the Ventricle and Mariska soundtracks, this is probably the one period of contemporary music where I was actively paying attention as it came out, and I’m already starting to get old enough to start feeling nostalgic for it. That’s especially funny, since a lot of these songs already had a tinge of nostalgia about them when they were new. Like many of the previously mentioned playlists, a lot of the songs on Kiki’s soundtrack take traces of Lounge and Exotica music from as far back and the 50s and mix them with equal traces of 70s Singer/Songwriter sensibilities. Unlike either of the other two, however, Kiki’s soundtrack has a MUCH heavier dose of Rock & Roll energy, which ends up giving it more of a kaleidoscopic 60s vibe as well. Those two Flaming Lips tracks are probably the points at which Kiki and Madam Ventricle’s playlists most overlap, they’d be the most hard-rocking tracks on Ventricle’s soundtrack but here they manage to be two of the gentlest songs. “Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung” at least has some Noise Rock guitar distortion to give it some edge, but “Vein of Stars” really sounds like an artifact from some alternate 70s where Yacht Rock went through a weird nihilist phase. Probably the only softer song is “fallen from the Sky” by The Frames, a sparse little Twee Pop throwaway from the Once soundtrack that I still remember waaaaaaay better than any of the big Indie showstopers that movie is ACTUALLY known for.

Continuing with that Lounge-meets-Rock formula, we have this soundtrack’s opener: “Mull Historical Society” by the band of the same name, which makes for a really good thesis statement for the combination of Lounge chords, Rock guitars, and Techno beats that really drove this particular strand of Indie music. From right around the same period, and with a similarly broad range of influences, we also have two tracks by The New Pornographers: “The Electric Version” and “The Laws Have Changed.” Sondre Lerche provides “Two Way Monologue,” which leans more in the twee/hipster direction (and whose title is also the single best description of an political debate I’ve ever seen). Moving more in the 00s Rock direction, we’ve got a few one-offs: “Fear of Heights” by Apollo Sunshine, “Spain in the Summertime” by King of Prussia, and “Don’t Know Why (You Stay)” by The Essex Green. Between this batch of songs, you can get a feel for what just about every Indie film and car commercial from the years of 2000 – 2010 sounded like.

Getting a bit more contemporary with things (and it kills me inside that talking about anything pre-2015 officially counts as “old” now) we’ve got “Disciples” by Tame Impala, probably the only song by them that I actually know well enough to recognize. We also have “Summer Breaking” by Mark Ronson, which I must confess does such a good job of replicating slightly-sleazy 70s Rock that I legitimately didn’t realize it was from 2015. Dude, look at the music I listen to. Do you REALLY think the name “Mark Ronson” would mean anything to me on sight alone? And besides, let’s go the opposite direction and look at the OLDEST song on Kiki’s soundtrack: “Moonlight Feels Right” by Starbuck. They sound pretty much the same, don’t they? Then again, because I first encountered it on a Pandora Indie playlist where it really shouldn’t have been, there was a point where I honestly thought “Moonlight Feels Right” was the same kind of modern retro endeavor that “Summer Breaking” actually is. And then we have “Steppin’ Out” by Joe Jackson, one of those songs that I would hear in the grocery store for YEARS before I finally figured out who it was actually by. And it sounds so much like all those early-00s Indie Pop songs I was talking about before that now I guess I need to go back and add that they also have a bit of 80s Sophisti-pop about them.

And, of course, I also have to throw in “Do You Believe In Magic” by Cymbals, which will be familiar to anybody who actually reads those Conventional Wisdom blogs about songs I wish were anime themes. THE “AT LEAST ONE JAPANESE SONG PER SOUNDTRACK STREAK CONTINUES!”

(This was another fairly painless playlist to put together, even if I did have to resort to some much older posts than I usually prefer. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but it’s always a bit of a challenge to deal with 2010-era stuff, since it’s not really old enough for anybody to feel like they need to “preserve” it. A lot of this stuff has official posts from back in the day, so nobody bothers to re-post it in higher quality even though the “real” posts often look and sound like garbage.  Still, I couldn’t not post the official music videos of “Somewhere Up Above” and “Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse” to preserve what future generations will look back on my generation and groan about the same way my generation looked back and groaned about leisure suits. Oh, and that of Montreal was directed by the Homestar Runner guys, so that’s weird. I was also strongly tempted to use the music video for “Two Way Monologue” as well, cos it’s honestly a much better short film than either of those clips. Alas, “Two Way Monologue” actually cuts out around two minutes of song from the video, so I kind of have to stick to the original. As for the perpetual struggle to avoid the YouTube region lock gods… that actually went a lot better than I’d dared hope. Most of the official music video posts were kept unrestricted this time, and even thought the only version of “Mull Historical Society” I could find SEEMED to be a YouTube Music post, it nevertheless was unrestricted as well. For a brief, fleeting moment, I started to wonder if YouTube Music was easing up a bit, but then “Spain in the Summertime” was blocked in all the usual regions. Alas, that one’s such an obscurity that I had no choice but to include that version anyway, so sorry if anybody can’t play it. Seriously, I was half-prepared to tempt fate and post the song myself, for a while I thought the only version on YouTube at ALL was a live recording. Oh, actually, I might have told a lie. There was one other track with some region-locking: “Disciples” is blocked in North Korea, Southern Sudan, and the British Indian Ocean Territory… which I feel pretty safe in assuming won’t affect most people who want to read any of my stuff. Unless I’ve got some massive fanbase in Pyongyang I don’t know about. One last note, I’m curious if mentioning “The New Pornographers” by name is going to trip Patreon’s automatic No Naughty Stuff warning message. Lord knows I’ve gotten a robotic finger-wagging for far less… LAST-MINUTE EDIT: Amazingly, it didn't!)

Kiki's YouTube Playlist