Far Out There: Character Soundtracks - Avatar

Well now, this a challenging one: what kind of playlist would Avatar have? As a person who’s supposed to posses the entirety of all recorded human knowledge, wouldn’t she be sick of every song ever by now? But seriously, what DOES a person like Avatar listen to? Really complicated and disorienting math rock? Seven or eight complete symphonies at the same time? Audiobooks rendered entirely in binary code? Naw, she listens to Jpop. Bright, sugary Jpop with a healthy side portion of lush 70s disco/pop. Why? I thought about making a big deal out of how someone with her intellect would appreciate how densely packed the arrangements can be (rivaling classic Motown for sheer amount of hooks per single) since that’d mean there’s more to take in at one time. Or maybe Avatar would prefer aggressively bright and happy music as a counterbalance to her innately pessimistic outlook on the universe? Or maybe I could point out how the frequent use of synthesizer and vocoder and unnaturally overdubbed harmonies give these types of music a sort of scifi feel that fits well with Avatar’s origin? But no, all of that stuff is a rationalization at best. Honestly? It’s just because Avatar’s little and cute, and when I think of little and cute characters my mind immediately jumps towards sugary Jpop, and when I think of old-school Jpop my mind further drifts towards the likes of ABBA or Electric Light Orchestra.

That final connection might seem a little odd to some people, going from pretty and cute JPop starlets to bearded ol’ Benny Andersson or Jeff Lynne, but on a purely musical level, the distance between old school JPop and ELO or ABBA is very narrow indeed. Seriously, go listen to the chorus of “Mamma Mia” and tell me that doesn’t sound like it would work as the theme of an 80s anime. Or, better yet, go watch the Daicon IV Opening Animation and tell me that “Twilight” doesn’t fit perfectly with that imagery. Obviously, both those songs wound up on Avatar’s playlist, with ABBA further represented by “S.O.S.” and perennial Top Guilty Pleasures list-topper “Dancing Queen,” while ELO also contributes “Turn To Stone” and the Olivia Newton-John sung “Xanadu.” Honorary mention also goes to “Love Is Like Oxygen” by Sweet, which wants so badly to be an ELO song that I couldn’t help but include it as well (Actually, as an aside, I wrestled quite a bit with whether that song or “Told You Once” by The Apples In Stereo should get that I Can’t Believe It’s Not ELO spot on the list. “Told You Once” is arguable a better song, but “Love Is Like Underground” turned out to be a really perfect transitional track between two other songs, and I’m a well-established obsessive about that kind of thing)

Continuing with the era, we move along to the 70’s most infamous cultural offering: Disco. Specifically, scifi disco novelty records. Now, disco pretty much always had a kitchy futurist streak in its fashion, but forefront after Star Wars exploded all over pop culture, it REALLY became inescapable. Already a very one-shot-novelty-prone genre, the coke-fueled disco factories cranked out a torrent of tunes with extra scifi sound effects and goofy space lyrics. Obviously, that makes a pretty good fit for Far Out There in general, and a mad science refugee like Avatar in particular. Specifically, I picked “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper” by Sarah Brightman & Hot Gossip and “Fly On UFO” by Chrome… or Chromium… or Big A, depending on which release you’re looking at. Haphazard releases and confusingly vague artist identities were other things the disco era tended to really get into. Again, I could try to make up some deeper explanation about all the scifi references in “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper” representing Avatar’s encyclopedic knowledge of everything or “Fly On UFO” appealing to her sense of alienation from the rest of humanity, but it’d just be a rationalization. I just like the wooshy scifi sounds.

But what about the main event? Didn’t I say all this 70’s stuff was only here as a sideshow to a lot of JPop? Why, yes I did! Let’s get to that! It goes without saying that there’s going to be some anime themes, that’s how 90% of us Westerners learn Japanese music is a thing, after all. We’ve got “Catch You Catch Me,” the original opening from Card Captor Sakura, which sums up everything I said about the connection between “little and cute” and JPop in just under four minutes (heck, Avatar even dressed up as Sakura one Halloween). We’ve also got “Animetic Love Letter,” the first ending to Shirobako, which is also a bright, happy pop song, but I would be associating with little, cute things anyway thanks to being accompanied by footage of adorable big-headed dolls in the show. Stretching the “anime soundtrack” definition a bit, there’s “Katamari Dancing” from Beautiful Katamari, which is both a game rather than an anime and probably not the first song anyone else would pick to represent Katamari. But it fits the vibe of this soundtrack very well… and Beautiful Katamari just happens to be the only game out of that whole series I ever actually owned. There’s also that. More “anime” related but way less “soundtrack” related is “Dear My Keys” off Tsumugi’s first character CD from K-on!, which somehow manages to be better than any of the songs actually written to be used in the show itself. It’s also the SECOND-most Electric Light Orchestra-sounding Japanese song on this soundtrack, we’ll get to the MOST Jeff Lynne-esque song  later.

Branching out from anime soundtracks to stand-alone JPop songs (like a 14 year old in 2001 buying his first non-FLCL CD), we have “I Know” by Aya Matsuura, “Curry Dayo!” by YMCK, and “Ring A Ding Dong” by Kaela Kimura, none of which really have any greater pop-cultural significance beyond being really bright and cheerful and catchy, so here they are. Much better known to casual listeners will be “Black Out Fall Out” by Polysics and “Asia no Junshin” by Puffy AmiYumi, two of Baby’s First Japanese Artists (if you were a teenager before 2010, at least). Both songs make heavy use of synths and vocorders, which do exemplify my non-cutesy reasoning for picking these songs as Avatar’s soundtrack, but the later is also the single greatest example of the JPop/70’s connecting I was talking about ever. Almost unfairly so, since classic Puffy were all about DELIBERATE stylistic pastiches, so the fact that “Asia no Junshin” sounds like literally every ELO single put in a blender is less creative influence and more near-parody. Either way, though, it’s totally what I can imagine Avatar listening to, so here it is.

…oh wait, I’ve forgotten one more track, and it’s a real odd one: “Basket Case” by The Moog Cookbook. So, I keep going on about how the futuristic, scifi-sounding qualities of old-school synthesizers  fits Avatar’s character really well, and I’d originally hoped to push that a lot further. The Moog Cookbook were a 90s-era throwback to 60s/70s-era synth demo compilations like Switched On Bach, and I had the idea that this kind of cheesy yet futuristic pop would be a great fit… until I really started digging into ACTUAL 60s/70s-era synth albums. Back on Trigger’s soundtrack, I mentioned how deliberately retro music often ends up sounding a lot different than the stuff it’s supposedly trying to be faithful to, and that really kicked in here. Pretty much everything I found was either too wildly progressive like Synergy, or too… I’m not even sure what the right word is here. You remember that Going To The Store video, with the weird rubbery cgi guy walking down the street in terrible animations? You remember that goofy, dorky song that played along with it? That was “The Little Ships” by Jean Jacques Perry, and it’s what most of these vintage synth albums sounded like. WAAAAY too bouncy and obnoxious and genuinely irritating to sit through. In the end, “Basket Case” wound up being the only synth instrumental on the whole soundtrack.  “Curry Dayo!” is at least kind of close, thanks to being a chiptunes song, but even that has a very different feel than Moog Cookook’s sole contribution to Avatar’s soundtrack. …and yes, it IS a cover of the Green Day song, and that’s exactly as weird as it sounds.

(OOOOOOoooooooh boy. I’ve got some tales to tell about putting THIS soundtrack together. If you know anything about YouTube OR Japanese record labels, you know that a combination of the two is pretty much doomed to be deeply frustrating.  And sure enough, tracking down videos of a lot of these sons was extremely frustrating. To a certain extent, I guess that kind of helped, since it meant this playlist was already full of fan posts instead of official ones I’d need to replace. Unfortunately, it also means using older, lousy-sounding videos on occasion because that’s all I could find, and that’s assuming I could find a whole version at all. Yes, Avatar’s playlist is, to date, the only Far Out There character playlist where I’ve had to resort to using samples of songs because that’s literally the only form in which they’re available on YouTube. Animetic Love Letter” could only be found in the form of Shirobako’s end credits, which at least sort of has a reson to exist. “Ring A Ding Dong” is also only available as a 90 second preview, though, and not because it was edited down for some other purpose. They just deliberately chose to only post a preview clip on YouTube, to build up interest in a full version that’s not officially available outside of Japan. Again, I understand how hard it is for Japanese companies to GET products out ot the rest of the world in a way that actually turns a profit, and I understand how Westerners distributing this stuff for free just makes it that much easier for the domestic audience to avoid buying the legitimate releases. But just because something is understandable doesn’t make it any less obnoxious. But the REAL horror story here, ironically, isn’t about a Japanese song at all, but a British one. “Ride On UFO” is weirdly, inexplicably SUPER unavailable on YouTube in its normal form. At one point, I’d found an extended dance mix that tacked around five extra minutes of disco grooving on the end of the track, but it was at least the only song in the video. But then that video got deleted, and now the best I can find is a video that contains BOTH sides of the Big A release, meaning that halfway through the video it suddenly goes from being a spacey scifi disco song to a weird 50s retro rock novelty.  So if you’re listening and at seems really out of place… well, that’s ‘cos it is. To make matters worse, literally the only version of the song I can find on YouTube is part of a recording of the entire second SIDE of the Star To Star album, which is even more disruptive. I guess I could also complain about how hard it was to find a video of ELO’s “Twilight” that left on the vocoder prologue, but it hardly compares to the lunacy of these other video hunts.)

Avatar's YouTube Playlist