Far Out There Character Soundtracks: Ichabod

(First off, some housekeeping: since posting the intro, I’ve been clued in on a VERY helpful site that checks the geo-restriction status of videos, so I’ve been able to start going through and swapping out stuff that’s blocked in half the world with stuff that isn’t. That’s turned out to be a lot, actually. See, when I first put these playlists together, I tried to rely on the videos automatically posted by YouTube Music as much as possible. They generally have better audio quality, no obnoxious text or image slideshows or whatever, and I’m just a goodie two-shoes who’d prefer to link to an official posting rather than some dude’s unauthorized rip. I’d resort to unofficial alternatives if there just WASN’T an official video of a song, but only as a last resort. Alas, upon checking, it turns out that YouTube Music videos are, pretty much as a rule, blocked in at LEAST half the planet. Thus, in a fit of irony, I now find myself only using the OFFICIAL videos as a last resort, plugging up the holes where there’s not an unrestricted fan video available. I really want to squeeze in some kind of cynical musing about how the record labels are probably still collecting ad money off those unofficial videos, even if they can’t legally make the official posts visible in a certain region… but this awkward digression is the only way I can think to fit it in. Basically, apologies if it turns out one song somewhere is still randomly blocked in your country, I did my best.)

We start with Ichabod. Ichabod, as we all know, is… kind of a weird dude. I mean, he doesn’t get much of a chance to show it when he’s constantly reacting to even weirder characters, but left to his own devices, he’s pretty darn complicated and strange. So it stands to reason that Ichabod’s tastes in music would be complicated and strange too, as in three separate Frank Zappa tracks strange. Admittedly, those three tracks are “Flakes,” “Cosmik Debris,” and “Carolina Hard-Core Ecstasy,” which… well, in a body of work that include the likes of “Be-Bop Tango,” “G-Spot Tornado,” or “The Black Page #1,” the likes of “Flakes” sound downright Top 40 accessible. At least, it does when who break it down to the individual hooks. It’s only when one strings all the movements and solos and Dylan parodies together and realizes this one song has more song in it than some whole ALBUMS that the true complexity reveals itself. Well, that and the warped, snarky sense of humor. 

That’s the hallmark of Ichabod’s musical tastes right there: weird, but no so weird that it isn’t still built on relatively familiar melodic structure. He just likes entertainment that takes familiar basic elements but builds those familiar parts into an unfamiliar whole. Picks like Oingo Boingo’s “Forbidden Zone,” Chrysalis’ “Dr. Root’s Garden,” and Focus’ “Hocus Pocus” have the sort of weird, pompous air about them one would associate with progressive rock, but the actual songwriting itself is firmly rooted in straight ahead classic rock. Even more genuinely artsy and progressive songs like Gosta Berlings Saga’s spacy instrumental “Helgamarktz,” Max Webstar’s off-kilter “Toronto Tontos,” or eX-Girl’s operatic “Tofu Song” still employ fairly recognizable notions of melody and harmony and actually sounding like “music.” At least, more so than atonal heavy jazz-fusion noodling or what have you. (This soundtrack, incidentally, was one of the ones that benefited most from Pandora’s algorithms; I doubt I’d have ever even heard of Max Webster or Gosta Berlings Saga otherwise) Really, the only songs that go all the way to being experimental are the Zappa/Grace Slick collaboration “Would You Like A Snack?” and Orphic Oxtra’s “Skeletons Having Sex On A Tin Roof,” and even those have enough of a wacky attitude about them that they’d appeal to ol’ Bodbod’s sense of humor.

That’s important aspect of Ichabod’s soundtrack, actually: the glimpse of just what he finds funny. Since Far Out There regularly sees him either working or playing the straight man to someone else’s antics, so we don’t often get to see that he does find things funny. Weird, ironic, straight-faced, unconventional things, but he DOES really enjoy a laugh from things that manage to hit him the right way. That explains the Zappa connection, obviously, but I’m gonna dig into that more later. Instead, I want to focus on other off-kilter selections, like the genre-hopping yet repetitive anti-humor of The Beatles’ “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number),” the paradoxical absurdist art school nerdity of They Might Be Giants’ “Dead,” or the weird for weirdness’ sake of The Residents’ “Simple Song,” to say nothing of “Highway Code” by The Master Singers. That one in particular might be the best example of how Ichabod’s sense of humor works (and another song I never would have known existed without Pandora throwing random things at me). The Master Singers were a group of schoolmasters who performed those complicated vocal chants the Anglican church uses to make passages of scripture easier to memorize… except they didn’t recite scripture, they recited a pamphlet on road safety.  Seriously, it’s a “song” that’s just several minutes of dry British traffic rules. I’d make a joke about literally singing the phone book… but The Master Singers did that, too. That’s the sort of straight-faced, nerdy absurdity that would absolutely appeal to Ichabod’s personality. 

There’s actually a lot of a Nitpicker’s personality to be found in several of these picks, which brings us back to the Zappa selections. Between “Carolina Hard-Core Ecstasy” popping the myth of wild rock and roll groupie action, “Cosmik Debris” making a mockery of new age mysticism, or “Flakes” basically offering an unsolicited appraisal of pretty much every person who’s ever done a job ever, there’s a healthy (or UNhealthy) amount of criticism towards the deeds and ideals of the rest of humanity. And what is a Nitpicker if not an cynical, alienated critic of the rest of humanity? …well, it’s what Ichabod is, anyway. There’s also more than a little of that to be found in the titular mad scientist Chrysalis’ “Dr. Root’s Garden,” especially since it spends most of its runtime establishing the obnoxious neighbors that egg him on. In the back of him mind, Ichabod really WOULD like to be the ruthless and demented ruler of the known universe. And then there’s “Everybody Else Is Wrong” by Utopia, whose presence here needs no explanation… even if Ichabod would mean it far less ironically than Todd Rundgren probably intended. On the other end of the irony scale, though, is National Lampoon’s “Deteriorata:” a cynical parody of Les Crane’s hippy-dippy reading of the Desiderata. “You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here, and whether you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind your back.” Is something Ichabod most likely doesn’t ACTUALLY believe, but only because he’s not optimistic enough to think we’re all getting off that easy.

(One more note about the playlist: For the most part, I was able to find clips of the original studio recordings in one form or another, but in a fateful portend of things to come, I hit a brick wall with the one Japanese song on the list: eX-Girl’s “Tofu Song.” The only version I could find on all of YouTube was a 2000-era amateur live recording. Thankfully, though, the song is entirely a cappella, so the audio survived the trip through a camcorder mic a lot better than a full band performance would have. At least, it’s close enough to give you a good feel for what the studio version sounds like. Get used to me complaining that YouTube and Japan aren’t getting along on something. Also, I should point out that the version of The Beatles’ “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)” featured here has never actually been officially released anywhere. The version issued on the flip side of “Let It Be” and the longer version on The Beatles Anthology each contain portions that the other does not. This is a fan edit combining the two to try and approximate the “real” full song. None of you care about this bit of trivia, but Ichabod would be annoyed with me if I didn’t mention it)

FULL YOUTUBE PLAYLIST