Why Avatar has the Most Ironic Soundtrack of All Time

this video was brought to you by viewers like you thanks for helping me afford toilet paper every once in a while I'll ask people hey you remember Avatar and they always come back with do you mean the blue one or the good one and I think that's the best way to describe this mutant freak show of a franchise with its own theme park and the sequels seem to only exist in news articles discussing how they just got delayed again on top of at the time making a record-setting amount of money and seemingly being so good that it caused Twilight moms to spiral into their own kind of depression it's a bizarre beast to try and wrap your head around if you're one of the three people on the entire planet that hasn't seen it it's basically Pocahontas but blue or you could look at it like Dances with Wolves but blue it's actually remarkably similar to Fern Gully but blue and I think the matically it's a lot like The Lorax but blue with a budget of 237 million dollars in the Titanic Dream Team of James Cameron and Jon Landau along with composer James Horner again that you know not only from Titanic but from all these other films that everybody's seen it's really no question how this film became so amazingly successful except that it wasn't the soundtrack isn't honestly that bad until you know what it is that you're listening to even though it might be my favorite work from James Horner in a spiritual sense this was kind of hard to explain have you ever wondered why this film had such a massive budget I'm pretty sure a lot of it went into the super whiz-bang motion capture stuff which back in oh nine would have been pretty expensive but I'm convinced that not an insignificant amount of the budget went toward avatar has some of the deepest lore that you've never heard of before it honestly starts feeling more like Lord of the Rings where Game of Thrones as soon as you start looking into it there's a whole book dedicated to explaining the Navi world and of course I bought it and in turn fans have compiled all of this expanded Navi lore into their own wiki it has the entire history of the RDA that evil corporation that tries to take over Pandora it explains the super conductivity of unobtainium along with not one but two fictitious schools of thought that try to explain how the unobtanium led to the formation of the Hallelujah Mountains every single plant you see in this film gets its own little section complete with a made-up binomial nomenclature it explains the culture of the Navi including how the population that we see in avatar is the omaticaya named after the Omata samba or the blue flute Amada hyah literally translating to the clan of the blue flute which of course doesn't show up in the film and they make sure to make a note of that in the book okay but if neither humans nor avatars have ever seen the flute then how do we know what it looks like checkmate atheists and guys don't worry for every mistake I'm making this video these Zeno musicologists that they hired totally have it covered it also highlights how the omaticaya are known for their weaving in their textiles because remember that from the movie all those scenes where Jake learns how to weave at first you just kind of want to dismiss the book like it was some rogue English major that was so insanely happy to get a writing gig that they invented their own headcanon about how blue cap people get married and carry babies but before we get there I'd like to draw your attention to the Navi language that we hear throughout the film who's read did this isn't some Cub Scout cipher where you just swap out an English word for made-up one this is an entirely developed con Lang or made-up language complete with its own grammatical structures all created by dr. Paul Frommer a linguist at USC who they hired specifically to create this language Navi is as much a language as Klingon and elvish and it's filled with all kinds of interesting non-english sounds like these ejectives and fricatives and glottal stops both singing Luke they hired Carla Mayer a dialect coach to help the actors handle all these non-english sounds in fact CCH pounder who plays Mowatt managed to handle it fantastically forget the wonky well stiff what are you called here or she says the K and Jake so let's learn well Jake zuly that's the accent that's those non-english sounds that's that ejective consonant which is the complete polar opposite of sam worthington just doing everything he can to try and not sound Australian the enemy is out there and a very powerful sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move but back to the pre-production okay so they hired dr. Jody s Holt a plant physiology professor at the University of California Riverside to make sure that all the plant science they did the film was as accurate as possible down to how the actors were going to take samples it's difficult to overstate the absolutely astronomical amount of work that went into the world of Avatar literally as far as I can tell they actually modeled the Pandoran solar system to get the day/night cycles accurate and have the planets and the background appear as they should within the Avatar world this was the most extra film ever to me that's why they went ahead and put in avatar land at Disney World and they keep pushing to make those sequels they've already done a Star Trek amount of world-building developing that deep lore and they want to make more of a profit off of their investment and with all of those pre production costs and development we have my new favorite human being when not posting pictures of the cakes she decorates on her website dr. Wanda Bryant is an extremely accomplished ethnomusicologist ethnomusicology is the study of music as it pertains to culture especially outside the Western European tradition and when James Horner was hired by James Cameron and they got the old Titanic duo back together Horner turned to dr. Bryant to help him develop a new kind of music for the Navy and Bryant being an absolute badass wrote up her entire experience with working on the music for the film in an essay that will link down in the description because I'm just not gonna be able to cover all of it here and I cannot urge you enough to go and read it for yourself because it almost reads like a crime scene investigation but we'll get to that and there's also this really great interview with Bryant where she talks about the whole experience on my outer space as YouTube channel I'll link it in the description below so again just to reinforce the idea of how in-depth the pre-production was by the time they'd started consulting with dr. Bryant they'd already had this idea that the Navi would have drum circles where each drum would represent a different planet in the Pandoran solar system and they'd play and I quote in a complex rhythmic structure which feature multilayered elliptical time signatures derived from the orbital patterns of their solar system which I don't even know where to start with that are the Navi supposed to be Ligety fans or something really trying to do like a musical universe Alice but for Pandora it was intense and immediately Bryant noticed some pretty considerable problems like one what on earth pun intended is an elliptical time signature and two in her own words she says I realized that there is a disconnect between the artistic concept and the ethnomusicology calor organ illogical perspective for example that Almaty Samba the blue flute that this Navi nation is named after isn't actually a flute it's a trumpet so there's that organ ology is a really important field to study when you want to make up an instrument kids then she noticed that while the avatars have five fingers the Navi only have four meaning that if they're gonna have some kind of earphone or wind instrument like a flute then they'd only really have access to a pentatonic scale instead of our hepta tonic one they would only have five notes per octave instead of the seven that you see in the Western European tradition which strangely enough created a big problem for Horner see the idea with avatar was that they wanted to take cultures from all over the planet kind of throw them into an artistic blender and then create a culture that wasn't completely recognizable as one specific population or society on earth they wanted something vaguely non-white that wouldn't single out any one group of people so they committed to blue cat people think of it like the animals clearly this is a rhinoceros but it has this head like a hammerhead shark and this peacock feather thing on its head but it's still obviously supposed to be a rhino or a rhino stand-in or like the horses they have this ant eater thing going on and they have scales and he's like gills sort of things or whatever but they're still very clearly horses that's basically what they were trying to do culturally for the Navi now when he heard that the Navi would only have access to a pentatonic scale Horner got a little nervous that it might sound a little too recognizable as Asian or African or Native American he wanted a completely new sound at the same time Cameron made it apparent that he was a very hands-on director wanting to be invested in every aspect of the music production so when Bryan ended up getting too focused on the musical logic of the concept art Cameron admitted that and a quote on occasion a detail or two may have been overlooked or consciously ignored in the interest of storytelling which hold up okay so you're saying that you can break the cannon in order to maintain effective storytelling okay cool very cool but that's even though you're spending millions of dollars in pre-production to develop this alien world which you might then end up ignoring in order to better develop the story that you haven't written yet white let's just call that a red flag and move on for now okay so back to the music so Horner was a super tough customer for Brian as Brian puts it Horner was extremely well-versed in all kinds of world music so Brian had to really dig deep to find pieces of music and sounds that Horner hadn't heard before in the end she had 25 examples of music that her and Horner agreed would be workable here are a few that she listed Swedish cattle herding calls folk dance songs from the Naga people of north-east india vietnamese and chinese traditional work songs breeding songs from born celtic and norwegian medieval laments central african vocal clinique persian terrier michael toma works by she'll see the finished women's group for tina personal songs from the central Arctic Inuit and brush dances from Northern California on top of that she hired singers from Bulgarian Israeli Indian and North African vocal traditions and at one point hired instrumentalist Tony Hannigan who plays various panpipes whistles ocarinas and the Kenna among all kinds of other non-western instruments if I hadn't made my point yet this is most likely where all the money went for the film at least in terms of the music budget and they went absolutely ham writing demo after demo after demo they did everything they could to blend these completely different styles together which would have been extraordinarily difficult considering how they all came from different language backgrounds with different vocal inflections and phonemes on top of massively different tuning systems not every culture dealt with a Pythagorean comma with equal temperament like Western Europe if you want more information there's a great write-up on not another music history cliches blog as well as a great video by twelve-tone links in the description for both and all of that doesn't even begin to address the different rhythmic systems that you find in this collection think about how hard it is to get any three people on Twitter to agree about anything now multiply that by tuning system math and you have a whole different kind of nightmare honestly what they came up with sounds really cool on paper and it sounds like at every point they were respecting all the concept art in lore that they had already developed for this world like some of these microtonal drones that they would have to represent a wa in the natural world for one of the songs it was really fascinating to read about so when Cameron came to them saying that he wanted a bunch of different songs to relate to different aspects of Navi life that was actually also pretty cool to read about - especially when he mentions that he didn't want the songs to be like a performance he wanted it to be more about their daily life which again is an interesting and non-western perspective for a director to have which is pretty exciting to hear on a project like this he wanted like a weaving song a hunting song a funeral lament in like a spiral song for a wa or something like that and if you're at all curious yes the lyrics for those songs did make it in the book which is absolutely fantastic until you read about what ended up happening initially Cameron wrote the lyrics for these songs in English which when translated into the Navi language with a very non-english sounds became kind of difficult to sing and he started changing the lyrics to have it sound better to his Western ears again different languages with different phonemes have different ways of making their language sound good when sung that's why accurately studying this stuff is so important to reiterate this is really basic stuff if you want your songs sung in the native language using these new sounds the songs are just gonna end up sounding a little different than what you're used to you might even say that to you these songs would sound alien on top of that when Horner and Bryant had started putting the individual songs together taking inspirations from all over the place they ran into the problem of merging the non-western sounds with the Western Orchestra that was gonna fill the gaps in the score after all this was said and done this was still gonna be your standard blockbuster movie with your standard blockbuster movie soundtrack the disparate non Western musical systems led to them using a microtonal system that would significantly contrast with the Western Orchestra that they would play for the rest of the film but to be clear they set out to create music that sounded like nothing anyone had ever heard before the problem was that that's exactly what they did and they went out and wrote music that sounded like nothing anyone had ever heard before which in turn led to Cameron's shooting down every single one of their demos because they didn't sound right to him probably because they had made music that no one had ever heard before which again to me sounds like exactly what you want to have happen when you're writing about a culture that is literally alien again millions of dollars in pre-production of research but yeah it just doesn't sound quite right how about next time instead of wasting all these resources you just toss a bunch of instruments into a wood chipper and save everybody some time to be fair Bryant paints Cameron is someone who is aware of the difficulties that they had to but it doesn't make any sense that he would shut them down that hard it's like this is exactly what you paid for what did you expect so in the end of this entire ordeal only one song made it into the film the lament at the tree of souls Cameron said that he wanted to break with na'vi tradition remember this is a tradition that they're making up and he wanted them to write a Navi Amazing Grace something that could be understood by all from Oklahoma to South Dakota that is a direct quote and when they even just tried to ornament the vocal lines and that song to make it sound even slightly less western or even European Cameron shot it down again and again at this point everything almost completely fell apart for the duo Bryon specifically says the Navi Amazing Grace episode forced us to realize that our dreams of creating a truly unique and unusual musical sound for the Navi would be tempered by the fact that this was not our movie in the end and I'm leaving a lot out here they basically had to abandon almost all their work in the film when you hear some kind of vocal line it fits in Navi it's a nonsense lyric that has no meaning [Music] the syllables that Horner picked were so they could cut through the orchestra not necessarily because they meant anything they could literally be singing about what they had for lunch it wouldn't make a difference the only micro tonality or at least non-western tonality that you hear in the film comes at the end of phrases where the pitch falls off Horner ended up having the same problem with the live instruments that he had with the songs and he ended up just sampling them so he could just treat all the non-western instruments like his traditional Western instruments all the drums were completely digital with multiple drum sounds being layered on top of one another until it sounded just right which is why when you listen to it the score sounds incredibly digital which to me makes these scenes feel so much more artificial and computer-generated at every single point Horner and Bryant did their best got shut down and then they had to construct some kind of artificial replacement that sounded vaguely like the original boy oh boy making something that'll walk talk and act like it's from the native culture but isn't why does that sound familiar Bryant mentions that there are in fact some fragments of their work in the film like how the film opens with a call that is vaguely reminiscent of one of the Swedish cattle herding calls that she'd shown Horner at the very beginning but aside from that and the lament of the tree of souls Brian really makes it seem like very little of the original work made into the film outside of vague tamriel colorings here and there so far in my research I've found five places where I can identify very clearly here was the sound source that I brought to James Horner and here's something very similar not the same you can hear Horner's creativity in it but the concept or the sound quality something that is there that's very recognizable when talking about the overall effect of the score she cites Marvin cooks a history of film music Cooke could have been writing about avatar score when he discussed the pervasive use of ethnic instruments and voices sometimes lending authenticity to a film's cultural or geographical milieu but at times perpetuating a generalized to ham roll exoticism that suggested Hollywood stereotyping was still a guiding spirit that is avatars score in a nutshell in other words this score is kind of like if you like took something from a group of people without really asking for it and then repurposed it beyond recognition in order to make money it's kind of like that it's difficult to them visualize something like that happening but it's kind of like the musical equivalent of that Horner Bryant set out to try and make this soundtrack sound like this beautiful collage of music from all over the planet but in the end it was specifically engineered to be as inoffensive as possible while sounding vaguely non-western let me see if I get this straight for you a guy spearheading a project sponsored by a massive corporation decides either directly or indirectly to hire a doctor who specializes in a field where their work might help legitimize the project's intentions but at every opportunity for the sake of profit and easy accessibility this guy undermines the doctor and her work such that she is effectively forced out of the project and is only able to comment on the legitimacy of their actions from afar now where have I heard that story before it's not like it isn't obvious when you go through the film of the fine-tooth comb it's kind of a disaster like let's pretend that in the end they decided to use certain instruments and textures to represent different populations [Music] [Applause] okay fine it sounds a vaguely non-western we'll call that the Navi sound well then why do the humans get these vocal lines when they approach home tree and Jake and the Navi get this brass moment during the final confrontation [Music] we even hear brass when Jake shows up on that pterodactyl in fact the animals come to save the day it almost sounds like Superman's showing up you might argue that Horner was one step ahead of the game and was trying to make the blue flute that doesn't appear in the film and is actually a trumpet up here in the actual film by playing all this brass but that is some forty chests that no one's gonna get because there's literally nothing that sounds more European than brass it's sure there's this really cool nature motif that comes back over and over again [Music] and there's this really cool moment where they're breaking out of jail and again when the colonel shoots Grace where we get this Dias eerie like melody toting fire up the ship [Music] the problem is that both that nature motif and his Diaz eerie moment appear in the love ballad that they marketed with the film which you can just tell that they desperately wanted this to be a new my heart will go on which when you look at it that way means that this moment is actually a reference to the love ballad or the love ballad has a reference to the medieval chant of death take your pick either way it's weird to be completely fair though there's one thing I actually like about the soundtrack and it's the motif for home tree when Jake first sees home tree he's a prisoner it's nighttime and it's really scary [Music] but he wakes up there it's daytime the motif is less ominous and that's really cool [Music] we also get it when Jake wakes up from the ashes of home-tree and goes to help the Navi again because it's all thematically about home tree it also plays in the kernel of shooting grace and when rogue one yes her callsign is rogue one go on you copy starts fighting against the gunships maybe because they're both fighting for home tree in the Navi I don't know oops which again cool but in the grand scheme of things that is one thing that Horner was able to sneak in there underneath the three-hour mountain of scathing imitation when you look at this film as a whole with all the work that went into creating at the time the most successful film in history the story behind the music is nothing short of depressing on one hand Horner's efforts were commendable he never had to reach out to an ethnomusicologist nor did he have to put in all that effort to try and create this familiar but artificial musical landscape but he did it anyway and I would absolutely kill to hear those demos but if your whole film is basically a blue version of Pocahontas Dances with Wolves Fern Gully and the Lorax it might do you a little good too I don't know maybe actually sit down with one of those stories and really think about what it's trying to say because the score in this film is the musical equivalent of strip-mining yeah it made a lot of money but it came at a cost we are all worse off for not having a score that could have had all those different types of world music coming together at every twist and turn they mutated the non Western music that they'd collected to fit in with a Western audience there's virtually nothing about this score that isn't just some permutation of traditional Western European music this stood to be one of the most amazing and inspiring Hollywood scores ever on top of being James Horner's magnum opus but they just undermined the duo's efforts over and over again I can't stress this enough everything about this film was artificially engineered to satisfy its audience's preconceived notions everything about this film is fake it's a veneer nothing about it is remotely genuine that's why Disney had absolutely no problem integrating it into the hyper reality of the theme parks this is not what non-western music sounds like this is what Western audiences think non-western music sounds like it's like they didn't even bother to watch their own movie because the story behind this soundtrack is ironically familiar I think that one of the most important things is to keep your ears open keep your ears open to unusual sounds you know things that you may find a little uncomfortable now with a little bit of listening some of those may become the favorite sounds in your musical world thanks for watching like that my patrons for making these videos possible with an extra special thank you to Alex Cole Kowski Alex clinker Clara tan at least in thomas google it Hayden Elsa Jacob Silas Jordan Adams Karin Rosa now Kate J Kim colada Marin John Zatara Noah grape ray Locke Rafael Martinez Silas Rick Osborne and Who am I I'd also like to thank everybody who requested that I talk about James Horner I feel like this is sort of his unreleased greatest work I would love to hear what those demos sound like and I feel like this is an unappreciated effort that he made toward the famous boy you know that just like you be sure to subscribe and check out my other videos follow me on Twitter and twitch have your musical questions answered live and if you really like what I'm doing then consider supporting the channel on patreon but that's all I got for now thanks for watching so apparently there's a Pandora Research Foundation which links to Pandora pedia which as far as I can tell is like an officially licensed Disney database full of expanded avatar lore and there is a whole page on this website on na'vi music theory and it says that they use pentatonic diatonic and microtonal scales okay

Channel: Sideways

Views: 2,331,457

Keywords: Avatar, James, Cameron, Horner, 2009, Ironic, Irony, Wanda Bryant, Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicologist, Alien, Pandora, Elliptical Time Signature, Blue, Production, World Music, Music Theory, Film Score, Titanic

Id: tL5sX8VmvB8

Length: 23min 27sec (1407 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/HoLYxNoAH]

Oh I read it as "Why Avatar has the most iconic soundtrack of all time", and was a bit confused.

[u/dimechimes]

That was way more interesting than I expected.

[u/[deleted]]

That’s the whole thing about James Cameron isn’t it? His movies are big and spectacular enough to draw in the general audience but have enough passion and innovation in them to please enthusiasts. It seems like a delicate balance and if the music didn’t sound right, it very well could have derailed the spectacle he was trying to create. To me he gets points for at least attempting to have more authenticity but at the end of the day, would you rather have an artistically pure film that nobody sees or one with compromises that is successful enough to fund your next project?

[u/calamity_joe]

The aspect of this video that is interesting is that they tried to make a score to represent the Navi that included non-Western countries that blended those cultural sounds together under a micro-tonal system. What they produced didn't work for a blockbuster while contrasting the Western score they used in other places, so it was scrapped for a less-confronting sound that emulates a vaguely non-Western type of music that can be listened to by a mass audience.

The guy in the video seems to think this change is tantamount to the auditory form of strip-mining a culture's music which is where he loses me. While it would have been interesting to hear what they came up with, if it didn't work as a whole for the movie, why should they include it? It's kind of ridiculous to compare this to blood diamonds.

[u/Unovalocity]

I really like the soundtrack as is. I am curious what it would sound like, but I still think its fantastic the way it is

[u/soapysales]

tl;dw - A lot of investment in world building meant James Horner worked with an ethnomusicologist to develop a really complex musical language for the Na'vi by "strip mining" non-western ethnic music and slapping decidedly western musical motifs on it to appeal to western audiences. In effect, the soundtrack is guilty of exploiting foreign resources just like the humans in the movie.

Really entertaining and thought out video essay, it does a great job dipping toes into the deeper waters of the Avatar universe and its development without losing the main point. Credit where it's due.

[u/[deleted]]

So where do I listen to this unreleased stuff?

[u/Birdgang14]

I never got all the extreme hate for Avatar. I like it. It's a fun movie.

[u/klendathu22]

Such a passionate video for such a terrible and forgettable movie.