Blog 6

Frontier Psychiatrist by the Avalanches

“Frontier Psychiatrist” was created in 2000 by an Australian band called the Avalanches. It’s a bizarre song created from multiple different samples of music and sound through a method literally called “sampling.” These samples include the sounds of a whinnying horse, dialogue from the sketch “Frontier Psychiatrist” by Wayne and Schuster, a scratched record, and a booming chorus of trumpets and violins.

The lyrics are entirely nonsensical, but more or less discuss the story of a boy named Dexter who has been deemed “criminally insane” and “psychosomatic”, which has warranted his expulsion from his entire school system. This can be gleaned from the first stanza of lyrics, but then the song goes haywire and turns into a jumbled mess of weird pronouncements like “You’re a nut/ you’re crazy in the coconut”, “He was white as a sheet/ and he also made false teeth”, “And milk! Rectangles, to an optometrist, the man with the golden eyeball.”

The Avalanches haven’t come out with any type of statement about the song’s meaning, but it seems that it’s more or less portraying what it’s like to be inside the mind of a person with a psychosomatic disorder,a disorder that involves both the mind “psyche” and the body “soma.” The video is as strange as the song, which creates a type of psychosomatic experience in itself — the bizarre music coupled with the weird lyrics creates a discombobulating effect that leaves people wondering what the hell just happened. The madness happening in the video is creating the madness flowing into the listeners ears — mind + body.  It’s an interesting thing, because a song could tell the story of the victim of a psychosomatic disorder, but “Frontier Psychiatrist” seems to instead show the experience.