Fondly Feeling The Music of BOCCHI THE ROCK and KIDS ON THE SLOPE (Patreon)

Music is the most purely emotional art.

I feel like this is almost unquestionable. Yes, a lot of various arts can be moving. And movies can be transformative experiences that are probably my favorite things in the entire world. But there’s something about the way a song can just immediately make you feel a given mood, often within seconds. It’s something that goes beyond the effect of earworms, or a connection to a memory, or even our cognitive understanding of the lyrical words. It’s like the tone of the music just immediately hooks up to your spinal cord and starts emanating throughout your body. It's an entirely visceral process. And because it can do this, music communicates so much more than one might assume. I mean, there’s a reason we can recut trailers to make The Shining seem like a happy family comedy or Paddington seem like a horror film. The images are the basis of subject, but the music instructs you how to feel about what you are watching. And often, it does so with great power.

I mean, there’s a reason so many classic films have classic scores. It’s hard to think of Lawrence of Arabia without the grandeur of Jarre’s classic cue. Or what is The Good The Bad & The Ugly without the twangy windwork of Morricone? And who are Lucas and Spielberg without the melodic bombast of the great John Williams? While all this seems to go without saying, it becomes more evident when a movie explores the subject of music in and of itself. I’m not just talking about the litany of great documentaries, nor the seemingly uniform nature of the biopic, but the fictional explorations of fictitious artists that try to get at the very essence of what we want from music, both in the listening and the act of creation. For all the fun and games, Singing In The Rain is a treatise on the entire showbiz process. All The Jazz goes into the darker existential heart of creative motivation, along with the addiction to it. And John Carney’s two classics Once and Sing Street both get at the innocent origins of the way we use music to connect to people and find ourselves in the process. Which brings us to music’s greatest power of all: It gives us the ability to do…

… what you can’t do with words alone.

BOCCHI THE ROCK

“There are no enemies here.”

Of all the quotes in this wonderful show, that’s the one I keep hearing in my head. Probably because it touches on the powerful dichotomy of what this show is offering us. In one way, Bocchi The Rock is the traditional, feel-good story you might imagine: Young girl falls in love with music. Young girl wants to start a band. Thus, Young girl finds unlikely friends and compatriots and goes through comic trials and tribulations in the process. It’s all the familiar things that make for a charming, fairly enemy-less coming of age story. But in another way, Bocchi The Rock is wonderfully distinct. Because it’s also one of the best treatments of social anxiety - and by extension, one of the best general treatments of mental illness - that I’ve probably ever seen? But part of understanding why comes in understanding the way mental illness has so often been treated beforehand.

Because in 9 out of 10 prior stories about mental health, a character will have some kind of “problem,” usually behavioral, usually surface-level, and yet usually stemming from a bad trauma. This alone is pretty reductive, but then they will then go through a hair-raising and genre-y conflict that recreates that trauma in often worse fashion and they come out the other side of it and are usually “cured.” I don’t think this is necessarily done out of insensitivity (thought it can be). It’s more done out of the fact that this is classic conflict-based storytelling with any other kind of “character problem,” even though they are very much not. Thus, the net effect has kind of been disastrous for the public’s historic understanding of mental health. Because the storytelling amounts to one big “just face your fears and get over it!” Something that echoes the way so many of the ways people engage  life in an emotionally closed-off way, often burying it in the process. But you learn quickly that it doesn’t work that way.

Because often, a mental health diagnosis is a fun new life partner! A big case of “Yay, this is something I have to deal with for the rest of time!” You know, just like many other chronic illnesses. And it’s often debilitating. But it also doesn’t mean you can’t perform life duties, nor does it mean you can’t perform those duties at a high level. It just means you’re going to be dealing with something that’s CONSTANTLY getting in the way alongside it (in addition to the life duties itself being hard enough). It just doesn’t fit the conventional narrative. To wit, Bill Hader talks about crippling anxiety and he’s on Saturday Night Live for fucks sake. “How can that be?” you might ask. Well, that’s the whole thing. People don’t see the panic attacks. They just see the killer impressions when he comes out the other side. And there are so many amazing, wonderful people and performers who suffer from things like this. But luckily, things are changing and so many people are talking about it more with stark clarity.

And it seems like the art that explores it is changing, too.

Which brings us back to Bocchi The Rock. The story centers on Hitori Gotō AKA Bocchi, whose social anxiety is absolutely crippling. She can barely interact with classmates and strangers. But like so many people, deep down, she wants connection, too. She just has no idea how to enact it. Enter two ingredients: Her father’s guitar. And watching an interview of someone in a band about how they used to be a shy wallflower and now they’re in a huge cool band. Boom! That’s her plan! Get good at guitar and it will instantly make you friends! Cut to three years later and now she can absolutely shred on a guitar, but only in the comfort of her room. Sure, she can share the thing she’s passionate about by posting about it anonymously online (who could ever relate to such an instinct?!?), but she also knows she’s in stasis. Thus begins a series of terrible attempts to put herself out there, start a band, which of course doesn’t happen until she’s literally railroaded into covering for someone in a set and she has to hide in a box and yet, the formation of a new band is off to the races.

What is so damn wonderful is how none of this “cures” Bocchi. We even sense her frustration with how often she thinks it will. And yet she is constantly met with the instinct to run, hide, glitch away, and literally throw herself into the trash just like Forky. But the best parts are when she sometimes comes up with a “solution” from the part of herself (and all of us) that I can only call “idiot brain.” My favorite example of which comes when she has to accomplish the simple task of “walking into a diner to meet a friend” and has no idea how to properly do this totally innocent and nonchalant thing. But that’s what social anxiety does, right? She assumes everyone will look at her, or maybe expect something from her. So she decides to cut this off by entering and suddenly proclaiming: “are you winning, diners?!?” Because of course the way to endear yourself to a bunch of strangers is to cite a popular MS Paint meme from 7 years ago. It remains the hardest I have laughed this year. It is also so endearingly human. And the idiot brain instincts will be with her right through the finale. But in the process she slowly, even subconsciously begins discovering something deeper about what’s happening within her.

In one of my favorite episodes there’s an “audition” where the band has to prove they can play a live show for the venue to book them. When Bocchi senses everyone is uptight and the band’s performance is out of step, she thinks to herself, “I never figured out what it means to have growth, but I know what I want right now. And I can’t afford to blow this audition.” Then she begins coming alive on stage. Please note that it’s not that the fear went away. It’s that a deeper fear took priority. And the “success” is in that way she let the solution to that other priority take over. It’s kind of like productive displacement. And yet, the net effect is that the performance strengthens. And over time, she starts having more moments like this. It’s not that they ever become “easy.” It’s that they become a little bit easier. Bocchi thought starting the thing would be the growth, but she’s seeing that growth comes in a constant process. It is the managing of something that is always there, even if she no longer needs the box. Effectively, this is the constant process of normalization.

And ultimately, self understanding. Because I actually love how much Bocchi’s motivations reflect this simple focus: deep down, she wants to be adored for her guitar playing. While she first admonishes herself at first for having these “vapid and selfish” motivations, they actually reflect a simple emotional want that comes OUT of her anxieties. Namely, she doesn’t want to  do the everyday things that stress her the heck out. She tells us “the thought of quitting my job fills me with power” and yes, there’s tremendous motivation to that, too. Because often the things we DON’T want to do have even more power. And when it comes to adoration, there are ways that all human beings want attention and closeness with others, thus so much of her push / pull is about the ways we both want and don’t want certain kinds of attention. Which is all a part of her realizing no motivation is idealistically pure and for the grand sake of art, but a complex system of a lot of competing feelings.

What’s more is that Bocchi begins to see the complexity of that real, adult world around her, as if it keeps poking at the seams. As innocent as the world seems for these plucky high school girls becoming friends (sidenote: I would die for Ryo), you can see Bocchi’s mix of excitement, dread, and bewilderment as she also dips a toe into the world of the 20-something rockers around her. Particularly when it comes to substances. Note the ways she overhears the suicidal, drunken men across the bar (drawn in a different art style), who muse “is life just an unrelenting hell?” and she contemplates the life ahead of her. Note the way everyone constantly borrows money from her and she has to wonder why all rockers are so poor. Note the way she often projects her future self or others as a drunken mess all the same. There’s this sense of sadness and danger always lingering off of the frame. But most of all, you see it in her relationship with Kikuri Hiroi AKA Fang girl (I know what that trope means now!). Who is the mischievous, carefree, usury type who is also wholly supportive of the budding young Bocchi, who is constantly showing up for her when she needs it. But the biggest moment of support comes when she basically railroads Bocchi into performing an impromptu street concert with her. But it is here she says the important thing I mentioned at the top of the essay.

“There are no enemies here.”

Which is such a point of great insight because Bocchi is not an adult, filled with guilt and regret the way some of us are. She’s a young teen with social anxiety, filled with this litany of fears about how everyone might delight in her failure. But instead, there are only people who could potentially enjoy what she has to offer. Which means the “enemies” are all just in her head. Which unfortunately gives way to the other realization that so many people with mental illness have, which is that the greater enemy therefore IS her head. Which just ends up enforcing something she knows all too well: that something’s wrong with her. You see her struggling back and forth with all of it. And yet, the tiniest of victories come in disproving the negative voice, if only for a second. And the way we find growth is not in feeling some miraculous weight of her shoulders, but in the way those tiny victories stack up and bring us closer to the enemy-less world of those around us. To those who somehow become the ones we care for and are cared for in turn. Early on, Bocchi asks herself about the wonderful girls now in her midst, “where’d this friendship come from?” as if it was somehow magic. But no…

It came from the mortifying ordeal of being known.

AN ASIDE ON “SHOWING THE PAINTING”

The covering of music anime is actually a great opportunity to bring up the subject of “showing fictional art within art” because it gets at a really complicated dynamic. And it’s one that my friend’s old college professor actually had a great piece of advice for. He said that, for example, if you have two characters talking about how truly great a fictional painting was within the narrative, then you should “never show the painting.” Because this inherently allows the art to be the thing everyone says it is and thus the story can function as normal. But if you actually try to show it? Then you’ll inevitably invite judgment of the painting on its own merits, which can cause a bit of dischord.

A perfect example of this dichotomy is two shows about sketch comedy that came out the exact same time on the same network. With Aaron Sorkin’s much hyped Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, it was “showing the painting” that absolutely annihilated the show. Because you had all the characters loftily talking about how they were the greatest and best comedy writers in the world and yet Sorkin’s understanding of sketch was laughably dull, trite, and subpar. And it made the show seem all the more pretentious and disconnected from its own reality (though for many, this also contributed to the train-wreck hate-watch factor). Meanwhile, 30 Rock was the actually-funny show that rarely showed the sketches. And when it did, it was constantly taking potshots at how dumb inane they were, which not showed self-effacing humility, it elevated the show’s actual humor all the more.

So every piece of art about fictional art has to deal with this spectrum. If you’re quoting a fictional novel, the excerpts from the novel have to be good. Or the film within the film must be convincing, etc. This is actually why I’d argue that  food is unusually great for exploration in cinema because 1) it’s beautiful to look at and makes people hungry and yet 2) viewers can’t actually taste it, so you have to trust the words of the characters on screen. But the place where this push / pull hits hard is when music comes up in films. Because it’s really, really, really hard to write great songs. Flight of the Conchords ended not because they couldn’t write more comedy, but because they burned their entire catalog in the first season and writing a whole album for the second was exhausting and daunting. My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is incredible, but there’s an inevitable hit to miss ratio to having to write that many as well (even for the late great Adam Schlesinger). Which is part of the reason I think so many movies with fictional bands have stories that center around the creation of one great song. The perfect example is That Thing You Do, whose 60’s earworm literally sustains the rise and fall of the running time (also thanks to Adam Schlesinger). This is also what’s behind the functional build up of the song in Hustle & Flow.  Same goes for Shallow in the recent entry of A Star is Born. But what’s also tricky to do is writing songs that properly characterize “budding art in progress.” Meaning you have to write slightly-rougher songs that show potential of a young artist as they’re starting out. Sing Street is a perfect example of this in that there is an inherent quality to the hooks, but you see them working through the cycle of all their influences and ultimately finding something more personal.

All of this is build-up to say I think that Bocchi The Rock does an exceptionally good job at that. The songs of the girls’ fictional “Kessoku Band” are bright, fun, and feel like they’re made of that age. They also seem like a true act of collaboration, where the show’s music director Gen Okamura got musicians through personal connections, including Osamu Hidai (drums), Yūichi Takama (bass guitar), Akkin (guitar) and with Ikuyo Kita’s real voice actor Ikumi Hasegawa performing the vocals for most of the songs. You can find a lot of playlists of “their” real album on youtube. A lot of it actually remind me of this band called Damone that was a bunch of high schoolers making a pop-punky rock thing in 2003. But it’s all a success. Because when you show the painting, it has to be what you say it is.

NANA

So this essay was originally gonna be a piece about THREE shows because I was gonna write about the start of Nana, which I’m super into. But since it’s a longer show, I think going through all of it would be better for the essay. Thus, I’ll write that when I finish.

For now, let’s end with…

KIDS ON THE SLOPE

[Me, starting to watch this show]: “Well, after the existential gut punch of space noir that is Cowboy Bebop, I was so excited for director Shinichirō Watanabe to tackle high school kids and jazz and the budding relationships of youth and… oh… oh no…. he’s doing it again.”

Gah, this show hits hard. And it’s not because I have some inherent love of jazz, nor because I know a great deal about Japan in the 1960s. It’s because it’s so good at capturing the fights, frustrations, and freedoms of youth. Chiefly in the way it explores friendship and dynamics within the unlikely pairing of our two lead boys. There’s Kaoru Nishimi, a smart, wealthy, mild-mannered boy who sees himself as effete and unconnected, often thanks to a lifetime of moving schools. And yet he forms an unlikely friendship with his would-be bully, Sentarō Kawabuchi, who is both kinder and far more complicated than he first realized. And the show earnestly explores the ways they frequently come together and apart throughout their three years of schooling.

Personally speaking, I rocketed back to high school while watching this because it captures something so, so specific about some friendships in public school. I feel weird even making the distinction of public school, especially as you probably went to one, too. It’s just that almost everyone I meet out here in the Los Angeles film industry miraculously went to some private school and then some top tier college. And thus their school memories tend to drift to a world of these small, insular, cliquish, bored groups. And even saying the word “public school” makes them imagine some nefarious thing that likely goes along with dated inner city tropes. This is, of course, completely stupid. And it’s indicative of the classism that goes into the freedom of pursuing the arts. But even though I went to a fairly decent public school, going there usually means going to school with a whole spectrum of kids that they likely did not. Meaning, sure, you went to school with “smaht” kids in honors classes. But also kids in second level who were mostly going to state school. Kids in the bottom half, who might do some local, trade, or community college, but a lot end up right in work or the army. And also there’s a lot of kids who were completely disinterested in school, along with those involved in drug dealing, overdoses, and a lot of arrests. Keep in mind that this isn’t the “Oh no, I’m in trouble with my lawyer dad” kind of arrest. This is the “I’m now in the system for life” kind of arrest. And all of this was completely normal. That’s because it IS normal for most of the country (and having a bunch of well-off kids in a fish bowl is not). And it meant that you were frequently overlapping with a lot of different kinds of people who would likely be having different lives than you. And my mind flew back to a couple kids I knew in particular, which I swear will be relevant to the show at hand.

I’m kind of nervous to talk about them and won’t really go into too many specific details out of respect, but it’s just that the details often tell a deeper story about what makes people so endearing. One of the kids was this hilarious weirdo who was older and (I think) was literally last GPA-wise in our massive class, which takes a certain kind of effort. But he was the kind of kid who would repeatedly crash his motorcycle, work mostly to pay for tattoos, dance on school tables, constantly get sent to the principal’s office, and yet had a knack for making the teacher laugh even as it happened. We took a lot of art classes together and he’d make weird stuff just so he could throw it walls later. He was kind of like The Tasmanian Devil with face studs. And yet, there was no real malice there at all. It was more unhinged joy, along with the desire to get everyone around him to try acid (his favorite drug at the time). But his social skills had this deeper kindness to them, too. Specifically, I have a memory of us early on as we sat at our randomly assigned art table. Keep in mind that it was a big enough school that you didn’t really know everyone, you more just saw a lot of them around. And suddenly at the table this shy girl that we didn’t know super well just started quietly crying to herself. While everyone else kind of froze, unsure what to do, this guy immediately went into concern mode, using this sweet voice I never had heard him use before: “Oh no, what’s wrong???” She suddenly opened up, talking about how a guy she was seeing was suddenly mean to her. And of course he was instantly lovely, echoing about how he’s a jerk, and they started talking about self-esteem. By the end he gave her a big hug. To this day, I think it is one of the most clear examples of sudden empathy for someone I saw in the entirety of high school. In a world where everyone else seemed scared and in their heads, he was out there living in actual connection. Which means in a way, he was the best of us... And yet he was just surrounded by this cloud. Things at home for him were just full of this constant, normalized abuse and it seemed like it would bounce off him with humor, even though you knew it was hitting something. I even remember him telling a story of his uncle getting drunk and angrily pulling a gun on his friends, along with stories of his dad getting shot and how he described the burning of the pain. I wanted him to get away from that crap so bad, but in the end, drugs are drugs, so it’s like gravity. I randomly check back up on him every few years and it feels like the arrest record always gets another hit. I actually ran into him once a few years after school at North Station and to my surprise, his eyes lit up when he saw me. We talked for a bit before he talked about being in a jam and I ended up giving him some cash for the train home. Nowadays, I have no idea if his eyes would light up or if he’d even remember me. Time is cruel that way. So is addiction. But either way, I still think about him so fondly.

The other person is probably one of the most quietly influential people on my life. We were only close for a few short years, mostly 8th grade when we were suddenly put into the same class. He was big and tough, older for the grade, and his family had been through some shit, but felt like they had come out the other side a bit. I was scared because I accidentally broke his collarbone on the schoolyard some years prior. But as tough as he was, he was more generous and goofy than most people assumed. More importantly, he was grounded in the earth. I can’t remember anyone at that age seeming to give less of a shit about what people thought of him. Maybe just because everyone liked him or were scared of him? I don’t know. I just know that while most of the kids I had been friends with were saddled with sports duties, and to a lesser extent, academics, he had life duties. He was constantly taking care of his much younger sister, getting jobs (which I now realized were probably illegal), doing family errands, and seemingly always going to the corner to buy milk. But he had a lot to give. He taught me about cars. He wanted me to teach him about movies. He taught me how to box with a bunch of friends in his backyard. I taught him how to wrestle (which I only really knew because my dad had taught me). And best of all, he taught me it was okay to get in certain kinds of trouble. Just good old fashioned nonsense, along with a bunch of other high school things. Being friends with him and that group was like shotgunning into a scary “older” life I desperately wanted to be a part of, but he made it all feel less scary. Granted, this is the exact kind of thing I feel like most families fear happening to their good little honors student, but my mom, to her immense credit, liked him immediately (granted, she was a teacher who loved most students, but especially ones like him, and she had an aversion to what she called “grade grubbers”). His family liked me, too. We’d do homework together, which mostly consisted of re-watching Ice Cube’s Friday over and over again. But once we did a video for English class where we did scenes from Romeo & Juliet. I was Mercutio. Which means, of course, he was Tybalt. I had his lines taped to the camera. We fought with butter knives. It is still my favorite thing I’ve ever made. We were babies. We were kings of the tiniest, dumbest world. He was protective of me. And likewise, I became intensely protective of him. To the point I had this almost existential rage anytime a teacher or authority person would assume something shitty about him based on grades or what would happen in the goings on around school. Because as much as adults might not have the capacity or decency to recognize it, every kid in school knows the cavernous difference between a bully and a kid who happens to get in fights.

Why oh why would I think of these two while watching Sentarō in Kids on the Slope?

Oh yeah, because the similarities and overlaps are beyond aching. But I bet many of you have similar thoughts, feelings, or memories in your life? With those people who reminded you of either boy? Because there’s something universal in that dynamic, isn’t there? But to the show’s credit, there’s also the specificity of this particular story. Because it’s so good at drawing those amazing bits of depth within both characters. There’s Kaoru’s deep, intrinsic loneliness, especially in being surrounded by people who want him to “perform” according to their highfalutin desires. Then there’s Sentarō’s itching defensiveness, stemming so deeply from an ancient wound of ostracization, for both him and his mother long before. There’s nothing wholly easy about their relationship. Even as they get closer, sometimes they buckle under the pressure of their competing natures. And yet, they are always in awe of what they give the other. And at the center, they share this thing called jazz.

What I love about Kids on the Slope is how much it both is and isn’t about the music. While the band formation of Bocchi is more about the plotting of specific goals and accomplishments (with its own little manners of subversion), this show is constantly met with subversion. Which leaves the constant jazz sessions for Kaoru and Sentarō as more the space in which they navigate the friction points of their own worlds. Specifically, how they navigate their own attempts at loving relationships, which often overlap with each other. That’s right. Where so many stories cover young love in the rom-com tradition of boy meets girl, followed by some losing and getting, the thing I don’t like about those stories is that they always seem to act like those two people are the only real people that matter in the universe. The “baxter” and the “other woman who isn’t right for him,” are largely just obstacles. And it just adds to this ugly solipsistic feeling when setting your sights on a person you love. But real life is complicated. Because sometimes we’re on the fringe of things because we’re ALL autonomous beings with our own wants and fears. And often, those are directed in ways that are rarely simple.

Kids on The Slope portrays the world that’s closer to that reality. Especially because so much of their friendship is also defined by their relationship with fellow classmate Ritsuko. Kaoru likes her, you see. And Sentarō is childhood friends with her. But she also likes Sentarō. But Sentarō falls for Yurika. Only, soon Yukira meets “Brother Jun,” the cool trumpet player who Sentarō looks up to in turn. All this may seem complicated, but really it’s simple. And often, how things really are. We like who we like. And when love is unrequited, it can feel like we’re always trying to go up some steep slope that’s always headed in an impossible direction. But none of it is set in stone, either. There are ways our feelings can change. Particularly in Ritsuko’s beautiful arc, where we see the way feelings go in and out in jazz-like discord and harmony, mixing and confusing us as we bury our feelings below the surface. We say it’s often done out of the intention of politeness and consideration, but often resulting in a deepened sadness. These are all the things that seem to echo that old adage…

“Why can no two people feel the same way at the same time?”

To be clear, the show takes place in 1966 and no one is particularly good at voicing their feelings anyway, but that’s probably par for the course. At some points I kind of joked that this was “I Don’t Know What To Say Right Now, So I’m Going To Walk Away: The Show.” But where other shows turn that inaction into plot-blocking, this show turns it into more fodder for conflict, particularly as the walking away pushes the pain further inward and we see it reflected in their internal monologues. Meaning there’s consequences to it. And it’s showing that they’re all prisoners of their own thoughts and feelings, suffering in silence until they burst. But even then, those bursting declarations are feeble attempts that often come out as defensive, or telling explosions of jealousy, anger, resentment, or a confused attempt at some sort of love. In short, displacement is everywhere. But thankfully, the show is not romanticizing any of this behavior. In fact, it's largely a show about bad communication and its empathy only extends to commiseration of the impulses behind it, all while fully articulating the exact kinds of damage it really causes… But at the center of it all is the friendship between Kaoru and Sentarō that forms the moving backbone of the show. For all the while, there is the jazz that binds them.

“Just make some noise, that’s all!”

Those are the words that make Kaoru’s fingertips suddenly come alive. There’s this freedom from the precision of the classical style he’s learned. Soon, the difference of him merely hitting the notes and learning to play them with twang, energy, and personality comes through so vividly. The sounds from the basement crackle and vibrate on screen, showcasing all the vibrant directorial signatures of the man who brought Cowboy Bebop to life. Kaoru and Sentarō can’t quite communicate. But they can do THIS. And this can do so much. However, [spoilers for until the rest of the paragraph] they are not meant to become jazz legends. Things fall apart from the mere happenstance of an accident, but one that plays into the deep family insecurity that Sentarō already felt. I love this choice because dramatic timing and poetic deaths are “easy” for narratives. But the pains of guilt are not (especially in how it comes soon after the gift of the pen from his surrogate father, which makes it feel all the more cruel). And the guilt sends him off into the ether and a life of atonement. Even Kaoru and Ritsuko won’t find happiness as the paths of life take them further away. And as life goes on, eight years can move quickly. Soon you reach a point where you can look back at it all and realize, yes, the pains of that time were somehow deep and life-altering… and yet now seem trivial to the needs of the present. Thus, the final act of reuniting and “Moanin’” feels so damn cathartic. Sentarō’s “run!” declaration after the session does so, especially. For as they go down the new slope of the hill, they once again see Ritsuko and it’s like all feels light once again. Because life exists on a slope. There’s always a school, or a church, or a hospital at the top where you have the daily act of trudging up it. But the moments you get to let go and run down in a pure hit of electric glee, giddy from the high of what you just achieved? There are few things more meaningful to us. And as I watched the show in tears, it offered reminders of my own life [END SPOILERS].

For instance, you may wonder what happened with the friend from eighth grade? Nothing dramatic. The friendship was just a slow victim of trajectory. In high school we were thrown into different classes, friend groups slowly changed, and dating life changed it further. But the truth is that on a deeper level I now realize A LOT of things about it that I can’t quite get into, but perhaps they should be clear. Either way, long after school we connected a few times (back when I actually was on Facebook), but it was mostly us recounting about the days of running in the nearby park during a rainstorm, or how I would try to construct elaborate sleeping contraptions on his tiny couch during the many, many times I slept over. It’s nostalgia in the truest sense. Because we are remembering the joy of the days where The Weight Of Things felt like it was just off to the side, out of sight from the delirium of the moment. The days where you were free to run down the proverbial slopes, often as some adult called your name in vain. We called them “the good old days” and that’s what we meant.

Those were them.

* * *

If you watch either of these shows, you may be tempted to ask, “Wait, does playing music actually help solve their problems?”

Of course, it does and it doesn’t. Because there are so many things about life that need the deeper functions of both words and action to give wholeness to our lives. But within these shows, the music acts as a binding force that nudges them towards those ends. And sometimes ecstatic release is such an important part of that process. As I said at the top, its strength is about the ability to do what you can’t do with words. It places you into a feeling. A moment. A space of powerful emotion. And it becomes a thing that is as real, powerful, and essential as it gets. Which is why we need it. And when all the kids on the proverbial slope list of their favorite things, it is Kaoru who says that his favorite thing is “this time, right now.” Which speaks to the most essential nature of the whole art: to reflect what you’re feeling.

That’s what music is.

<3HULK