10 Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes - part 10 (Patreon)

…aaaaand here we are! We made it to ten! Congratulations to everybody who endured me rambling on about songs I like and pretend shows that don’t exist! And wouldn’t you know it, we end this series with a reach waaaaay back to the past, all the way to the late ‘70s, and address a genre we’ve somehow managed to avoid completely so far: City Pop.

City Pop is a weird thing to talk about on several levels, not the least of which being how much its reputation has shifted over the years. It went from being the hip new thing during its 80s heyday, to being an embarrassing relic of the bubble economy, to being rediscovered by the Vaporwave generation and made cool again, only to then get caught up in the confusion over whether Vaporwave was still cool or ironic or what. Me, I just like listening to good music, regardless of how hip it is… but even just as a musical style, City Pop is a bit hard to pin down. This is one of those “genres” that are defined as much by image and marketing as the sound itself, the very name “City Pop” evoking the upwardly mobile young generation moving to the big city during Japan’s economic peak. This was music made to be played on fancy new hi-fis in big luxurious apartments, or on shiny new Walkmans while shopping at all the trendy downtown stores, or blasting over the speakers of a new car while driving out to the beach over the weekend. The very sound of the economic bubble in action. But when it comes to the actual music itself, rather than the packaging and demographics, City Pop sounds like a lot of different things. Everything from early J-Pop to Jazz Fusion to Adult Contemporary could be branded City Pop so long as the album cover was Aesthetic enough. And wouldn’t you know, the City Pop song I’ve picked here STILL manages to feel like an outlier.

It helps to know that Taeko Ohnuki’s “Tokai” sort of got grandfathered into the City Pop genre after the fact. After all, it is generally regarded as one of the most quintessentially “eighties” genres of all, yet Ohnuki’s Sunshower album was released in 1977. What’s more, both the album as a whole and “Tokai” specifically have more of a laidback Yacht Rock vibe than the slick, electronic studio sheen that defines so much of City Pop’s best-known songs. In fact, it feels more like an extension of the Singer/Songwriter tendencies of New Music artists like Happy End than anything else. (And yes, I realize that the distinction between "New Music" and "City Pop" is mostly an invention of Western critics, but it's stuck for a reason, so I'm gonna use it too). Between the soft saxophone and subtle waa waa rhythm guitar and electric piano, not to mention the out of nowhere synthesizer solo in the middle, “Tokai” is every bit as ‘70s as most City Pop is ‘80s. But it does have guys like Ryuichi Sakamoto and Tatsuro Yamashita on it, so that connection alone tends to attract the City Pop attention. And what’s more, while many of the ingredients are flavored differently, the end result of “Tokai” does broadly fall under the same “relaxing background music” umbrella that so much City Pop was designed to be. And there is enough cross-pollination from Crossover/Jazz Fusion in “Tokai” that it does have at least a LITTLE in common with the shinier song from the decade to come.

Still, “Tokai” is an especially mellow, slightly melancholy tune; way more so than the bouncy commercial jingle vibe of most City Pop examples. With that in mind, it’s not too surprising that I’ve got this song pegged as a closing theme rather than an opening theme. Even the most mellow of shows would need something more lively than this to get people hyped up to watch it, but as the closing credits song? …well, honestly, even as a the closing theme, “Tokai” would only work for a REALLY low energy, low stakes, slice of life show. Obviously, you want the ending song to be a bit of a calm down, but this song is SO calm that the transition into it from just about anything actually happening would counter-intuitively be really distracting. But what if you had a show that doesn’t really HAVE much of anything happening?

Okay, this might look a lot like an aged-up version of that one thing I made up for Kaela Kimura’s “Happiness!!” but since when has anime ever been afraid of doing a show that looks a lot like a show that’s already happened? More importantly, though, the similarities here are really only “manga-drawing artist girl.” In tone and content, this show would be something totally different. Something way, way, WAAAAAAY more slice of life. Arguably more like the idea I had for “Goodbye” by Advantage Lucy. Just your totally average middle-aged suburban homemaker Mom going about her daily routine: cooking, cleaning, getting her kids ready for school, buying groceries, bringing her husband stuff he forgot at home, all the wholesome/boring real life stuff… and also, in her free time, she happens to draw manga. Back in her youth she wanted to do be a manga-ka professionally, but she never really made it. She drew lots of doujins and fan art, worked on weird indie computer games, and sold a few comic ideas to magazines that folded after just a couple issues, but nothing she could ever make a living doing. She never gave up on her craft, though, and even now she happily posts her homemade manga on her own website just for kicks and giggles. After all, being a responsible, mature wife and mother doesn’t mean you have to quit your hobbies, right?

The obvious gag to build this series around is, of course, the contrast between our main character’s boring everyday life and the glimpses of the wild and wacky manga she draws, but not in the escapist/delusional way that our OTHER manga girl show handled it. More like we see the daily routine for the first two-thirds of an episode, then see how little random details from her day work their way into her manga. Like, when that one vegetable she gets at the store turns out to be moldy underneath, that just HAPPENS to be the day she decides the evil invading space monsters turn out to be carrying a wasting fungus that consumes everything it touches. Or when that one cashier is extremely incompetent, she just HAPPENS to draw the idiot security guard who gets decapitated by the rampaging killer super-soldier to look suspiciously like the guy. Stuff like that.

Oh, and that’s the other running gag: despite Manga Mom looking as sweet and wholesome throughout the day, her manga style is very much the old-fashioned, pulpy, hyper-violent, scifi stuff of the late 80s/early 90s. None of this moe girl crap or isekai fantasy junk for THIS lady, thank you very much! She loves huge mechas with giant shoulders and a million, billion tubes and wires connecting everything blowing up cyberpunk dystopian cityscapes and fighting against evil aliens with blue skin, LIKE GOD INTENDED. But yeah, that dichotomy seems like it’d be good for a lot of laughs.

And there’s other ways we could combine the Mom/Otaku dichotomy for gags. Maybe she’s got teenage daughters who think Mom’s geeky hobbies are just, like, the MOST embarrassing thing in the world. Like, she picks up one daughter from an afterschool club where one of the teachers is an old friend from the doujin days, and they talk for about a minute about some show, but then daughter one re-tells the encounter to daughter two and it turns into this hour-long cringefest rant that they’re both mortified about. Classic generational gap comedy, ya know? Conversely, maybe the family’s youngest kid actually wants to follow in Mom’s footsteps as an artist, and she’s a bit conflicted about it? Like, she doesn’t regret any of her OWN life choices, but she doesn’t necessarily want to wish that upon any of her kids, ya know? It wouldn’t exactly be high drama (preferably said kid would be too young for any of this to matter either way) but just that extra little bit of poignant content to balance out all the comfort food comedy.

And speaking of comfort food, that brings us back to the soundtrack. Wile it would probably be murder on an actual anime’s budget, I think it’d be great if a show like this used a lot of real, licensed music used diegetically. That is, Manga Mom listens to mixtapes of old City Pop songs because that’s what she listened to while growing up, and what she listens to is what WE listen two watching the show. Maybe the show could cheat a bit and commission vintage-sounding throwback songs by modern artists (that seems especially likely for whatever the opening song would be), but either way I think that kind of in-universe musical backdrop would fit a show like this very well. On the surface level, it’d set the tone of a calm little suburban universe, and on a subtextual level it’d illustrate how our main character exists in her own little bubble, out of step with the rest of modern trends. In fact, it just now occurs to me that, if she’s got teenage kids NOW, then late 70s/early 80s music would have ALREADY been a bit out of fashion when she was a kid. Like, maybe she inherited a music collection from an older sibling who thought it was all lame, but even at that early age she didn’t care what anybody thought was or wasn’t cool. And there’s nothing wrong with that, ya know?

Oh, and before anybody asks: Yes. I totally gave her the stereotypical “anime mom” hair on purpose. If fact, in universe, I bet this lady specifically started doing her hair like that the second it became a meme, just as a little private in-joke.

…and that’s it! Ten songs I wish were anime themes, and ten imaginary anime that could use them! So, now what? Well… ANOTHER Ten Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes, of course! This was way too much fun not to do again! No, but seriously, I’ve got a few other blog ideas in the works to serve as pallet cleaners, and even when I DO inevitably kick off another series like this, I’ve got a few twists on the formula that I’m just itching to try…