10 WESTERN Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes - part 2 (Patreon)

Okay, this whole blog is gonna be full of qualifying statements and strained rationalizations and desperate attempts to justify some really half-baked concepts. More than usual, I mean. For one thing, I’ve gotta sell an audience of otaku on an example of Contemporary Christian Music. I know, believe me, I know. The two worst things any art form can do is (1) strain to be as unobjectionably palettable to the mass audience as possible and (2) have some moralizing point that it values over being artistically good, and Christian media doubles down on both these to a painful degree. Still, I do have to at least partially stick up for mid-to-late 90s CCM as being better than its own reputation suggests. At least, some of the time. Occasionally. Honestly, I could feel this way out of nostalgia, since that was basically the ONLY non-Oldies music I ever listened to as a kid. Or maybe it’s just because the scourge of Praise & Worship (songs literally designed to be so idiotically simple that people who didn’t know them at all could still sing along) would hit right afterwards and literally ANYTHING sounds better by comparison. Or maybe I was just spoiled by the fact that PFR were really, really good.

Granted, PFR (short for “Pray For Rain”) were of a similar mind to a lot of Christian artists in that they basically just repurposed other popular genres with a big heaping serving of Jesus mixed in, but Rock & Roll has always been full of artists blatantly ripping each other off. All I ask is that the rip off be well-done, and PFR were very, VERY good at refashioning existing musical trends for their own purposes. From Alternative to Indie to Power Pop to Grunge, PFR had an ability to hop across a dizzying spectrum of musical styles while still maintaining an impressive level of personal identity. It takes a special kind of craftsmanship to sound like ELO and Rush and The Police and REM all on the same record, and still come out the other side sounding like themselves. And for my money, “Anything” is their crowning achievement. A stellar fusion of jangly guitar strumming and soaring Beatles vocals, I unironically think “Anything” is one of the best songs to come out of the year 1996 (which, admittedly, is also the same year that gave us “The Macarna”). Handled wrong, this song could have come out sounding like any number of pleasant, mellow Alternative mid-tempo tunes, and that’s not to say “Anything” ISN’T pleasant or mellow. However, there’s juuuust enough uncommon chord arrangements in the chorus and odd syncopated rhythm behind the verses and quick precision strikes of phasing on the guitars to keep things quirkier than… oh, I dunno, your average Hootie & The Blowfish tune. The same pieces, put together differently, could have come out as forgettably straightforward as the theme of some old WB sitcom. As it stands, though, I think it’s got enough personality and good vibes and killer hooks to make a great closing anime theme. But for what?

And now comes the REAL challenge. This one is going to be a bit of a drag for me to write, and possibly for you to read as well. Not just because it’s a bit complicated, but because, thanks to a lack of foresight on my part, I’m pitching a second show in a row that’s not really “about” the thing its about.

The setup SOUNDS like a cosmic horror story. The universe is full of bigger, realer dimensions populated by massive eldritch beings beyond our very comprehension, and we’re normally too little and primitive for us to be noticed by them either. However, a tiny fraction of humans are able to perceive at least the faintest edges of what’s going on the rest of reality, and sometimes even interact with it a bit. Over the years, these people have been known as wizards, prophets, or lunatics; sometimes all at once. A small community of these people have gathered in a rundown apartment complex on the outskirts of a small industrial town in Japan, where… they just pretty much go about their lives. Yeah, the actual thrust of the show wouldn’t be saving the world or solving cosmic mysteries or fighting eldritch abominations or any of that. They wouldn’t be able to do that even if they understood their own powers well enough to try. Instead, this show would just be a calm little Slice of Life series about a community of outcast on the fringe of society scraping their way through life… a life that occasionally contains flashes of surreal dream logic and wacky stuff only they can see.

I usually try to avoid directly referencing the real shows that are informing my ideas for these blogs, but in this case I think I need to be a bit more transparent about the thought process, because I’m basically about to pitch a show I’d REALLY dislike actually watching. Recently, at anime night, we watched a really obscure show called Windy Tales. Full disclosure, I didn’t like it, largely thanks to the… “distinctive” art style, but also thanks to it not being about the thing it’s supposedly about. The set-up is that a group of highschool girls discover they have the power to control the wind, and stumble onto a whole community of folks with these powers. And then… nothing. The wind stuff only barely factors into most episodes of the show, instead focusing on really average Slice of Life stuff. The girls try to track down the person in a picture they found at the photography club, one of them tries out for an idol group despite not really wanting to, puppy love stuff happens… and then occasionally there’s a flying cat or dreams about being on the moon. It never actually goes anywhere or builds to anything, the set-up is just an excuse for some light and fluffy snapshots of school life.

Again, I didn’t enjoy Windy Tales, both because I don’t like the art and because I wanted to learn more about the supernatural elements instead of “let’s all go to the city and watch a movie!” random moments. To be clear, I'm not automatically against ALL Slice of Life shows, or even ones with traces of supernatural elements (heck, I've even pitched one before), it's specifically the bait and switch aspect that I dislike. But the thing is, everybody else in our group loved Windy Tales, and I realized I’ve actually encountered a number of works with this sort of tone. Ya know, more interested in dishing up emotional comfort food than actually telling a story, despite going through the motions of presenting one. Specifically, I feel like I’ve encountered a lot of properties for people who want to FEEL like they’re watching something quirky and artsy and experimental, but not so much that they actually want to feel uncomfortable or challenged by anything. So you’ll get these shows that tease some sort of trippy surreal setup, then spend most of their runtime on generic relationship soap operas or feel-good motivational tripe or some other really basic stuff. (Hey kids, remember Lost?) And when I sat down with “Anything” again to see what I could think of, my brain kept wandering back to Windy Tales, or something of a similar tone.

It wouldn’t LOOK similar, though. I tried to make the art in that picture look more like Paranoia Agent, which is a good example of a show that goes surreal in ways that I actually DO like. Ya know, willing to go dark and be scary and ultimately build to some kind of climax… though now that I think about it, episode 8 (“Happy Family Planing”) actually DOES strike the sort of atmosphere I’m talking about here. So just imagine a whole series of that, only without the whole suicide thing. Basically, a string of interconnected short films about a building full of foreigners and social outcasts going about their daily life, which just so happens to occasionally feature wildly hallucinogenic moments that don’t go anywhere. Honestly, I feel like my earlier paragraph describing exactly why these characters can see and do what they do probably would never actually happen in the show. No character would know enough to spell it all out, and even if any did, they probably wouldn’t care. This feels like the kind of show where the overall message would be “don’t think too hard about stuff, just relax and feel good.” I hate shows like that, but that doesn’t stop them from continuing to get made.  And hey, if the advent of YouTube lore channels has taught us anything, it's that a show like those doesn't even NEED to tell its own story! Just drop a few tantalizing hints, and the portion of the fanbase who really does want more than just comfort food will go through the trouble of filling in the blanks and writing your story FOR you! What could be easier? 

But there’s no way that’s enough for you, the patron reading this blog. I can’t just say “there’d be this show, and stuff would happen” and expect YOU do do the heavy lifting to flesh out the idea. I gotta actually give you an idea! Again, I can’t describe any broad story arcs, because this show wouldn’t have any. Instead, let’s talk about the weird vignettes that would be sprinkled throughout individual episodes. After all, if this WERE a real show, those bits of artsy strangeness would be the only parts I’d ever care about. I mentioned earlier that a number of the characters in this show would be foreigners, so there might be one young couple who barely speak Japanese at all. Some of the older housewives in the apartment might take the younger lady grocery shopping with them, prompting an episode full of them trying to translate everything for her despite not actually speaking her language themselves. Quirky misunderstanding, lighthearted awkwardness, and gentle humor all around… but also there’s an impossibly massive human foot in the sky today which only they can see and looks pretty weird at first but gets kind of scenic by sunset. Or maybe one character has a dream about an estranged childhood friend vomiting up a mountain of pills and then turning into a fish… which results in an episode of that character reconnecting with the friend in a nice relatable story that never mentioned what was up with the fish dream in the first place. Or maybe one character thinks the mascots on boxes of food are talking to her, despite nobody else being able to see it, and it turns out she isn’t even seeing the same mascots as everybody else is (“What do you MEAN this box of frozen chicken as a drawing of a chicken on it? It’s CLEARLY a man in a suit and tie with chicken legs where his eyes should be!”) Or maybe one boy can’t focus on his college entrance exams because he keeps having visions of a gang of hoodlums in bright red cowboy costumes doing martial arts in the parking lot of some supermarket (with all the signage in Hebrew, just for added trippiness) Or maybe there’s a vacation episode where everybody goes to a resort in the mountains… because a billboard told them too. And then a few days later, some faces formed by the branches of the trees tell them all it’s time to go back home, despite nobody knowing what they had to leave for in the first place. Wondering what the heck is up with any of that mess? Well, you and me both. I raided an old dream diary for most of that imagery, so I’m just as in the dark about what any of it means as you. And again, this show wouldn’t even try to explain any of it. It’d all just be the sprinkles on top of a pile of bland vignettes of oddballs being generally nice and supportive to each other. The ACTUAL important thing would be making sure that the viewer could say "Hey, I feel like an oddball too!" get a feeling of secondhand contentment from all the pandering while also pretending that they just watched something actually deep. Tumblr would absolutely eat crap like this up.

But the question then arises, why would a show like this use “Anything” as a theme? I mean, like I said before, it’s got the kind of relaxed, pleasant vibe that would fit the tone of the show well, but so do a lot of other songs. Why would a Japanese production want some 90s Christian band form the Midwest to do their ED? Well, my first inclination was to say it’d be because of the cast being full of foreigners and other weirdoes. Maybe some of the characters could be devout Christians, because what’s weirder than being part of one of those freaky foreign religions? Of course, the next question would be how Christian beliefs would even work in a universe where eldritch beings from other dimensions are constantly rubbing up against ours and making things weird. They totally wouldn’t, but that assumes that the people making this show would even KNOW anything about Christianity in the first place. Remember, this is Anime we’re talking about. All they’d have to do is throw some cross necklaces and Jesus paintings and Mary statues around and BINGO! Instant weird foreigner religion! But the thing is, I kind of used the whole “because foreigners” excuse in the previous blog, and I can’t resort to that for the WHOLE Western Songs series. Instead, let’s work with the lyrics. The big hook of the chorus is the line “It doesn’t mean anything without you” …which in keeping with the Christian Rock cliché, sounds like a generic romantic line if you don’t already know the song’s about Jesus. But in the context of a show like this, I could see the creators trying to interpret the line as being about the community of characters as a whole. The recurring theme throughout the show, far more than any of the actually INTERESTING bits, would be watching the characters help each other out and bond and form relationships with each other. And since our world is full of touchy feely idiots who get suckered in by “I’m okay. You’re okay. We’re okay.” crap, they’d probably think the song is really meaningful in that context. What’s more, the closing fade out kind of alters the lyric a bit, going out on a loop of “Anything… Doesn’t mean… Anything…” which could be repurposed as a sort of mission statement about the premise as a whole. Don’t get bent out of shape because none of that cosmic stuff gets explained, because it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just… stuff that happens. That’s life, right? Stuff just happens around you, and what matters is how many GIFable heartwarming moments you have with the people around you! Again, I disagree VERY strongly with this kind of storytelling, but people are total idiots, so a show relying on this slush would probably be insanely successful.

…geez, I talked myself into a pretty lousy mood on this one, didn’t I? Sorry about that. I can pretty much guarantee that the next one will be at least a BIT livelier, though. So stay tuned for that!