10 WESTERN Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes - part 4 (Patreon)

It’s funny, then, that “The Garage Band Revival” didn’t really have much of a unified image or sound. Just about all the bands that rode to fame in The White Stripes’ wake honestly didn’t resemble that group very much, let alone each other. The Black Keys certainly had a name that made them sound like The White Stripes’ other half (not to mention a similar guitar/drum duo line-up) but their Blues sound had a gritty authenticity that Jack White’s art school pretentiousness couldn’t touch. And the other groups only strayed farther and farther from any precedent The White Stripes has set. The Strokes were the second-biggest stars of the Garage Band wave, but they sounded more like a New Wave version of Television. The Vines were an unholy hybrid of Nirvana’s Grunge and Oasis’ Britrock.  The Caesars were what Smash Mouth would have turned into if they’d never written “All Star.” The Hives were what The Clash would have turned into if they’d ONLY written “Should I Stay Or Should I Go.” The Mooney Suzuki were what The Hives would have turned into if you replaced The Clash with The MC5. Jet was basically just The Mooney Suzuki with about a dozen extra levels of generational loss. About the only thing uniting all these bands was the fact that they weren’t Metal and weren’t Rap. Out of all the artists that drafted behind The White Stripes to some level of success, the only one that really, truly reminds me of that band’s “minimalism as a statement” mindset is The Raveonettes.

It’s funny, then, that “The Garage Band Revival” didn’t really have much of a unified image or sound. Just about all the bands that rode to fame in The White Stripes’ wake honestly didn’t resemble that group very much, let alone each other. The Black Keys certainly had a name that made them sound like The White Stripes’ other half (not to mention a similar guitar/drum duo line-up) but their Blues sound had a gritty authenticity that Jack White’s art school pretentiousness couldn’t touch. And the other groups only strayed farther and farther from any precident The White Stripes has set. The Strokes were the second-biggest stars of the Garage Band wave, but they sounded more like a New Wave version of Television. The Vines were an unholy hybrid of Nirvana’s Grunge and Oasis’ Britrock.  The Caesars were what Smash Mouth would have turned into if they’d never written “All Star.” The Hives were what The Clash would have turned into if they’d ONLY written “Should I Stay Or Should I Go.” The Mooney Suzuki were what The Hives would have turned into if you replaced The Clash with The MC5. Jet was basically just The Mooney Suzuki with about a dozen extra levels of generational loss. About the only thing uniting all these bands was the fact that they weren’t Metal and weren’t Rap. Out of all the artists that drafted behind The White Stripes to some level of success, the only one that really, truly reminds me of that band’s “minimalism as a statement” mindset is The Raveonettes.

The Raveonettes were also a boy/girl duo, also had a black/white/red color scheme, also clearly spent a LOT of time on their pop art aesthetic, and also made a big deal out of deliberately imposing creative restrictions upon themselves in the hopes of inspiring greater ingenuity. But where The White Stripes’ self-imposed limitations mostly consisted of not knowing any bass players, The Raveonettes were much more maddeningly specific: All of their songs would be written in the key of B-flat minor. No, seriously, that was a mission statement. Go look at their debut ep Whip It On, it’s right there on the cover. Yes, that means all the songs sound pretty similar to each other, and no, they couldn’t keep that gimmick up for long. As early as their follow-up Chain Gang of Love, they’d already expanded to the wild uncharted realms of writing songs in B-flat MAJOR. The mind boggles. But seriously, even with all this gimmickry in place, The Raveonettes didn’t sound that much like The White Stripes or any of the other Garage Band wave. Instead, their mix of twangy guitar reverb, piercing feedback, and that one drum beat from “Be My Baby” sounds more like an unholy crossbreed of Surf and Shoegaze and Phil Spector. In retrospect, it’s not all that surprising that this “scene” couldn’t hold itself together for longer than it did. Still, although The Raveonettes were a bit of a weird fluke amid a whole crop of weird flukes, and they got progressively less interesting with every release, I still really like their first couple of albums, and definitely think their debut single “Attack of the Ghost Riders” could make for a pretty darned good anime theme.

I mean, even the band themselves seem to have thought it was theme song material, seeing as how the music video is done up to look like the trailer to some 50s Biker/Horror drive-in flick that TOTALLY ISN’T BLATANTLY RIPPING OFF A MARVEL CHARACTER, GUYS. The point is, from the driving drum beat to the simple, pumping guitar licks to the adrenaline blast of feedback that more or less serves as the “chorus,” this is a song designed to get the listener all fired up. This is the song that plays right before something bad happens, but also something really cool. I think it’s the perfect weekly opening salvo of a show. So what kind of anime would that show be?

A racing anime? Well, it’s got “Riders” right there in the title. I know I’ve been waiting until after explaining the idea of the show to try and justify the song choice, but in this case I think it’s too obvious not to acknowledge right away.  This should could be about ghosts or those who ride ghosts or some form of an attack taking place, but SOME part of that title pretty much has to be a part of the series pitch. The song just repeats it too much for it not to have some kind of relevance in the actual show, It’d just sound weird otherwise.  But more importantly, this would be a DARK, GRITTY racing anime, because “Attack of the Ghost Riders” is a pretty dang dark and gritty song.

Look, my last few attempts to pitch relatively bright and friendly shows just ended with me being cranky and bitter, so let’s try this from the opposite direction. I’ll pitch a dirty, cynical, grimdark show and maybe my contrarian streak will make me react in the opposite direction. And if not, well, it’ll still mean I got an excuse to draw something REALLY different from my usual style. I still haven’t started the final version yet, so I might have to come back and amend this part if the picture turns out horrible, and if it turns out amazing I’ll probably come back and brag about it. Basically, if what I’m writing right now makes it into the final blog, then that means I think the picture turned out… average. (EDIT: Future Me just wants to comment that I actually had to work harder on making this look rough and sketchy than I do when I want the results to look clean)

But enough about that, let’s talk edgy, grimdark racing anime. It’s a post-apocalyptic (or at least post-society collapse) dystopian future with the usual anarchic wasteland broken up by a smattering of cities clinging to some semblance of order. They don’t really have the resources to keep the cities’ infrastructure running, and that’s before you factor in the inevitable evil rich ruling class who live large (or some semblance of it) on the backs of the laboring masses. This is all exemplified by the biggest sporting event of the future: big races on giant tracks using super-fast motorcycle-looking things with shields and weapons. There’d be some kind of technobabble explanation for how the weird science behind the futurecycles lasts longer than everything else, which is why they can keep the races going while so much else in society is falling apart, but it’d also mean that they don’t have the means of make NEW ones anymore. Thus, we’d have the wonderfully dystopian situation of the futurcycles being incredibly valuable and important to keep repaired, since if one fully breaks down it’s gone forever, but the drivers and pit crews are totally disposable since there’s always more desperate losers willing to take on a wildly dangerous job for a quick payday. And it’s definitely dangerous, not so much because of the weapons (which would mostly be flashy beam weapons and zappy stuff) but just from the sheer speed at which the futurecycles travel. Like, “snap your own neck if you turn too sharply” and “literally drive straight through a person” levels of speed. And there’s ALSO all the shady criminal types betting on races and the evil upper class who always want things their own way and all the regular people stabbing each other in the back for a chance to strike it rich through the races in one way or another and so forth. It’s bleak, bloody, nihilistic fun all around.

And right in the middle of it all, we have our… “hero” definitely isn’t the word, but our main character. A street urchin nobody with a nasty criminal past who also just happens to be a phenomenal futurcycle racer, thanks to both his single-minded determination and a superhuman ability to tune out pain. This not only allows him to excel on the track, since he can endure grueling numbers of laps without a break AND take the physical punishment of maneuvers that would cause others to black out, but it’s also really helpful in navigating the criminal intrigue and backstabbing drama outside the track. Actually, “navigate” isn’t the word either, ‘cos this guy’s whole deal would be that he just marches on ahead right through whatever’s in front of him. You know that soft-spoken, world weary, empty-eyed anime archetype that you’re increasingly likely to see the older the target audience of the show is? Our protagonist is that guy to the absolute extreme.

The basic formula of the show would be the standard “underdog longshot proves himself” story: some down on it’s luck team brings our guy in out of desperation and he does better than anyone expected, but half the fun would be watching him overcome the politicking and intimidation attempts behind the scenes by just completely no-selling all of it. Like, Mob Guy A wants Racer B to win instead of our guy, so he sends a bunch of thugs to beat him up (because, remember, the bikes themselves are too valuable to sabotage, but breaking the DRIVERS is no big deal) , but he’s so impossibly resistant to getting knocked down that the thugs get freaked out and run away. And our guy doesn’t even piece together that the thugs were trying to interfere with the race until somebody else points it out afterwards.  To him, it was Tuesday. That’s the kind of humor I’m talking about.

And if it sounds pretty boring of me to pitch a show where the main character deliberate under reacts to everything… yeah, I can definitely see that. The obvious retort would be that every episode would also have a futuristic race sequence to keep things exciting, but that’s only half of it. My OTHER response would be to say that the show wouldn’t really be “about” the main character at all. Rather, it’d be more like a series of short stories about an assortment of shady characters who each bring about their own downfall, which always just so happens to involve trying to take advantage of our main guy, and it all goes wrong because he won’t follow the plan. Like, here’s another potential plot. Introduce a girlfriend or our guy early on in the series, then a few episodes later Mob Guy B kidnaps her and threatens to kill her if he doesn’t throw a race. Except our guy just tells Mob Guy B to do whatever he wants and goes ahead and winds… at which point we find out that girlfriend was actually the one plotting this whole thing with Mob Guy B, and now they’re in a lot of trouble ‘cos they’d already promised Mob Guys C through G a lot of money if they bet against our guy. That’s the formula here, bad things happening to bad people who totally have it coming, all because they tried to tangle with somebody who absolutely does not care. They don’t actually know what to do when somebody calls their bluff, or at least they don’t know what to do when that guy comes back afterwards. And in a world with so many OTHER shady characters just waiting for an opportunity to strike, a single slipup like this is pretty much an open invitation to disaster. So that’s what this show would be, a combination of futuristic scifi racing sequences and a series of pulpy exercises in noir cynicism.

And I cannot stress enough that this would be a VERY cynical show, it’d have to be for the set-up I just described to work. EVERYBODY’S got to have it coming in one way or another, there’s no such thing as an “innocent bystander” in this kind of setting. For example, a lot of times these competitive underdog type stories take on a populist bent, with the protagonist becoming a rallying point for the whole community of downtrodden have-nots against the evil elites. Screw that noise, this show would have the “normal people” be just as interested in taking advantage of our guy as anybody else. After all, most of the big scary mobster types would have started out as ”normal people” at some point, so they’d all have the same foibles.

Heck, let’s really have fun with this. You know what I said about the city where the show’s set being ruled by an evil rich upper class? You know how the obvious assumption is for Hero Guy to lead The People to depose The Bag Guys in a situation like this? Well, let’s say that’s already happened. Maybe the city/state where the show’s based had a big ol’ revolution to overthrow the corrupt government and chase out all the evil rich guys and restore equality and goodness to the land… and it was a total failure. Like, maybe they banned the race for a few years due to how barbaric it was, only to realize the hard way that it was the only thing bringing any kind of money into the city, so they had to bring it back. In fact, that’s be a good way to set up the series as a whole. Maybe anybody with any real talent moved out when racing was banned, and now all the teams trying to start back up are full of nobodies. Maybe our guy gets a job in the pit crew of an especially desperate team, and when their driver dies mid-race he just volunteers to take over and nobody cares enough to stop him. And from there… well, I was about to say “we’re off to the races” and didn’t even realize what I was doing.

I can still tell that this is the kind of pitch that would probably be a pretty hard sell, at least today. For one thing, gritty pulp scifi hasn’t exactly been much of a money maker in Japan since… well, since Cowboy Bebop underperformed domestically. But having just mentioned Bebop, I still feel like a show like this would have SOME kind of audience, even if it’d be a bit niche. I can also see objections that I haven’t made the central character sound very interesting or sympathetic… which I admittedly haven’t. This is gonna be one of those “you either agree of you don’t” things, but I just don’t care all that much about actually caring about the characters, just so long as the PLOT is interesting to me. This would definitely be the kind of series where the main selling point, aside from the futuristic racing sequences, is watching the plot points fall like dominoes, not any kind of investment in the characters. If that doesn’t work for you… well, there’s always next month.