I've been a fan of Japanese popular music for 40 years, and have managed to collect a lot of material during that time. So I decided I wanted to talk about Showa Era music with like-minded fans. My particular era is the 70s and 80s (thus the "kayo kyoku"). The plus part includes a number of songs and artists from the last 30 years and also the early kayo. So, let's talk about New Music, aidoru, City Pop and enka.
Credits
I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.
Sheepishly, I still have to admit that I have yet to watch the original anime "Cowboy Bebop" which has been compared to pure art, especially with all of that music connected to it such as the iconic "Tank!". And I'm also a jazz fan, so I should have already dove into the series but I guess I'm still the guy outside looking in.
Maybe I ought to head over to a lonesome alley bar at night and drown my sorrows for a while, although I'm unsure what the reaction would be there if I made a request for a Brown Cow. Hey, I'd still take the chance if the watering hole had music that I've just heard above. It's a beautiful jazz blues piece by producer Yoko Kanno's（菅野よう子）Seatbelts that adorned part of Episode 12 titled "Jupiter Jazz (Part 1)" when it was first broadcast in 1999.
The short piece would ultimately find its way to the June 2001 mini-album"Cowgirl Ed" where it started things off. "Goodnight Julia" refers to an old flame of Spike who pays a price for her sporadic contacts with him, and whether or not Spike did survive the final battle, I could imagine him slinking into a down-and-out bar to drink himself into a bottle while this song is playing. It's a wistful number that would be welcome on any soundtrack for an old fashioned film noir. Y'know, I think that I really ought to try a scotch with his one.
My, my, Mai, Mai...this has been quite the Mai start for "Kayo Kyoku Plus" today. Just finished an article for Mai Kuraki's（倉木麻衣）"Secret of my heart", an anison for the "Meitantei Conan"（名探偵コナン）series, and now I'm going ahead with a more down-and-dirty tune by Mai Yamane（山根麻衣）for "Cowboy Be-Bop".
In terms of the singer, I'm approaching Yamane in that countervailing way that I've gotten into Japanese popular music. A lot of fans have become J-Pop fans through anison being their front door and then branching into the other genres and singers including the singer in this article. For me, although I had heard of Yamane's contributions to the legendary "Cowboy Be-Bop", I only started getting into this singer through her very early City Pop tunes in the 1980s such as "Tasogare"（たそがれ）, and then I made the inroads into her rock-and-anime area.
So I have arrived at "The Real Folk Blues" which is really a jazz-rock extravaganza with Yamane behind the mike and The Seatbelts as the band. And man, with all of the attention on that opening theme, "Tank!", I've realized that the ending theme is no shrinking violet by any means.
Mentioning about that jazz-rock arrangement, I couldn't really say that "The Real Folk Blues" is a typical fusion tune. I think that the creation by lyricist Yuuho Iwasato（岩里祐穂）and composer Yoko Kanno（菅野よう子）is something that belongs in that category of film noir-spy caper-Neo-Western music. It has that smoky bourbon blend of sexiness, danger and lone-wolf sense of justice. Plus, the lyrics by Iwasato seem to describe something like a final scene from a Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall noir movie: "Sorry, dollface. Would love to be with you but a palooka like me ain't much for settlin' down. Gotta keep movin'". Heck, "The Real Folk Blues" would be something that I would have heard in a 1970s James Bond flick but with the far more intimidating Daniel Craig bringing the hammer down in the opening credits.
Yamane's honey voice and those horns are just perfect for the cool tone. And I gotta say that the coda that seems to describe Bogie walking off into the distance is amazing with the music keeping that main theme but taking on that underlying rhythm of an uncertain future. Y'know...with "Tank!" and "The Real Folk Blues", "Cowboy Be-Bop" may have been an anime with one of the most killer anison theme batteries in history.
As I may have intimated in some of the other articles on anime theme songs, my interest in anime was revived only within the last few years...basically after I actually returned from Japan. All those 17 years I was living and working in the Kanto area, I really didn't touch the genre at all...except for viewings of "Chibi Maruko-chan" and "Sazae-san" on Sunday nights. The overarching reason is that I simply didn't have time. Being an English conversation teacher meant that I needed a full night's sleep and that didn't chime in with the scheduling of a lot of the good stuff which was in the really wee hours of the morning. Plus, my anime buddy told me that it was easier to be an anime fan outside of Japan rather than within the originating nation itself. Apparently, it still isn't too cool to be too public about being an anime fan despite all the festivals and the stores in Akihabara and Ikebukuro.
However, what I hadn't been aware of when I was a resident in Japan was that theme songs and excerpts of anime soundtracks were and are being used all the time to be provided as background music for variety shows or news program segments. In fact, just today on NHK's "Asaichi" morning show, the producers used an excerpt from the stage musical-worthy soundtrack of "Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii"（それでも世界は美しい...The World Is Still Beautiful）, an anime that I had seen last year, as the BGM for the introduction of a venerable actress.
There was also another excerpt that I heard fairly frequently when I was watching the news and variety shows. It was a snazzy Big Band piece with some really tight horns that livened up any feature about heading out into some especially tony Tokyo neighbourhood or just any segment that needed something spicy and exciting. I didn't know anything about it except for the fact that it was cool-sounding, and it was only when I was back here in Toronto that I found out the piece was the theme song for the much-acclaimed anime "Cowboy Be-Bop", "Tank!". Another anime enthusiast and friend who used to come up to the apartment in Ichikawa from the wilds of Mie Prefecture for a visit used to tell me about this particular show, but aside from the title, I never cottoned on to it.
The above video contains the opening credits for "Cowboy Be-Bop" which first came out in 1998, and after having taking a look at it for the first time last night, I gotta say that those are some of the slickest opening credits I've ever seen for an anime. Now I know where "Space Dandy" got its inspiration. "Tank!" and the credits just seemed to have come out from an imagination fed on reruns of "Peter Gunn", the original "The Thomas Crown Affair" and any other ring-a-ding-ding spy caper from the 1960s.Henry Mancini would see this and smile sagely.
"Tank!" was created by composer and musician Yoko Kanno（菅野よう子）, a name that I've seen a lot on various credits for other anime. and I had known she was involved with "Cowboy Be-Bop". She was also helping out with the spiritual descendant of the show, "Space Dandy", (including the arrangement of the ending theme, "X-Jigen e Yokoso") and was also behind the composition of the ballad in dedication of the recovery from the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake for NHK, "Hana wa Saku"（花は咲く...Flowers Will Bloom）.
Kanno was also behind the formation of The Seatbelts, the ensemble responsible for the blast radius of jazz that makes up "Tank!". According to the Wikipedia write-up on the band through a fictional description in "Cowboy Be-Bop", the name supposedly "...derives from how the performers wear seatbelts to be safe while they play hardcore jam sessions." I think that could also be applied to the audience members.
All those years ago, I had thought that the song came from some sort of 60s caper flick...the sort which contained lines like "Headin' out on a heist, Johnny?" and scenes with plenty of dollars and dames surrounding Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Instead, it's from an anime near the end of the century. Who'da thunk?
When credits as iconic as those for "Cowboy Be-Bop" come along, I guess it's pretty much inevitable that parodies will arise. I was taking a look at the Internet meme database "Know Your Meme" and discovered those opening credits but with characters from another popular anime. It's really well done and I had a nice laugh, too.
I have already mentioned the legendary composer's name once, so I will finish things off here with Henry Mancini's version of "Sing, Sing, Sing". The famous swing piece created by Louis Prima and popularized by Benny Goodman used to be the go-to song in trailers for movies taking place in The Jazz Age, but Mancini's take was the very first version I got to know through my Dad's collection of standards. And when I listened to "Tank!", I was instantly reminded of "Sing, Sing, Sing". The latter may not be as constantly over-the-top as the former, at least not until the last several seconds, but I wouldn't mind calling Mancini's "Sing, Sing, Sing" a proud ancestor of one of the coolest anison I've heard.
