10 Songs I Wish Were Anime Themes - part 3

Okay, it’s taken me waaaaay longer that it should have for me to realize, if I’m gonna charge money for these music blogs, I probably shouldn’t go giving away what the songs are in the blog title that everyone can see for free. I don’t see a way to get Patreon to embed a video into the body of the blog, so I still gotta put the video up top, but hopefully I can avoid giving the song away before you paying customers get to read the thing. Whoops.

“Do You Believe In Magic” – Cymbals

Anyway, this one brings us back to potential Opening Themes again, as well as another band that really deserves to have been better known than they were: Cymbals.

Cymbals were a latter day product of Shibuya-kei, a style I also really wish was more of a thing today. In some ways, Shibuya-kei could be seen as a precursor to all the permutations of Vaporwave we’ve had over the past decade, even if they don’t actually sound all that similar. An early exercise in plunderphonics, Shibuya-kei as a musical style was built around samples from obscure thirty-year-old records, namely 60s Pop, Bossa Nova, and French Ye-Ye music. This obsession with recontextualizing fragments of kitchy, retro music was complimented by an art style and fashion sense similarly inspired by the idealized jet set aesthetic of the mid-sixties. Oh hey, where else have I seen that word “aesthetic” recently? Again, your typical Shibuya-kei song is a million times more bouncy and energetic than any Vaporwave song, sounding more like the soundtrack to a quirky European comedy than a dying VHS tape. Still, both styles are warped, ironic revivals of colorful, commercialized, consumerist eras the creators probably weren’t even alive to see. That’s gotta count for something. Artists like Cornelius and Pizzicato Five made some decent commercial waves with the style, but it was already starting to fade by the time Cymbals arrived on the scene, and they never really managed to make a serious impact at home or abroad.

Oh, by the way, while I brought up the heavy use of vintage samples as being important to Shibuya-kei, Cymbals were an example of later artists going through the trouble of actually writing and recording everything themselves. Cymbals music still sounds like something between an amped up Burt Bacharach song and a rock cover of a Mario Kart soundtrack, but this time they didn’t have to split the royalties with anybody. Or at least they wouldn’t have had to if they’d ever really had a hit. Honestly, it’s kind of weird that Cymbals never broke through commercially, even if Shibuya-kei was fading from relevance at the time. Guitarist Reiji Okii went on to some serious success as a writer/producer for other artists, and vocalist Asako Toki became a pretty big name in the revival of City Pop, so I guess they were as much ahead of their time as they were too late.

But I need to talk about the specific song at SOME point, don’t I? So here we go, “Do You Believe In Magic.” First of all, for anyone reading this without playing the video first: No. This is NOT a cover of The Lovin’ Spoonful song (or the Nektar song if you prefer the deep cuts). As much as Shibuya-kei acts raided the sixties for ideas, Cymbals didn’t rip of John Sebastian here. Rather, “Do You Believe In Magic” is an original mix of indie rock instrumentation with lounge music chord changes and some truly hyperactive drumming courtesy of Hiroyasu Yano, all with Toki’s cooing vocal on top. It’s catchy enough that it absolutely should have been a hit, regardless of whether or not it was fashionable at the time of release. If you HAVE listened to this slice of high-caffeine elevator music, then I’m sure you’ll agree with me that something so sugary and sunny is the perfect opening theme to a frothy girl’s anime. About what, you may ask? Well, it’s right there in the title: Magic!

Now, the obvious thing would be a straightforward magical girl show. Ya know, the standard “teen girl is granted the power by a cute mascot from a magical kingdom to transform into a colorful costume and use shiny toys to banish evil monsters” deal. It’s certainly bouncy and cheerful enough to be the lead song for a sparkly, glittery magical girl show, but… well, that’s a little TOO obvious. Let’s get a bit more creative here, which I know can be asking a lot of the anime industry at times, but still. There’s just something about that title, the fact that it’s a question. “DO You Believe In Magic?” Let’s imagine that this song isn’t opening for a conventional magical girl adventure, but rather a comedy. How about a show where our heroine is sent from the magical land of wherever to go to school in the human world for “because we need a plot” reasons, and she’s horrified by how boring a world without magic is. She becomes obsessed with showing off her powers to her friends and teaching everybody about magic… but nobody believes her. There’s all kinds of ways to run that gag into the ground. Maybe magic doesn’t work as well here. Maybe she’s really BAD at magic and it only ends up working when nobody’s looking. Maybe she sucks SO bad that when she actually does use it in front of people, it just looks like a normal trick that can be rationalized away. Maybe she occasionally DOES pull of crazy magic in front of everyone, but some kind of plot twist inevitably erases everybody’s memory, because this definitely feels like the kind of anime that would fiercely enforce the status quo. The point is, “Do You Believe In Magic” feels like the theme to a zany comedy, one with an intro full of quick cuts and colorful slapsticky moment of our protagonist getting into hilarious situations.

The verses of “Do You Believe In Magic” have a very herky-jerky start-stop feel to them, with the band cutting out while the lead vocals are up front and vice versa. All these distinct musical phrases really lend themselves quite nicely to rapid-fire scene transitions, which in turn lends itself nicely to a montage of our main character trying and failing to impress people. Like, we have a shot of the main character doing some really unimpressive trick, cutting quickly to everybody walking off as she tries to get their attention back, and then just as quickly cut to the next vignette in time with the music. Also, the whole Shibuya-kei retro 60s vibe of “Do You Believe In Magic” makes me think that an OP with the song would get good mileage out of a blocky pop art Piet Mondrian style. The screen could be broken up into colored blocks, with each moment happening in a different block. Say, our heroine tries a trick in one block on the left side of the screen, which then collapses as a second block on the right appears and shows her audience walking away unimpressed. (and, obviously, the show’s credits would take up the empty spaces of the screen) Then, when the chorus hits, the blocky motif would give way to a full-screen sequence of the heroine flying around in the sky with her magic at full power, both to establish that she really DOES know magic and isn’t crazy or a liar. Hey, it certainly sounds more exciting than the actual  “Do You Believe In Magic” music video, which inexplicably goes out of its way to be as deliberately drab as possible. No WONDER people didn’t pay attention when this song was released. What about boring white guys in business suits having a meeting says “Listen to this pop song!” to anyone?

But even if we throw out all my armchair show-pitching, I still say “Do You Believe In Magic” has all the energy and catchiness and sparkly sheen t make a great anime theme. And not just that song, either, there’s LOTS of Cymbals songs that’d have made awesome themes. Check out “Highway Star, Speed Star” or “Gozen 8ji no Dassou Keikaku" or “What A Shiny Day.” Heck, how about “My Brave Face,” which I swear was actually the theme to a Mario Kart game and everybody just forgot about it. Yeah, this is another band I’d dearly love more people to rediscover, be it in anime theme form or anything else.