Conventional Wisdom: My First Japanese CDs - Clicked Singles Best 13 by L'Arc-en-Ciel

Oh man, remember when L’Arc was, like, the biggest thing in the history of ever? Not that they aren’t a big deal now or anything, but MAN I was getting hit with stuff about them from every single direction back when I was first learning about Japanese music. Fullmetal Alchemist was blowing up everywhere, and “READY STEADY GO” was getting constant TV exposure as a result, gaining them listeners well beyond the previously established boundaries of J-Rock fandom. With that in mind, after having spent most of an entire Animazement budget on Cowboy Bebop albums, my next loss of inflated dealer’s room dollars went to L’arc-en-Ciel’s greatest hits album. I wanted to finally see what all the fuss was about… sort of.

Actually, I have another embarrassing newbie error to confess here, one that follows nicely from the whole “Real Folk Blues” story.  Honestly, I only REALLY wanted to get that one song I knew from Fullmetal Alchemist, and just naturally assumed their best-known song so far would be on the greatest hits collection. You know, the collection that was released three years before the song in question was even recorded. It’s not that I DIDN’T want to sample the rest of the L’Arc library, I just wouldn’t have sprung for it if I didn’t think “READY STEADY GO” would be included in the deal. Funny side-story: I actually have vague memories of seeing Clicked on display at some vendor’s tables with a handwritten note saying “WARNING: does not contain Ready Steady Go” stuck to the front. I’d say it was a shame that warning wasn’t on the copy I bought, but even without a sticker, the album has a track listing plainly visible on the back, so I still shoulda known better. I’ve got nobody to blame but myself for the subsequent annoyance. As a result, Clicked represents a sort of false start for my Japanese record-buying experience. Technically, this was the first album I bought that wasn’t an anime soundtrack, but that sure wasn’t my intention. I THOUGHT I was buying the Fullmetal Alchemist song and getting twelve bonus tracks in the deal, so I’m reserving the non-soundtrack milestone for something else. Besides, “Blurry Eyes” was technically the theme to some OVA in the 90s, right? And wasn't another an opening for GTO? So technically it IS still an anime soundtrack album, sort of! Kinda! Just barely!

Anyway, now comes the part where I have to risk incurring the wrath of J-Rock fangirls by saying I wasn’t all that impressed by anything on Clicked. I didn’t HATE any of it, my initial reaction could very well have been sour grapes over not getting the one song I actually wanted, but this also just wasn’t a kind of music I was terribly interested in. If those Cowboy Bebop soundtracks demonstrated how unimaginably vast the potentials of Japanese music were, Clicked was proof that even the magical mystical otaku-land of Japan had its boring, conventional, mainstream side. Of course, nowdays, I know realize that “conventional” and “mainstream” are pretty laughable conclusion to draw about L’Arc-en-Ciel, of all things. I mean, yeah, it’s an absolutely true fact in GENERAL, but if idiot weeb me thought that L’Arc was as depressingly middle-of-the-road as Japanese media could get, there were a LOT of disappointments in my future.

I still listened to Clicked an awful lot afterwards, though, simply because it was one of the only Japanese albums I owned, dang it! Again, nothing on this album was actually BAD, and if any of it actually had been on the soundtrack of any show I had a preexisting emotional attachment to (and yes, I know some of these WERE on soundtracks, just not stuff I’d seen), that attachment probably would have rubbed off onto the music just fine. I know that for a fact, because listening to this album again for the first time in years was an AMAZINGLY nostalgic experience. I may not have had any emotional attachment to these songs back at the time when I was first hearing them, but NOW I have tremendous warm fuzzies for that time. Those were the DAYS, man, back before I knew better. This was exactly the sort of revelatory experience I’d HOPED this whole blog project would provoke, but kinda doubted would actually happen. Nostalgia is fun!

Having said that, I am kind of struggling to find stuff to SAY about most of these songs, at least to the extent that I did about the Bebop albums. I’m having more fun reliving my memories of going to Suncoast and buying a brand new copy of Newtype USA and working on my Geocities Digimon site and writing terrible fanfics all while listening to this CD than specifically reflecting on the songs themselves. Even more that the Bebop albums, Clicked was a CD I’d bust out when I wanted to feel like a REAL otaku. This was the soundtrack to talking about Toonami on a bulletin board or reading Shonen Jump while wearing one of those floppy character-head hats or some other weeb crap like that. Just the fact that it sounded so Japanese-y and different from everything else I could get my hands on felt cool in a way that was totally removed from the quality of the actual music. Thus, I have way more memories of what I was doing when I originally heard these songs than I have thoughts about the songs themselves. And that holds true even as I re-listen to them today.

Still, I gotta say SOMETHING, right? Well, “Blurry Eyes” does still get stuck in my head fairly easily. Like, I listened to the whole CD and wrote the first draft of this blog a WHILE ago, and I think “Blurry Eyes” has randomly appeared in my head at least once every two or three days since.  Also, “HEAVEN’S DRIVE” is a lot of fun with its sudden horn-driven chorus, and it does occasionally appear in my mental tracklist without warning as well. But the rest… Look, “flower” and “Lies and Truth” and “winter fall” are perfectly good songs and all, but I’d almost certainly struggle to tell them apart without a track list to cheat off of. It isn’t that they all sound the same, because they don’t, it’s just that none of them really grab me. Again, if I was introduced to these songs one at a time or if my initial impression was attached to some other media, I’d probably have an easier time remembering them as unique entities. As it is, little fragments of “NEO UNIVERSE” or “HONEY” may float around in my memory after the listening experience is over, but not the songs as a whole. If I absolutely had to choose, I suppose I prefer the earlier tracks for leaning a bit more towards straight Rock than the traces of electronic/dance/whatever that start to pop up in the later tracks. Again, “Blurry Eyes” wormed it’s way into a VERY deep corner of my brain. Even then, though, the production on those songs is VERY thin and tinny in ways that don’t exactly scream “Rock & Roll” to me. If you’re already conditioned by years of anime soundtracks and approach the songs from that perspective, though, it’s not that distracting. And, again, my whole impression of these songs is more as an extension of my early anime fandom than as a stand-alone listening experience.

Okay, I WILL confess to having no love for the one “new” track “Anemone.” It’s still not exactly bad, but it’s also a rather formless, hookless glob of production tricks that wasn’t a very good last note to end the album on. It kind of sounds like the “other” song that plays over some big blockbuster’s credits. Like, not the one that starts during the final scene and plays over the stars’ names, but the one AFTER that song. The one that plays while the Grip and Best Boy and Assistant to Mr. So & So are scrolling past, when most of the audience is already heading to the bathroom. And speaking of formless, I do also have a bone to pick with “Pieces,” sort of a Mobius strip of a song. Like, it somehow seems to be in a constant state of building up without ever actually resolving, to the point that I can’t tell how far into the song I even am without looking at the clock. I dunno, maybe that’s the whole point, but it’s a bit maddening to listen to the thing for over five minutes and never really feel like it properly “finished.” Somebody who knows more about music theory could probably explain what’s bugging me better than I can myself, but those are my only egregious complains. Otherwise, L’Arc-en-Ciel are a perfectly competent band with a perfectly solid greatest hits collection. I couldn’t really get into it at the time, and even now I enjoy it for reasons largely unrelated to the quality of the music itself. (but hey, whole generations of J-Rock fangirls have taught me that’s just fine) I don't regret revisiting the sounds of my nerdy youth, but I haven’t gone back to RE-revisit any of it since I wrote the first draft of the blog. That’s despite re-listening to multiple Cowboy Bebop tracks just for fun after finishing THOSE blogs. Heck, I’m listening to a Carpenters song as I post this, THAT’S how much of a burning desire I have to listen to more L’Arc at the moment. I wouldn’t groan if somebody else started playing it in earshot, and I’m sure “Blurry Eyes” will suddenly be stuck in my head again when I try to fall asleep tonight, but aside from a deliberate dive into nostalgia, I don’t really have any use for Clicked. If all this feels like an underwhelming conclusion, well, be sure to come back for the NEXT blog. You’d better believe I’ve got some WAAAAY stronger feelings to impart on that one…