Conventional Wisdom: My First Japanese CDs - Cowboy Bebop OST 1

So I WAS going to cheat right off the bat here, and lump four CDs into a single massive blog post: the generically titled Cowboy Bebop, No Disk, Blue, and the Vitaminless single/EP/mini-album/whatever it is. That’s not even the whole of the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, of course, (hello Cowgirl Ed and the Box Set and the Knocking on Heaven’s Door soundtrack) but it’s what I bought in one big, expensive bundle at my very first Animazmement, so it’s where my collection of Japanese music began. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the early days (well, YEARS) of my anime fandom unfolded at a considerable distance from the actual object of my interest. Just getting access to actual anime itself was challenging enough, secondary ephemera like wall scrolls or t-shirts or figurines or soundtracks just plain didn’t exist outside of ads in the back of magazines. So when I finally wandered into a real anime convention and saw all this stuff just laid out in front of me, you’d better BELIEVE I blew nearly my entire weekend’s budget all at once on these exotic rarities. Since my initial impression of all these disks were formed at the same time, I had planned to talk about them all in one blast… then I actually sat down and started writing, and half way through disc one I realize I HAD to break these up if they were ever going to be digestible. So get ready for four separate blog posts on Cowboy Bebop music, which is going to be a bit awkward when I get to Vitaminless, but I guess that’s the price we pay for not getting a friggin’ BOOK of a blog post.

And also, we immediately have to acknowledge that, much like the show itself, the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack is honestly a TERRIBLE gateway into the broader world of Japanese music, what with how willfully detached it is from the trends of the day. It’s an old joke that anybody who gets introduced to Cowboy Bebop and asks for more anime just like it ends up disappointed, and it’s not like there’s a ton of soundtracks in this vein either. Then again, the wild and wacky world of Japanese music as a whole IS lot more wide open than the anime industry, so maybe a set of albums that careens wildly from big band jazz to quirky electro-pop to classical opera DOES set the tone for what’s to come fairly nicely.

That first album in the one that has opening theme “Tank!” on it, and is easily the most Jazz-heavy collection of the bunch, which immediately puts me at a disadvantage trying to talk about it. “Jazz” is one of those impossibly vast uber-genres with about a million different eras and styles and sub-genres that are all wildly different from each other. Cowboy Bebop dabbles in a lot of them over the course of its 50-something minutes, and I like some of them a lot more than others, but I’m really not equipped to just name a specific sub-genre and say “okay, this group of tracks are the ones I dislike” the way I would if this were a collection of Rock songs. Instead, I have to get really clunky and awkward and talk about stuff like “that thing where it’s like a whole orchestra but Jazz instead of classical, you know that thing? I guess it’s ‘Bebop’ because that’s what’s in the title, but I don’t actually know?” Because yeah, whatever you call that kind of Jazz, it’s the kind I DON’T like. Don’t get me wrong, “Tank!” is still a fantastic theme song, in fact most of the big band Jazz stuff here is still listenable just on the strength of Yoko Kanno’s melodies, but that whole giant, noisy, overpowering sound of tracks like “Rush” or “Too Good Too Bad” or “”Bad Dog No Biscuits” just doesn’t do it for me. I’m a much bigger fan of sparser, Film Noir-ish songs like “Cosmos” or “Memory” or the first half of “Space Lion.” I suppose there’s a gentle middle ground on “Car 24” and “Cat Blues,” though even those are a bit too busy for my tastes. Still, that’s not to say I HATE any of these songs, the deep nostalgia built into my impressions of both the show in general and the music specifically is WAY too strong for me to not get a massive wave of warm fuzzies every time I hear anything off of any of these albums. I just can’t imagine I’d have the same affection for these particular songs in any other context.

Of course, there’s also the “Cowboy” half of Cowboy Bebop present on acoustic guitar workouts like “Felt Tip Pen” or “Spokey Dokey” or the rather bizarre “Waltz for Zizi.” Honestly, even bringing up the word “cowboy” in this context is misleading, as this isn’t country music by anybody’s understanding of the term. The harmonica on “Digging My Potato” and the afore-mentioned “Spokey Dokey” adds some Blues to the mix, but for the most part the guitar songs are more the kind of thing you’d here at a some European café (hello there, “Piano Black”) than any cowboy movie. I mean, I can’t imagine a cowboy movie where you’d hear “The Egg and I,” no matter how hard that guitar solo in the middle tries to convince me otherwise. Overall, these tracks are the ones I find myself revisiting on a casual, everyday basis more often, along with the quieter Noir-ish Jazz tracks. It should go without saying, what with this being a soundtrack and all, but these songs make for fantastic background music. I’ve got a bunch of them on my various “drown out the world” traveling playlists, and it’s just the sort of thing where the abrasive big band songs just wouldn’t work

And then there’s the one vocal track on the album, “Rain.” This is probably the most stereotypically “anime” sounding song on the whole album, with its gothic choir organ and rawkin’ guitar solo and anguished hair metal vocals (incidentally, I greatly prefer Steve Conte’s vocals on the album version to Mai Yamane’s TV version). It’s also very well placed on the album, providing a big climactic crescendo near the end. And of course, it sounds great, all ominous and dramatic… as long as you don’t listen to the lyrics. Yeah, this is a bit of a running thing with the English songs throughout this soundtrack, but the words to “Rain” are pretty dang stupid. “If there is a Hell, I’m sure this is how it smells” is the sort of cringe-inducing line I’d normally say probably sounded a lot better to a non-English-speaker, except that Yoko Kanno didn’t write the words to this song, Tim Jensen did. What’s HIS excuse?

But all snark aside, I can’t think of Cowboy Bebop as anything other than special. It was the first of all these albums I listened to, obviously, so of course it’s the one I imprinted on most strongly. But even aside from that, the song choices and even the packaging ensure that this one stands out as a singular entity more than the others. No Disc and Blue feel more like soundtracks, extensions of a larger multimedia experience. They jump around from genre to genre so drastically that only the knowledge that it was all on the same show holds it all together. But this? This just feels like “The Cowboy Bebop Album.” As varied as the music contained within may be, it’s still thematically similar enough for it to make a cohesive listening experience without having to recall where it came from. And can I just say that I LOVE the packaging on this CD? From the retro Jazz album cover to the LP-looking disc art to the fake liner notes (“The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don’t take it seriously!”) it really is one of those things that makes you realize what we had to trade off for the convenience of MP3s.