My Music

One thing I didn't want to do when I started this blog was insert my private life into it – this was supposed to be a semi-professional one.

Meh. Screw that.

So now I'm going to talk about music – what I like and suggest.

First, I like background music. BGMs. I also like Japanese hero-type songs, usually in the Sci-fi genre. This isn't to say that I don't like Western music at all, but it's close. I don't know how I got started in it, but I've always liked my genre. (A Japanese show will virtually always have enough music in it to put out a soundtrack – American ones don't, at least not at first. Example: the Power Rangers first season soundtrack is a joke, but one fans might buy for the nostalgia. The Zyuranger soundtrack is symphonic and runs the gamut from “heroic” to “tragic”. It could be run in a movie with little rescoring.)

So I finally got around to watching all three Megazone 23 OVAs. The music was pretty good for the first one, okay for the second, and not so much for the third. In particular, I like ROCK CAFE, which is the first thing you hear when you watch the first one – it's a natural “chase” theme – but not just because it's good. It has another context for me. See, Megazone 23 was also included in Super Robot Wars D for the GBA – and if you know anything about the SRW series, this a joke turned serious. But because the game focuses so much on dodging, the Garland is a surprisingly good unit – good dodge (it's not going to get hit on the ground, even before upgrading), cheap upgrades (it does good damage against anything with fully upgraded weapons, despite its SS size...), a cool pilot graphic (anime-hair dude on a bike, with a 'hisshou' bandanna...), and space for four upgrade parts (it's the smallest human-operated transforming mecha – where the HELL does it have space for four parts?!). But the best part is, the Megazone 23 unit theme is ROCK CAFE – or a GBA version of it – and this works out very well. There's a sort of desperation there that you can really only find in, say, “Gen ga Tobu” (the standard Ideon theme in the SRW series, Alpha 3 most recently).

And that's the sort of music I like – something you can battle to.

Ever see Gaoranger vs. Super Sentai? It's on YouTube, I think. You will not find a better explanation of the Sentai series anywhere else. It's basically a clip show in movie form – they got a couple of really good actors to do guest appearances, and a couple other actors as well, all in their original roles – but where the movie really shines is its hot-blooded approach to showing off 25 years of Sentai. They chose their clips well, but the accompanying music draws from previous shows are chosen carefully, to great effect. Thus, you have “Ore no Heart wa Yume-jikake” (“My Heart is a Dream-work” – 'work' here being like from 'clock-work', so “My Heart Runs on Dreams” might be better) playing over the 'power/strength fighters sequence', where it works to great effect. Red Falcon (from Liveman) gets the 'violins and brass duel theme' for his teaching duel, and Banba Soukichi (coolest character in Sentai history by the estimation of most fans, being played by the great Miyauchi Hiroshi) gets “Spade Ace, the Young Lion” (not written for his character, but suiting him VERY well) – that he also gets to throw off a disguise and beat down two commander-class enemies, WITHOUT transforming, is a plus. But as a mecha fan, the best moment comes when, after the enemy boss grows to giant size, he defeats the Gaoranger robo. Oh noes that can't be good. But wait... what's that on the horizon. It appears to be – yes, yes it is. A mecha from every prior Sentai show (with a little intro from Miyauchi's two other roles in the series – it's a younger version of him flying one of the planes), to the music-only version of “Itsutsu no Kokoro de Fiverobo” (“Five Hearts in Fiverobo”, with 'de' here giving a 'to make' implication). It's a bunch of strung-together clips, but it works – makes one wonder how good a Super Sentai Robot Wars game would be, in fact. (My favorite one, here, is the Denzi Tiger's 'really big missiles' – the boss turns to his right, and there's a giant tank sitting there. It aims and fires two huge herkin' missiles at him. They go boom, in a way CGs can't replace or replicate.) But yeah, that's it. I also like to imagine what if other Sentai characters came back for the movie – like, one of the women. Momoranger would have some bombs ready (“Are you ready? Here I go!” *boom* *BOOM* - most understated phrase ever), the Ohranger and Changeman ladies would bring artillery (or not bother with small potatoes, and just bring in their mechas), Ninja White would throw some shurikens and transform into a paper crane (while making Naruto characters look like pansies – yes, ALL of them), Houou-ranger would simply blow up a couple of ki-whirlwinds, etc. And Heart Queen? Remember Magneto, from Marvel Comics? Like him, but a cyborg with a cool phrase. Also, all the Sentai ladies get to show their stuff to two songs: “Hanasaku Goggle Pink” (a slower song, with hanasaku here meaning “flowering”) or “Sexual Lady” (from Bioman – a faster, dynamic song) – fun stuff.

But really, I like the older ones. Clarification: I like brassy or orchestral pieces. If they have an appropriate singer (Kushida Akira, Mizuki Ichiro, Kageyama Hironobu...), even better, but an instrumental works just fine. The best characters don't need lyrics to introduce them, and this applies in all cases. Superman (probably the best example - “dun daDAA”), Batman (the opening for The Animated Series doesn't just set up the show, it introduces the whole mythology!), Rocky (Gonna Fly Now and Eye of the Tiger are quintessential training montage themes now, even without the lyrics), Robocop (no other refrain better introduces a reborn cyborg), Captain Jack (the American version of Banba Soukichi), The Doctor (if everything has gone to hell and you hear the theme, you start looking for a Police Box...), the Powerpuff Girls (Dun dun dadada daa dun...), John Shaft (Theme from Shaft is great background music for everything. EVERYTHING!), and so on. If a ship can be a character, then the Star Trek theme/refrain counts. But yeah. Spider-man, oddly, doesn't have a memorable theme – several SONGS, yes, but not really a theme. The movie had an excellent soundtrack, but could you really put it on the radio and get a bunch of correct guesses about it? (Robocop – Rock Shop, specifically – is old enough to have died out as a leitmotif, but memorable enough to remember as a theme in general. Your crap has hit the fan, and then – Rock Shop – you hear footsteps. Heavy footsteps. You recall killing a cop way back when. Oh crap he's back from the dead. You are thrown through a window as he reads you your rights. ...Were there that many rights? You want your lawy- ow. This is tortu- ow. No, no it isn't... ow ow ow. Okay, you did it. ...Help?)

But a song is nice, too. It's hard to listen to Stan Bush's “The Touch” without imagining a certain Matrix of Leadership, and this is what a Opening Theme is supposed to do – the length not totally mattering. “Seinfeld” opened with a scat-like theme a few degrees above a cold open, and it worked better than the “Friends” theme in some respects – hard to duplicate, easy to identify, original even 15 years after the fact, and much more unlikely to annoy. A well-written original theme, of course, is meaningless if it is too much like everything else at the time – it should be ahead of its time and durable. Example: The Transformers theme, which was such that there were some 3 variations of it during its original run (not exactly par for the course at the time, and something quite a few long-running anime shows do nowadays), but beyond that is short and to the point. You know the show will involve robots and transforming (and likely Frank “voice o' God in the '80s” Welker *cough *).

But a show where an incidental piece works better than an OP Theme? How about... Big O. As a show, it looks like Batman with Giant Robots, with the sort of overarching mysteries that have only been emulated by the first few seasons of X-Files and Life over here. There actually were two OPs, one for each season. The first famously sounds like Queen's “Flash” (“He'll save every one of us!”), and the second was edited over in favor of the first when the show came over here (it was originally a homage to the theme from Gerry Anderson' UFO...). But it isn't a terribly heroic theme, and doesn't work too well as a battle theme – doesn't work at all, in fact, and they wisely never used it – but like the Transformers theme, introduces a Giant Robot and calls it good. In this respect, it works. After listening to it, no one will walk away thinking they heard the theme song to a cutesy girl's anime (to which something like . Instead, they came up with a track called “Sure Promise” that rounds the bases – perfect for a sudden heroic entrance (Big O is delivered to the scene through an underground/subway system, and crashes up from the ground upon arrival) of epic proportions with nigh-indestructible armor, while also pulling a second duty as the “final attack” theme in the last episode (“Final Stage” - as appropriate an ultimate attack to Big O as the Goldion Hammer was to GaoGaiGar). When it plays, you know Roger's gonna win.

As for overall memorable music, GaoGaiGar takes the cake among mecha fans. A number of the pieces were full-orchestra sorts – or rather, there are some pieces of music that only sound right when played by a small group, say a quartet, and the exact opposite is true with certain GaoGaiGar BGMs. Namely, there are some pieces of music in GGG that wouldn't sound right until a sports arena's worth of musicians played them in unison – scale is another thing, then. An epic movie score, in the space of a half-hour show, makes all kinds of difference. Anything else for GGG's final attacks – well, example: GaoGaiGar makes an appearance in SRW Alpha 2 and 3. He has a final attack called “Goldion Hammer”, and the unfortunate problem is, the accompanying theme had to be rewritten for the game, so it pretty much sounded like a MIDI. While it was a good enough BGM to work without the scale, not having it made a difference, robs it of some of its effect. It renders the attack not sounding like something that, unchecked, could easily destroy a planet, and more like a handy attack to use on boss units.

So what was I talking about in the beginning? Oh. Music. Um... The Megazone 23 soundtrack is good. There.

I wonder if it's possible to cancel a holiday?

No, seriously. I know I'm not the first person to think this about X'mas, but to me it seems to bring out the worst in everyone - more so than any other holiday.

I live in Seattle, right? Fairly tech-y city with a port, not that this means much. I live a stone's throw from a mall, also – apparently not that far from the Penny Arcade office, either, if their posts are true – and consequently I get to hear sirens practically every day. (This is not so bothering – I came from a smaller town, but I lived in the U-District for a couple of years – and they are almost always fire trucks or ambulances.)

But I also work in the mall (or 'worked', depending on how things turn out). Working in retail is always fun the three or four days before X'mas, but my place of employment attracted a higher breed than, say, Nordstrom or JC Penny – usually. I went back for a pay stub yesterday, and the first thing I see is an irate customer telling first the Head Cashier, then the Manager, that he wants his money back – the shoe apparently not fitting. (I obviously walked in on the tail end of a conversation, and it wouldn't surprise me if the HC exasperated the situation somewhat – it nearly happened before.) So, they can't refund his money – something that can only be done with credit purchases – and would he like a gift card or store credit in its place? But no. This guy insists on getting his money back. “You have my card number in your computer! Look it up!” “What am I supposed to do with a credit! He's already gone back to college!” (by this point, I'm guessing why 'he' left so soon after X'mas – wish we could send 'him' the video, it'd get a few laughs in a frat) He'd gotten so worked up, that as he leaves and passes me, he spits out that I shouldn't buy anything from them (I get a discount, as long as I work there...) and that he'll never shop there again.

Sigh. I can't quite put into words just how far 'gone' this guy went; I'm just not that good a writer, and my memory is foggy besides. But in retrospect, there are a few things seriously wrong with his reasoning. First, if we can look up his card number so easily, what's to keep us from committing massive credit fraud? Second, gift cards (ours, at least) work online – and we have many things amusing things online that, for space reasons, we can't put up in the store. (Not to mention that, in a smaller college town, it's often easier to buy online – and if he went as far away as to make gift sending difficult, say Pullman, it's preferable.) Finally, the guy was trying to return a pair of 'shoes' that were more expensive than a pair of surprisingly comfortable slippers we sell – no trade, no store credit, not a whole lot of thought for the recipient, just 'gimme gimme gimme'.

Is this typical? I don't act like this – if I can only find one thing in a store, I don't bother – and it confuses me why someone would. So now I wonder if the dude was a Christian – and if so, to what extent. Agnostic? Bible in the house? Bible in the bedstand? Church, per wedding/funeral? Per 'every now and then'? Per month? Per week? Per X'mas? Or not at all?

Yeah, I know I have no readers, so I'm just asking the empty air. Or God, or Jesus (“What Would Jesus Blog” – heh). Cyberspace Jesus, fresh from being Sweet Zombie Jesus or Robot Jesus – no, I'm not trying to mock the dude, and I think he might chuckle besides. (I keep wondering if this is the difference between Christianity and Islam – Jesus can be treated quite a bit more lightly than The Prophet...) But I digress.

This all reminds me of that old argument: “Guns don't kill people, bullets/people kill people.” Wonderful. This would crack Spock up – have we seen a Spock “LOL” meme yet? – with its bizarre logic. So a dude with a bullet doesn't need a gun? Great! Let's take away the guns, save some metal for more meaningful projects, and see what happens. (Knives – the use of which leave far more identifiable traits and material at a crime scene – might take over in violent crime, or blunt trauma. The medical fees might go up or down...) Same thing with X'mas, I think. It's so much an excuse to spend and show that it ought to be separated from the celebration of the birth of Christ. No, correction: NEEDS to be. Call it X'mas (or maybe just 'Love Day').

...Now that I think about it, given that so much emphasis is placed on the DEATH of Christ (specifically, how he died), why isn't it just represented as t'mas, or T'mas? There are enough crucifixes brandished about anyway – why not? I also have an idea for a story: The Three Wise men are actually aliens from other planets, and couldn't make it in time for the original birth – they arrive NOW (cue Bill Murray's “Only a Carpathian...” lines) and are greatly mystified/annoyed by the modern world's take on a single birth.

But yeah, back to my original point. We should ban Christmas, as it is commonly understood, from being a public holiday. I hold enough respect for Christianity to say this, as much as some Christians will hold for my opposing viewpoint (when they find out), and banish me to their private (ie: subjective – where do the masochists go?) hells.

...Wow. I was sipping English Breakfast tea near the beginning, and I was on message. By now, I've moved onto Slim-Fast (not a meal replacement, but as healthy as anything else I eat nowadays), and you can tell. Maybe I do have ADD...

What the cat does...

So, I live with a cat now (moved in late September). And one of the things she's started doing is using the bath as a source of water – we run it a little so she can see it moving, since cats like drinking from moving water. This means that I sometimes have to pick her up and out when I need to crap, and she waits just outside the door while I finish my business. As I open the door, I am greeted with a “what the f**k do you do in there that takes so long, human?” look.

Ah, the pitfalls of living with a woman, and her cat named Princess.