Nakama Britannica

Since this is my first post on this brand spanking new blog I decided to cover an issue that I had completely forgotten about until a few days ago. As I was roaring along the road running over various species of wildlife and pensioners one of Gwen Stefani’s records came on the radio. As you may or may not know Gwen in her recent years has taken a great shine to Japanese pop culture. Funnily enough this 3 minute spat of pop music got me thinking to more pressing matters, the state of anime soundtracks and their past.

When I got home I had a gander over my soundtracks through the years and there’s one thing I noticed that has changed. Back in the early 90’s you would be hard pressed to not find a soundtrack that didn’t have some sort of English translation. Carrying onto the late 90’s there was a mix of both original Japanese music and English translations. If a show was deemed popular enough the songs would be re-dubbed along.

But now we are almost in the 2010’s and things are changing.

Now if you’re sitting there and thinking that nothing has changed then let me show you some examples. The easiest ones that come to mind (you may have your own, please let me know) are Tenchi Muyo and Dragon Ball Z. Through the early 90’s both soundtracks for these shows and movies were sung by English speaking artists for their respective dubs and were included in the shows at one point. They were released into the American market and things were all fine and dandy.

Move onto 1998 and Cowboy Bebop was released. This soundtrack is considered by some as the best in any Anime. It’s also a fine blues track in its own entity. Now the most important thing about the songs released by Cowboy Bebop was the mix of both English and Japanese lyrics.

Now taking a look at current day Anime soundtracks. One of the biggest phenomenon’s of 2006 was the release of Hare Hare Yukai from T.M.O.H.S The catchy ending song from this uber popular show engulfed Anime fandom like a wild forest fire. The soundtrack was released with the dubbed R1 box set, completely untouched from its original format.

So if we look at things in the bigger picture we can see that the soundtracks and their translations have changed over time. There are a number of theories and thoughts behind this and I share sentiment with a few of them. For one you could say that Japanese pop culture, along with Anime, has become more mainstream and accepted than it was back in the early 90’s. People are now more open to foreign music sighting less need for change.

You could also argue the fact that the overall quality of the Anime soundtrack has increased over the years. That still doesn’t mean all soundtracks are great. Every time I hear a song from Naruto I want to kick puppies. But the really good pieces of Anime music are on the level of pop songs and are taking over the charts in Japan.

But there’s also the fact that other artists from various countries are also being brought in to do their piece for shows. One example that comes to my mind is Ergo Proxy. The theme tunes from this particular show were done in English by Monoral and the infamous Radio Head. Now obviously there are plenty shows out there with various soundtracks and these are not the be all and end all. These are only examples that spring to my mind when writing this.

But the music to Anime has changed over the last decade or so. You can think of your own reasons but I would personally put it down to the quality of songs going up along with the demand for Japanese pop culture. Hence why Miss Stefani got me thinking about this article. I don’t think the music translation has died out completely; the chance for cover songs is still there. But with companies trying to save as much costs in production as they can and fans willing and able to buy the first product anyway. It begs the question to the creators, is there really a demand out there anymore?

But with fans craving more original music and the song writers themselves doing songs in English, I wouldn’t put money on translations being around much longer. Over the years to come I think the trend will continue. We will see a variety of different genres using both full English and Japanese tracks, all mixed into one big shiny album for you to buy.