when you've been to the top, everything else is down.

I've burnt out some albums. I've had that particular album on either burnt CDs or playlists since it came out.

It's something else altogether, as was the entire series.

It's why I have no interest or respect for any kind of revival remastering or reboot. What was made was in an instant will stand the test of time. It's like trying to improve upon Shakespeare or the Sistine Chapel. Laughable at best.

It is a powerful insult that the recipient most likely doesn’t comprehend the extent of.

The composer of the music in cowboy bebop, yoko kanno, is one of many in the ecosystem of Japanese commercial production who specializes in legally distinct versions of existing songs.

That’s not a value judgement, it’s just what that environment is like. Music needs to be fitted to the video, not the other way around and animation frames are wildly more expensive than live action video frames. You can make the sopranos intro fit the beats of Alabama 3 by leaving the overwhelming majority of the footage that was shot to make it on the cutting room floor. You don’t do that with animation because it’s absurdly expensive and every frame was made to lead into another one. Cutting without thinking about how many fps the sections you’re trying to join are would be incredibly jarring.

It’s also much cheaper to go with the relatively fixed cost of hiring a composer and band to make and perform the “original” songs than it is to negotiate with at least four different rights holders and then pay a percentage. Since animation is getting big distribution no matter what, there’s no benefit to the possibly low cost in dollars (or yen) of the residuals on a flop when you’re sending it out weekly to millions of homes.

Almost every song in cowboy bebop is a copy of an existing one with enough changed to dodge copyright. I hesitate to say all, because I can’t put originals to a few of em, but it would fit kannos M.O. and I believe that they’re all copies.

So it’s like someone listened to and internalized the musicality of pale imitations of music that fits into a much greater and broader context and has more breadth, depth and value, but refuses to engage with music beyond that.

It’s the equivalent of saying someone only listens to jingles. Jingles are interesting and there’s a real drought of recordings of em and information about em. More people should collect and catalog commercial music like that so it doesn’t just get thrown away, but if someone only listened to jingles their understanding and conception of music and people would be deeply warped.

It’s that old sci fi story of the aliens who received television and radio broadcasts without context and then came to earth expecting that world, but weebs did it to themselves.

Here’s the kicker: I like the music in cowboy bebop and I think kanno is incredibly talented. But that’s a brutal insult and to say anything else is just saying you shit your pants at recess too. Maybe it makes the first pants shitter feel better, but you gotta tighten up the ol’ turd cutter.