The Da Chaos Code: Yoko Kanno
Here’s a chaotic post totally in line with the Halloween, uh… “craze” sweeping the nation right now. For some reason I’ve had Yoko Kanno on the brain lately. It’s probably because I would crush on her mad serious were she not like twenty years older. But let’s pretend this is not the case. (Yes, we will pretend…)
No, let’s say it’s because I’ve had the SNES soundtrack to Gundam Wing: Endless Duel queued up on my computer stereo. Not that she had anything to do with that, but she did write the music for some of the recent Gundam Wing anime OSTs. Yeah, but I didn’t connect this in my mind initially (I was confused) because Yoko Kanno did do some SNES soundtracks back in the day. Why she was pegged to do one Gundam Wing anime production and not the SNES ones is beyond me (licensing contracts?), but sure enough I went ahead and made these incorrect brand alignments in my mind.
Furthermore, I always confuse Gundam Wing with the movie-gone-TV-series, Patlabor. Yes, I am sure anime geeks see them as very different series, but I think part of the confusion is that (A) I don’t like either one very much and (B) the Patlabor TV series had a pretty sweet cheesy ending song called “Midnight Blue”. Yoko Kanno also did a song called “Blue” for the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, and well shucks, I like Yoko Kanno, (and she did the music for Gundam Wing), and I also like the ending music for Patlabor (in a cheesy, guilt-ridden pleasure sort of way).
Wow, okay… I know this all sounds crazy. But it gets better (e.g. more forced).
So the Japanese pop star Nanase Aikawa has a cute little single that is also called “Midnight Blue”. Wow! And who has played guitar for Nanase Aikawa in recent years? Why, Marty Friedman of course! Which is significant here, because Marty played with Jason Becker back in the day. And then sure enough, Jason’s second full-length album, Perspective, has a song on it called “Blue”.
Which does not seem all that strange until you consider that (A) Yoko Kanno wrote a song called “Blue”, and (B) there was a character called Blue in the anime series, Wolf’s Rain — which *gasp* Yoko Kanno did the soundtrack for!
Unsurprisingly, the Wolf’s Rain opening is pretty tight:
What a bunch of creepy Halloween coincidences! Seriously spooky…
[...] mentioned this classy gem the other day when I was ranting about that bodacious female composer, Yoko Kanno. Funny tale about YK — my friend’s friend actually got to take her out to dinner one [...]
SUPER ENDLESS GUNDAM WING DUEL « Fretbored said this on December 24, 2008 at 5:28 am |