Wednesday, July 8, 2009

The first of many posts in which Sono blathers about music.

[EDIT: I went back into this entry and put most of the songs in so you can know which song I'm talking about when I'm talking about it. You're welcome.]

Well I'm gonna start this blog of by scaring away about half of our potential reader base by making my first post here about a topic very dear to my heart --

Music from the Sailor Moon anime series.


There may be a followup to this, as I've suddenly realized I haven't sat and listened to any of the background tracks for, literally, years, but I think the best place to start covering bases would be the theme songs. Granted there aren't a whole lot of these because Sailor Moon, unlike most series, stuck with it's same opening theme song for 3 out of 4 seasons.

So where else to start but the beginning? "Moonlight Densetsu". This is probably the song everyone knows best, because they used the same musical track for the english version. Granted, that version of the song was very very different lyrically. I'd like to call it "terrible", but it did it's job of getting 6-10 year old girls watching it so... I guess good job, DiC.
None the less this song is very very catchy and to this day I know what I'm hearing right from the opening notes, even if the 8 year old in me still starts singing the english version at the top of her lungs. Then the 21 year old version of me tells her to shut up and get it right.

Then there was "Tuxedo Mirage", which is a gorgeous song. I still have the translation of first few lines memorized, and when ever it comes on to play on my iTunes I just cannot turn it off. Actually, hearing it come on was what inspired me to write this blog post. Another line that I keep translating in my head every time I hear it is the end of the refrain, "Motto motto aishiteru, Tuxedo Mirage" (I love you more and more, Tuxedo Mirage.) I don't know why that has always stuck out to me but I just love that one moment when you first hear it in the song.
I don't have much to say about "Kaze mo Sora mo Kitto". But it's a catchy little song and I remember being fascinated watching the "puzzle" of Princess Serenity come together while it played while watching the ending credits.
And now the song that I could talk about forever (I'll try to restrain myself), "Sailor Star Song". This is easily my favorite song from the series. I didn't know until recently that Takeuchi Naoko actually wrote the lyrics to this song for the last season of Sailor Moon, and it only made me love it even more.
"Makenai" (Don't give up!) has sort of become my rallying cry over the years because of this song. Times when I was depressed, I'd listen to this and feel better for one reason or another. Maybe it was because Stars was my favorite season (no Chibiusa or Mamoru), or because I'd remember hanging with my cousin Rachel as a kid and watching Sailor Moon, or maybe it's just because it's a really happy song. But this one is catchy and uplifting and I just love it to death.

So now that I've covered the theme songs, I guess I'll move on to some of the other songs from Sailor Moon. One that I have always really adored was "Kaze ni Naretai" ("I Want To Be The Wind"), one of Haruka's songs sung by Ogata Megumi.



kaze ni naritai - ogata megumi

For the life of me, I cannot remember what this song is about, but I'm going to take an educated guess form the title and say it's about Haruka admiring the wind and wanting to be like it? None the less, this is another song I can never turn off when it comes on.


And on a related note, there is Michiru's "Fate Is So Beautiful", which for some reason doesn't seem to be in my iTunes anymore. I never liked this one as much as Haruka's, but it was an interesting song to listen to. I think it was a lot darker sounding of a song than it sounded.

And I suppose, even though I will be gutted for it, I must write about the english Sailor Moon tracks because I actually kind of liked, and still like, a lot of these songs. "My Only Love" is very very campy, but it was the first (and one of the only) song I ever learned to play on the piano and I still think, ins piste of how dumb it is, it's pretty romantic.

"The Power Of Love" is about as campy as they come but I will love this song forever. This, along with "Nothing At All" represent a time in my life when I got to see my best friend of a billion years on a more regular basis. And believe me we were as nerdy as they come. But it was fantastic and these songs, and Sailor Moon in general, were a big part of our friendship.
Though one thing about the english tracks that kinda of irked me was that they were sort of thrown into the dub of the anime with very little care as to where they were put. The best example is "Give Me The Strength To Carry On", which was in the original battle against Beryl, and also was used in the first movie even though it had very little to do with that battle.
I think the last song I'll talk about is "Sanji no Yosei" (3 O'Clock Fairy) from the Super S movie. this is the catchiest goddamn song on the face of the earth. After more than a decade, I can still sing the translation of this song.
Though it bothered me that DiC or 4Kids or whoever it was that dubbed the Super S movie was too lazy to dub this song. So for the first like 2 1/2 minutes of the movie, you have these kids singing in Japanese, with no subtitles, and no idea what the hell is going on. Especially with hoe much foreshadowing this song provides. This song and the resulting pied-piper-esque sequence pretty much sets up the entire movie. So... Epic fail.

So I guess that does it for me rambling on and on about music as if I actually know what I'm talking about. I may come back and talk about Sailor Moon in general and it's affect on me one day, but that's and entirely different animal.

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