About Anison And Context

Kind of like turning a zombie into a zombie game, the anime music-infatuated blogger types are doing a tournament, where various vocal themes, openings and endings battle each other in a popularity contest, only to be separated by strangely nerdy seeding patterns. Well, the whole endeavor is pretty nerdy so whatever goes, I guess.

Did I submit something? Sure did. You have 15 slots, which is pretty good given how I usually have a top 10+ going on, although at this time and this date and this age, the biases will show. Especially the stuff in my car. And I’ll share some of that…later.

What I want to talk about is the role of the meta in music appreciation. I think it boils down to that cultural and artistic expressions have contexts, and listing to anison is really just a form of appreciation of some kinds of expressions within a specific context. No matter if you think of anison as some simple commercialism or museum-quality superflat-astic display pieces, it doesn’t really change the way how context matters probably more than the musical pieces themselves.

Just earlier today [as of this writing] someone said to us that dance makes Love Live songs better. I’m inclined to agree; part of that mix-media franchise’s appeal from the start had to do with the full-motion MVs that came with their first few singles. The song and dance routine appeals a lot better than the songs themselves. And this is kind of the fundamental truths about anime music.

It’s all just tie-ins, aren’t they? And a lot of the fun in listening to it is associated with the thing the music is tied to. Or FUN if you speak with weird articles. It’s like when I hear TANK, I don’t think of a great SF mash-up anime from the late 90s. I think of an over-played, over-used AMV track that sounds about 100 times better live than studio. And What Planet Is This is better.

So it’s kind of simple, if you think about the tourny this way. Basically whichever context has more subscribers, the songs within that context will speak to more people in that way. It’s somewhat different than simply the most popular songs from the most watched shows, because just because an expression is well-understood, that doesn’t mean the expression will resonate well, or is meaningful or appreciated. Just like my previous example, what that song speaks about may vary from person to person, even if it’s a well-understood saying. Just like “Libra me” might be about reason kicking and curbs, but it might also mean the ultimate phallus of masculine expression to someone else.

What can you do about it? Tighten up the context. For example, see these.

And for better or worse, yes, sometimes, that means the girls must dance. To me that’s great, because, well, here’s one of my submissions.

PS. SPOILERS

PPS. When I hear Blue nowadays, I yell SPIKE DIES inside my head.