About eight or nine years ago, back when I scraped together a meager living as an engraver, I was into anime. Real into anime. In fact, it was safe to say that a good portion of my paycheck went to feeding that addiction. It was a different time, just before the popularity that Pokemon (and all its subsequent clones) brought the genre, so the average price per VHS tape was about $25-30.
Thirty dollars for a dingy VHS, I must have been out of my mind.
I did a lot of bargain-hunting in those days, and a set of four VHS for $60 seemed like a fine deal to me, even if I had never heard of the series. Obviously, if it was from Japan, it had to be good. The series I picked up was The Slayers, which is a series which impacted my life in a very unexpected way.
But that’s another story for another time.
I enjoyed the Slayers, it was a nice blend of adventure and comedy, wrapped together with a nice soundtrack. It is no secret that I think the music is the most important aspect of a movie/video game, so I sought out the artists that created the music. The beginning and end themes were sang by a woman named Megumi Hayashibara, who also happened to voice the main character of The Slayers.
Megumi, in the late nineties, was easily the most popular thing in Japan. She was in EVERYTHING. Dozens of television shows, movies, not to mention the albums she released, I’m sure the Japanese hated her as much as I hate our own pop divas. Which is why, when I bought one of her CD’s, ‘Shamrock’, I imagined there was some sort of Japanese analog of me in Japan buying a Britney Spears album.
About a year after I bought the CD, the rare CD imported from Japan, it somehow became cracked. This around the same time my computer crashed (back in those days when I couldn’t fix a computer to save my life), to I lost the mp3’s as well. And being a somewhat obscure CD, even among the Japophile crowd, I couldn’t even find it online (for a reasonable price, a couple specialty import places wanted $50 or more for it).
The other day, I came into possesion of seven Megumi Hayashibara albums, including ’Shamrock’, which makes this whole chili-less ordeal a lot less painful than it would otherwise be. I took the CD to my car and began listening, and it was indeed nostolgic.
It is strange because my taste in music rarely strays from the rock, techno, and classical genres, and this is undoubtedly pop. It is upbeat, fast, goofy, all around strange, and yet there’s a strange draw to the music.
I recall that when my stepbrother borrowed my car, he used to blast that CD with the windows down when he drove through construction areas and would get the strangest looks. Likely stranger than I would have gotten, being he always had a definite ‘punk’ look to him.
So, yeah, new music for me.
Zel-kun out.
Zai | 23-Feb-07 at 7:31 pm | Permalink
Yeah, VHS anime was too damn expensive back then. I remember when I was 16, I would get $40 a week for babysitting and I’d spend $30 on a Ranma 1/2 VHS that had only TWO episodes. I think I got a total of 4 VHS tapes before I gave up on that. Years later I’d find the whole series (about 300 episodes) on DVD for $160. My money was wasted on VHS. Go figure