"I Was Made to Hit In America..."

When I first saw BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad, I was at a local college anime club.  It was run by the sort of elitists for whom English dubbing is indistinguishable from Satan worship.  I only caught a few episodes.  It wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t especially impressed at the time.  This may have had more to do with the environment I watched it in than the show itself.  Under normal circumstances, it probably would have ended then and there.

Some few short years later, I saw a single-volume edition of the whole series on sale at Best Buy and thought, sure, why not.  Twenty dollars seemed like a fair investment.  From there, it migrated to the DVD shelf, where a lot of series have gone and there remained, to be watched when the right time comes around—if the right time comes around.  There are quite a number of series on that shelf which have gone unviewed so far.

Some time after this purchase, I actually did get around to watching the show.  Then my girlfriend (now fiancée, as of this writing) started asking me about it; I seemed so wrapped up in it, and she wanted to know what had me so thoroughly and completely hooked.  So I told her what it was about and what I liked about it.  She seemed interested.  So I offered to watch it with her.  I was about ten episodes or so into the show, but somehow it didn’t seem like that much of a chore to roll it back to episode one and start over.

There are a number of anime and movies and TV shows and books and God knows what else that Katie and I both like.  Most of these things, one of us liked first, and introduced the other person to later (examples: The Once and Future King, Harry Potter, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, Fullmetal Alchemist, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and several others).  BECK may be the first of these things that we both discovered together.

So what’s this show about, anyway?  We’re five paragraphs in, now; I guess I ought to start actually talking about the object of the writeup, right?

Okay, so:

BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad is a show about a bunch of guys getting together to make rock music.  Not the usual sort of J-Rock you see in the opening and closing themes of so many anime, either, but just regular rock music.  Music that’s about something true, even if the only person who cares (or can make any sort of sense of it) is the person behind the microphone.  Music that makes you want to get up, do something; music that makes you feel kind of bad that you haven’t done anything even remotely as cool with your life yet.

Our main character is Yukio Tanaka, Koyuki to his friends, who starts the show off in his last year of junior high, preparing to enter high school.  He’s lead a pretty simple life up to this point—not sheltered, exactly, but severely lacking in any real challenges to his view of the world.

This changes when Koyuki is on his way home from school one day.  He runs across a group of younger kids harassing a strange-looking dog that appears to be something Victor Frankenstein might have created if he’d started working on animals before proceeding to his more well-known monster.  The dog turns out to belong to Ryusuke Minami, a high-school aged young man who we later find out is the guitarist for a band called Serial Mama.  Ryusuke has actually spent much of his life in the U.S., as his father’s business required him to live there for some time.  Ryusuke is fluent in English, as is his younger sister Maho, who is about Koyuki’s age.

Koyuki, his friend Izumi (a girl he goes to school with, and knows from when they were both much younger), and a few other acquaintances wind up seeing Serial Mama perform at a live show.  This takes place in the sort of club, and in a part of town, that are utterly foreign to the sort of life and experiences Koyuki has had up to this point.  His bewilderment is almost as great as his fascination.

Serial Mama plays music quite different from what Koyuki is accustomed to hearing.  Influenced by Western rock bands, Serial Mama’s sound is more raw and vital than the studio-polished, micro-managed and carefully edited sound of the pop acts Koyuki is accustomed to.  Yet at the same time, it draws him.  The music does more than sound good.  It sparks genuine feelings.

But for Koyuki, it isn’t enough to just enjoy the music.  He feels inside him the need to make music, also.  And so he begins to learn guitar.

There are a lot of things to like about BECK.  One of them is the way that it makes learning music and learning an instrument look like the hard work that it is.  I know this from experience.

My father once played the guitar.  When I was fifteen or sixteen, he decided he wanted to play again.  He dug out his old twelve-string guitar and discovered that keeping it stored in variably damp basements (first my grandfather’s, and then his own) had, as you might expect, not been good for the instrument.  Its fret board was irreparably warped and the thing could not be kept in tune.  He asked me if, should he decide to buy me a guitar for Christmas as well as one for himself, would I learn to play? 

I said yes.

In retrospect, this was perhaps the first very strong sign that I was a person who could love music without having any strong need to make it.  I was infatuated with the idea of being able to play guitar.  Learning required an investment of time and effort that I could not seem to justify.  There was always something to do that I enjoyed more.

Koyuki is someone who does love the idea of making music, though.  He loves it enough to struggle with the guitar, to get angry when he can’t wring the notes he wants out of it, to get frustrated with the ache in his fingers from the strings, and still press on anyway.

He isn’t an instant prodigy. 

As Ryusuke forms a new band (eventually named BECK) and Koyuki joins them for rehearsals, the other band members comment that while he isn’t terrible, he isn’t at the level necessary to really perform with the rest of them.  Ryusuke insists Koyuki be present, however.  Partly it’s because he seems to know that the subconscious pressure of being in the presence of better musicians will put Koyuki’s relentless and self-punishing need to improve into overdrive.  Partly, it’s also because he recognizes that although Koyuki isn’t the greatest guitar player, he can definitely reach the level they need, given practice enough and time.  And, possibly more important than any of these things, he is vital to the chemistry of the group.

In fact, this is part of what I like about BECK in a nutshell.  It slaps the false glamour right out of the rock music scene.  There’s a lot anxiety about success, frustration about a lack of it, a little bit of desperation, and a lot of playing in cramped and sweaty venues to get word-of-mouth publicity.  It takes a side-trip into the business end of things from time to time, showing us BECK’s rivals (a glam band called Belle Ame, formed by one of the other former members of Serial Mama, with whom Ryusuke had a violent split).

Sure, there are parts where things get a bit unlikely, unrealistic, and flat-out improbable.  But however far out there the story gets (and it’s not really that far out there, as these things go), the characters are always real.

That’s one of the other things I really enjoy about BECK.  The events that take place don’t feel managed by the plot; the characters are not being led from Point A to Point B in the narrative, connecting the dots along a rigidly defined path.  They simply do the things that are in their nature to do, and the story follows them accordingly.  It’s the skill of the original manga author (to say nothing of the people behind the anime) that makes these people interesting to watch, and that makes their actions believable.  As such, the comedy of the show relies heavily upon character interaction, rather than slapstick or ridiculous gags that are obviously set up.

For instance (not verbatim):

Koyuki: “Did you hear that?  He said he likes how I sing!”

Maho:  “Yeah, that’s code for ‘your guitar-playing sucks’.”

Characters talk naturally.  There is the real, natural feeling of actual conversation, where many other shows seem to be very obviously reciting dialogue.  As a result, many of the characters can be pretty foul-mouthed.  But that’s to be expected, if the hard-rock culture of Japan is anything like its American equivalent.

And this is where the dub excels beyond all my expectations.

You see, part of the humor of the original Japanese dialogue relies on the fact that some characters speak only Japanese, some speak only English, and some (Ryusuke and his sister Maho, for instance) are bilingual.  There aren’t a lot of anime that do this extensively; in fact the only other one I can think of was the short movie Blood: the Last Vampire, and in that show Manga Entertainment basically just left it as-is.  It seemed like the logical approach this time around, too, and when I first started watching it on my own, I watched it subtitled.  When Katie started watching it, though, it was a different story.  She has trouble making out the subtitles from time to time.  Sitting on the couch across the living room from the TV, subtitles aren’t really practical, unless the dub is Utena-level bad.

What Funimation did was rewrite parts of the dialogue so that the characters’ bewildered reactions all still make sense in context, while still adhering to the basic feeling of the scene.  For instance, the dialogue excerpted above is one of the rewrites.  The line in the original Japanese version is somewhat different, but the tone of it is similar (Koyuki makes an ecstatic remark about how Eddie Lee praised him, Maho says something dismissive and deflating; humor ensues).

But still, it all comes back to the feeling of realness this story has.  It would be fatally easy for BECK to be an anime about the glamour of the rock world, how it would be everyone’s dream come true to perform, cut a demo CD, sign with a major record label, tour in America, etc. — all while expounding on The Power of Rock.  To an extent, BECK does this, but BECK’s creators know that it isn’t the music itself.  It’s the process of making it, of learning to make it, of devoting yourself to something bigger than you are, that does it.

I know I mentioned before how the story felt like a natural progression of the characters’ actions, and not led by a plot.  Yet at the same time, it has one of the best climaxes I’ve seen in an anime in a long time.  It doesn’t feel like it as you’re watching the rest of the show, but as you watch the ending, you find yourself realizing that the whole show really was building up to this point, this one moment, and you realize how much change has occurred because the Koyuki we met in the first episode would not be capable of doing the things he does at the end. And so in its way, the show is about The Power of Rock.  Or rather, it is about the redemptive, transformative power of music to change us and make us better.

I can’t really put it any better than this: BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad is one of the best shows I’ve seen in recent years, and the ending is one of my favorite moments in all of anime.