On K-on~
I’ve been watching anime for almost twenty years. For a lot of people that are watching anime today, that’s more years than they’ve actually been alive. I can remember the first thing I saw that was anime: I was around twelve-thirteen years old and I went over to a friends’ house to join him in a night of video games and whatnot. When I got there, he and his older brother were watching Vampire Hunter D, and they’d just reached the point where this mutant (who thinks he’s got an edge against Count Lee) suddenly gets the tables turned; he gets picked up and smacked against various pillars and objects, and then boom! Head explody. Holy fucking shit, Stop the motherfucking presses, right? Well, for someone who was largely raised on WB and Disney and Hanna Barbara, it was a revelation: there was a whole new world of animation out there, just waiting for me to find it.
It’s been a long time since then. The world has moved on. My tastes in anime are bizarre and eclectic. A few years ago, I saw an advert for K-on. Because I don’t keep my thumb on the pulse of the anime community, because I don’t follow directors, studios, staff, seiyuus, I initially thought it was going to be a show about ENOZ from Haruhi. (In retrospect, i think it’d've been significantly better if it had.) The first season is arguably decent, if weak-watered. It’s a typical SoL that revolves around a “light music club”, sort of a school-sponsored garage band. I thought to myself, this is something I can relate to. Fourteen years ago I was teenager, all glazed eyes and gleaming reproductive organs, and I wanted to learn bass guitar. And I did. Our band lasted six months, we played a whopping three shows (only one of which we actually got paid for) and we wrote three songs and had parts and pieces of lyrics and riffs for another twelve. Although I only played bass for a school year and never looked back, being in a band leaves a mark on you. So forgive me if I wax a bit nostalgic while reviewing K-on.
Some of the trials and tribulations they went through I can relate to. Getting your band together, getting their equipment squared away, learning chords and riffs and trying to make money to pay for the gear, (which is terribly expensive) unplugging the amp while it’s still on, learning about your bandmates’ quirks and musical tastes, mysterious calls at 2am, lunatic drives all over the place to go to concerts, endless drinking and drugs and women of questionable moral value, and somewhere along the line you stop fucking off and music happens. When your fingers his the chords just right and you feel it all come together in a righteous glorious moment. You feel galvanized and you know that this is it. this is what it’s all about.
In a show like K-on there’s a certain leeway permitted; you can’t really have the expectation that a bunch of girls in japan are going to drive around at 2am looking for a party or discuss the merits of one guitarist over another while passing a j back and forth. Or all at the same time. No. Instead it’s a SoL moe-blob show about a bunch of cutesy girls in school (By the way, what the fuck man, This school can afford some high-tension gear. I about shit down both legs when I saw that set of zildjian drums.) who decide to set up a band. The animation goes from mediocre to terrible and back again, the plot is inconsistent but it tries to stay on track, and over the course of one school year they produce a whopping two(?) songs and the first season ends. While overall the entire first season was a piece of shit in terms of animation, direction, consistency and effort, there is an underlying thread that I could connect to, which was me in the garage band, relating to the girls in the club.
The second season is an utter failure in this regard. There’s nothing to relate to. Well, there was one episode where they hocked a guitar, which is something I remember our lead guitarist doing, but the rest of it is dumbfuck shit that no one gives a shriveled ratdick about. The season is about half over and they haven’t done anything worthwhile at all. When you think about how things fit together, you realize you’re simply marking time until something happens, hoping something happens and instead you get a bunch of bland dumbfuck shit about nothing. So, the second season is largely uninteresting and I suspect that when the season is over I will say to myself, “I can’t believe I watched that shit.”
