Let’s Put A Tune To It!

We’re nearing the end of the year, but it’s never too late for a tag post!

The tag this time is – Put a Tune to It, Western songs in Anime!

A fun idea that’s had me thinking up songs since I was tagged by the tag’s creator and friend of the blog – Dewbond! Check out his blog, and his own song choices for this one. I’m honoured to be in the first round of blogs tagged!

The rules:

• Choose any number of western songs (any genre) that you think best sums up an anime or manga of any type or genre.
  • If you want to pick more than 1 from each section that’s fine. Or if you can’t think of one for a specific category that’s fine also.
• Explain why you think your choices could work. Is it the lyrics? The tune and the beat? Or just the music video?
• Link back to the original post so I can read people’s suggestions, I’d love to read everyone’s ideas.
• Include Put a Tune to It in your tags so everyone including myself can find them all easily.
• Nominate around 1-5 bloggers.

I’ll save the nominations till the end, so that at least 1-5 of you have to scroll through this post!

I just picked songs that seemed like they fit well for certain genres, so there’s no real structure for this. Also no specification on how many songs to go with, so I went with 7 which is what Dewbond had done with his post.

Blink 182 – All The Small Things

Slice of Life / Comedy – OP

Either you hear it or you don’t I guess! To me, this song really has that “slice of life” feel. I also figure it’s better suited to an OP rather than an ED because of the energy – to me, EDs are usually more mellow / solemn / emotional. Maybe not always the case, but that’s the way I think of it anyways.

On a side note, I’d never actually seen the official music video for this but it’s pretty funny.

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Third Eye Blind – Semi Charmed Life

Slice of Life / Comedy – OP

Feel like this one is pretty self explanatory! While I guess slice of life isn’t technically a movie genre, I feel like this song used to be pretty common for that sort of setting in movies, usually earlier on when things were still being introduced. It’s got the perfect energy and sound for some casual slice of life action!

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Our Lady Peace – Life

Drama / Romance – OP

Our Lady Peace is one of my personal favourite bands, so I had to sneak one of their songs in here. Life is one of those songs that I feel like has the right level of emotion to fit as the OP for a more dramatic anime, more along the lines of drama + romance. The tone has an uplifting feel to it, and the lyrics have an encouraging message about how life is tough, but that we’ll make it in the end.

Seems like a good fit for that type of anime where a guy or girl feels like they are in over their head with drama, just trying to figure out what to do. I picture a high school drama where social interactions feel like they are everything to the characters, because they don’t know any life outside of school. And so the drama and consequences of their actions feel heavier than they are. That’s the picture this song paints for me.

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Lady Gaga – Speechless

Drama / Romance / Slice of Life – ED

As I mentioned earlier, I associate ED’s with more mellow, emotional songs. And Speechless fits the bill perfectly to me. I can see this at the end of any anime pertaining to daily life – drama, romance, slice of life… It just seems like the perfect credits song to me. It’s a beautiful song that could fit a beautiful anime. The lyrics make me lean more towards an anime that contains some sort of romance, but really any anime that has a lot of social interaction / regular life works I think.

Fun fact, I used to be a pretty big fan of Lady Gaga when I was in high school. I even saw her perform live in Toronto when I was in Grade 12 on her Born This Way Tour. I just love catchy songs, and she has a ton of them. Haven’t listened to anything from her beyond the Born This Way album though!

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Paramore – Misery Business

Shounen / Action – OP

What can I say, to me action / shounen means an explosive chorus. And Misery Business has a pretty explosive chorus! I can easily picture the action sequences of a shounen anime during an OP that uses that chorus. Lot of energy.

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Rise Against – Help Is On The Way

Shounen / Action / Seinen – OP

I guess I’m being a bit liberal with my genre selections. I could see this song being either in an action shounen or seinen anime OP. The chorus has that type of energy that makes me think of overcoming an obstacle, moving forward. I like how it has that feeling in addition to the high energy that I think of for an action anime OP.

Muse – Knights of Cydonia

Sci-Fi / Mecha – OP / ED

Not to be confused with the anime Knights of Sidonia.

Knights of Cydonia I admit would be hard to trim down into a 1:30 segment for an OP or ED, but if someone managed to do it right, it’s just a great song for the Sci-Fi / Mecha genre. To be fair, a lot of Muse songs just have that sort of “futuristic” sound. This song just has that feel to it.

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Soundgarden – Black Hole Sun

Shounen / Seinen – ED

Alright I lied, I’m going to do 8 songs. I thought of this one while I was writing about Knights of Cydonia.

Black Hole Sun has that mellow energy that I look for in an ED. The energy to me feels perfect for mellowing out during the credits after an intense episode, which may be more suited to the seinen genre but I threw shounen in there anyways. Shounen can have some heavy hitting episodes too. I felt like this song fits well after something like that.

Also, this video is pretty creepy. Never saw it before either, until now. So many really bizarre music videos out there.

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I know the tag wasn’t specifically about OP / EDs, and more just matching songs with anime, but I wanted to be more broad and just select songs that I could see used in an OP or ED for anime of certain genres. That’s just sort of how I was thinking about it all.

I could have selected specific anime, but in reality a song that would fit Fire Force would probably also fit any other shounen. This post also shows my age pretty well, as most of these songs I listened to when I was in high school. Actually, I listened to ALL of these songs when I was in high school, haha! They say your tastes in music are mostly set by the time you hit your mid 20’s, guess there’s some truth to that.

Here are my nominations:

• InfiniteZenith
• Matija
• NegativePrimes
• Voyager
• Cactus Matt

If any of you would like to give this tag a shot, it’d be fun to see your responses. Maybe check Dewbond’s original post for a better idea of what he intended with the tag, unless you think like I do and would prefer to just be very broad.

Also anyone else who would like to tackle this, or has any ideas of their own, feel free to leave a comment or write your own post and just say that I nominated you!

This was a fun tag.
Thanks Dewbond for coming up with it and for the nomination! While I love a good QnA post, it’s also great to get tagged for something different from that!

Until next time,
Thanks for reading.