One of these days I’m going to update my utterly massive guide to record stores in Tokyo and put it up on this site. That guide is a decade out of date. It desperately needs to be updated. For example, it mentions nothing about the recent(ish) revisions to the main Disk Union in Shinjuku. When I wrote the guide in 2016, the first floor was a boring cafe that I never set foot in. Now it’s an entirely new store dedicated solely to video game music and anime soundtracks. I went from never going in the place to going there at least once a week, sometimes more.
It’s a fucking problem.
I’ve bought so much game music there that I need to expand my shelving to accommodate it all. I don’t know why. It provides an easy dopamine fix, even when buying a soundtrack to a game I’ve never even played – usually because my hit rate isn’t too bad with the blind buys there. If I go to the heavy metal store and pick up some fun-looking old hair metal album by a band I never heard of, odds are that I never heard of it for a reason: it sucks.
However, when I buy the soundtrack to a Neo Geo game I never heard of, or some mid-90s arcade shooter, it usually fucking owns. The quality of a game’s music can often be independent to the quality of the game it comes from.
Did you know that Hatris has a soundtrack? Did you know it fucking rips?
That being said, sometimes the quality of a product’s music is equal to the quality of a product itself, and not in a good way. I try not to share “bad” music on this blog too often, because – well the reasons should be obvious – who the heck seeks out bad music?
But this was too stupid not to share. Also I paid too much too be the only person to suffer this.
Donkey Kong – Ashita ni Nattara… (Right-click to download)
Rips of this exist on YouTube, I’m not sharing any “lost media” or anything, it’s even on the Internet Archive if you want FLACs of this stupidity, but I think I’m the first person to write in-depth about these songs, at least in a modicum of a critical capacity.
Donkey Kong Country is an animated TV series that was produced by Nelvana Limited, a Canadian company that also brought us such beloved children’s programming as Little Bear, The Magic School Bus, Beetlejuice, Franklin, and The Berenstain Bears. It debuted in the late-90s (premiere dates vary by country) and ran for three ungodly seasons. Donkey Kong Country was one of the first TV cartoons to be made using 100% computer animation, and if Wikipedia is to be believed, it was the first series to use performance capture technology as its primary source of animation – although this apparently changed for the second season, when Taiwan’s Hong Guang Animation took over.
I have attempted to watch this show on more than one occasion, as it pops up from time to time on various streaming services. I say “attempted” because the show is fucking horrible and I’ve never been able to make it through an entire episode. Sure, most Saturday morning cartoons were bad, but this one is just unwatchably terrible. Say what you will about 80s cartoons like Thundercats or Silverhawks, but they had a style to them. Even when they were dumber than bricks, they looked cool. Even when the animation was limited, the designs and characters would at least often be halfway decent.
But when you combine the horrible quality of C-tier kids’ cartoon writing with the comically primitive CGI, you get something that is only enjoyable as a historical artifact, if that.
All that being said, the show was popular…in Japan at least. The Japanese toy company Takara released toys based on the characters from the show, and I believe there was a card game too.
And of course, there’s this “soundtrack” which is really just two versions of two songs, which was released on the mini-CD format exclusively back in 2000. I’m not going to lie, I spent ¥8,000 on this stupid damn CD, which is thankfully only $50 right now because the yen is worthless, but I’ve seen this mini-CD on sale for upwards of double that. It has to be pretty rare. It’s rare enough that I had to be the one to add it to Discogs.
The CD just has four songs. The first track is “If I Become Tomorrow” (Japanese title: Ashita ni Nattara…), which is the opening theme for the Japanese version of the series. The second song is “Banana Heaven” (Japanese title: Banana Tengoku), which was the music that played over the end credits. The third and fourth tracks are the same two songs without the lead vocals. Japan calls these types of edits “Original Karaoke” versions because of course they do.
Vocal duties on the tracks are handled by the voice actors from the show, and the music was composed by Japanese hip-hop artist Harumi Kudo, who was the voice of Funky Kong on the cartoon. Here, he performs under the alias…sigh…Banana Ice.
Yes, the Asian rapper is calling himself Banana Ice. Is that a Vanilla Ice reference? Did Harumi Kudo understand the racial implications of calling himself Banana Ice? I don’t know.
I’m not one for Japanese rap, and the “singing” parts of the songs are mostly just yelling, because the voice actors are not singers. They’re bad songs.
THAT BEING SAID, I think the instrumentation on these is fine, and the “karaoke” versions aren’t half bad. They have a fun, bouncy energy to them that reminds me of a lot of good but utterly forgettable 90s dance music. If you told me that these were Baha Men b-sides I would believe you. It also has a vague, early-90s corny house music vibe too it. A “Jock Jams” aesthetic, if you will. Someone needed to remix this with some piano, a lady with a booming voice, or those 2 Unlimited keyboard slams, it’s almost something. I’ve definitely bought worse music this month. The horrors of obscure metal I subject myself to know no bounds.
But maybe that’s a story for another post.