Is there a case for getting rid of soundtracks?
With the poorly kept secret that we’ve adopted Manga Reviewer‘s database and are opening up our own manga section, it appears that The Nihon Review is again spreading its wings into a new medium. It’ll be an interesting challenge for us, but with the success (ok, maybe it’s a bit early to call it a “success” yet, but it’s not a failure) of the Live Action section, I’d imagine that with perseverance and commitment from the right people, we should be able to pull it off. But, I always have a lingering fear in the back of my head that we can’t. Our current staff are very much anime-orientated, and while one may argue that picking up manga reviewing is trivial considering our experience in anime reviews, building the database and making sure it never stagnates is not trivial by any stretch of the imagination. But, I am optimistic about our manga section. I’m not optimistic about our soundtracks section.
This is one of those articles in which I give our readers a glimpse into the inner workings of the site (in other words, I bitch and rant about things to do with the site that I don’t like, j/k). We’ve had sporadic discussions behind the scenes about the state and legitimacy of the soundtracks section, but I’m certainly in the minority, with regards to my position that we should, at best, suspend our commitments to it and, at worst, drop it completely, in the same fashion we did with Games. The idea of this article isn’t a leak, to use a terse term, but rather an attempt to be transparent about this particular issue (one that, in all honesty, isn’t that urgent) and see what the public that read this blog (all two of you) think about it.
I like closure, and closing the soundtracks section would certainly bring closure to a lingering problematic section. The problem with soundtracks are numerous, the most jarring is that, since we lost Kurier, no one is prepared to make regular contributions to it. Can I blame them? I’ve written soundtrack reviews before… they are seriously the most difficult type of review I’ve ever tried. As I’ve said in the past, experience would undoubtedly make the task of writing a soundtrack review easier, but so would a past in musical education, and that’s something I haven’t had since high school. Reviewing music isn’t like reviewing anime (which is just like reviewing movies and literature), in that, even if you haven’t had formal training in dissecting the latter, there’s enough literature out there, that, with a bit of exposure, you can pick it up reasonably quickly.
Soundtrack reviewers will always have their backs to the wall, compared with those that review other medium, such as the ones we deal with. To compound matters, for every anime that’s released, there’s generally two, and, in some cases, much more, soundtracks released. We have enough dedicated staff at the moment, that we can reasonably expect to keep up with anime and remain reasonably on the cutting edge of the medium, reviewing most popular titles (and quite a few obscure ones) within twelve months of them being released. We can’t quite do this with live action and music, but we’re still ok and do a job of serving to highlight titles in fairly obscure media. Soundtracks, on the other hand, we can never dream to comprehensively cover… not unless we had at least as many dedicated reviews working on soundtracks as we have now working on anime. The best we’ve ever managed to do is ten reviews over the course of six or so months… that’s probably the number of soundtracks Nipponsei releases in a week.
Of course, the counter argument is that, it could all turn around. We may pick up a dedicated soundtrack reviewer or two in the future, and it’s a medium that gets very little attention from reviewers, so we’d be covering a relatively untouched piece of ground on the internet. But it’s hard work, and I’m struggling to convince myself that it’s not beyond our means. I mean, why keep a section over if it’s just going to stagnate? My opinion is, let’s just close it down, be done with it, and concentrate on doing a bang up job with the other sections.
I lost a lot of sleep (no joke) as a soundtrack reviewer because I felt that I was fighting an uphill battle in quality and quantity. SK is completely right when he says it isn`t easy, and his points are the same that I`ve cited in the past. On top of that, OSTs are compilations of the best a show has to offer (rarely do you get complete OSTs, meaning they contain every piece of music in a series), ergo, you end up reading a lot of the same comments (“this piece is exceptionally good,” “this song brings back the vibrant battle scene into my head,” etc.).
I don`t remember my original position on the matter, but I don`t fight the opinion that the OST section should be closed.
As a casual listener of classical music and popular Korean songs, and with a firm belief that vast majority of soundtracks are at their best when used in anime as evocation of certain feelings and ideas, I personally don’t find soundtracks reviews that assess its entertainment value when played alone very informative, since I rarely ever listen to soundtracks playing by itself. They are probably released for fans to endorse them, to relive some part of that anime experience perhaps, but for that reason they’re incomparably inferior to other music that are designed to evoke emotions without the need of anime’s visuals, characters or stories. That’s one case I would bring to an argument in closing down soundtrack review section, additional to your case of stagnation, although my view is undeniably biased against soundtrack albums and ignores views of many fans who enjoy soundtracks for what they are.
As someone who’s struggled to write soundtrack reviews, I definitely feel your pain stemming from the difficulties in making subjective judgments about objective details. While it’s one thing to say “this piece makes me feel x due to its melody,” it’s another to say “the use of counterpoint during the motive augments the tension in the previous section”. The analysis in the second one is much deeper and IMO, that’s what people who review music should strive for. A case could be made for that being a bit much, which runs the risk of isolating the audience who may not have any musical training at all (and I certainly don’t have any).
As far as I can tell, the biggest parallel that anime music has in the audio world is in film scores and video game music. I’m going to skip any discussion of the former and talk more about the latter because their is probably more overlap between fans of anime music and fans of game music than between anime music and film scores. The audiences for the two are probably going to be similar and have a similar amount of musical background and training (on the whole).
So when it comes to reviewing anime music, anime music reviewers could definitely take a few pointers from those who review game soundtracks. For that, there’s no shortage of sites that do it, from the soundtrack section that we see up at http://www.rpgfan.com, to the reviews out at http://www.squaresound.com, http://www.altpop.com/stc, and even those sitting around at the forums at Gamingforce. While anime music is far behind the VGM community, there’s no reason it can’t start up again on the right foot.
Finally (yes, this comment is rapidly reaching the land of tl;dr), I’d like to make a note that unlike the VGM community, the anime music community is nowhere as organized. There are no standards when it comes to ripping music (compare some of the existing anime music releasing groups to #gamemp3s) nor is their a central database that anyone can run to in order to look up information about anime music. As someone who’s really interested in anime music, I’d like to see the community get its act together and become more organized/less disparate. From the standpoint of the Nihon Review though, I’d understand completely if you dropped your soundtracks section altogether.
In the event my posts aren’t going through:
As someone who’s struggled to write soundtrack reviews, I definitely feel your pain stemming from the difficulties in making subjective judgments about objective details. While it’s one thing to say “this piece makes me feel x due to its melody,” it’s another to say “the use of counterpoint during the motive augments the tension in the previous section”. The analysis in the second one is much deeper and IMO, that’s what people who review music should strive for. A case could be made for that being a bit much, which runs the risk of isolating the audience who may not have any musical training at all (and I certainly don’t have any).
As far as I can tell, the biggest parallel that anime music has in the audio world is in film scores and video game music. I’m going to skip any discussion of the former and talk more about the latter because their is probably more overlap between fans of anime music and fans of game music than between anime music and film scores. The audiences for the two are probably going to be similar and have a similar amount of musical background and training (on the whole).
So when it comes to reviewing anime music, anime music reviewers could definitely take a few pointers from those who review game soundtracks. For that, there’s no shortage of sites that do it, from the soundtrack section that we see up at http://www.rpgfan.com, to the reviews out at http://www.squaresound.com, http://www.altpop.com/stc, and even those sitting around at the forums at Gamingforce. While anime music is far behind the VGM community, there’s no reason it can’t start up again on the right foot.
Finally (yes, this comment is rapidly reaching the land of tl;dr), I’d like to make a note that unlike the VGM community, the anime music community is nowhere as organized. There are no standards when it comes to ripping music (compare some of the existing anime music releasing groups to #gamemp3s) nor is their a central database that anyone can run to in order to look up information about anime music. As someone who’s really interested in anime music, I’d like to see the community get its act together and become more organized/less disparate. From the standpoint of the Nihon Review though, I’d understand completely if you dropped your soundtracks section altogether.