This year my annual re-watch of FLCL was going to focus on the music, and for a while I was confused as to how I was going to go about studying the music since I personally have a very limited understanding about music. Personally, I know a surface-level amount about reading sheet music, I have played very little of the drums, the flute, the clarinet, the trumpet, the violin, and I took piano lessons for about a year, but I never broke past about a year or two of any instrument I’ve played. The knowledge I have about chords, scheme, etc. is marginal at best and laughable at worst.
Even so, I like studying lyrics and while I have never personally made a music video, I like how people edit videos and I like well-crafted AMVs and how music videos, movies, and of course anime combine both visual cues and the pacing of songs to enhance the experience of viewing them both at the same time. For an anime like FLCL, which at the same time can be viewed as a mere passion project of people throwing a bunch of random stuff and loosely stringing them together to make a tangled mess with no actual meaning AND the product of animating, music, and literary genius to make this multi-layered esoteric, philosophic statement that stands the test of time to where almost 30 years later people like me are still enjoying it, still breaking it down, and still finding new expressions and meanings in it (run-on-sentence, much)?
I’ve got to admit, even when I watched all 18 episodes of FLCL from season 1 to Alternative, I still found some interesting things in it. So, here’s the intended order of service:
First I will make a general statement of how the entire season uses music to enhance scenes.
Then I will look at all of the songs by The Pillows, which is the band that produced every song, present in every episode, and break down how the songs enhance the scene in its instrumental, lyrics, and the pacing of what it contributes to each scene.
Finally, I will give my opinion on whether each song lives up to its full potential or if an alternative music choice could have been used to achieve the best effect. I will also choose a song that appears in the season that I feel is used best and adds the most significance to the season and the series.
What I will not do is discuss instrumentals; there are a few in season 1 but considering Season 2 and Season 3 use a large number of sound-bytes and instrumentals that are not complete songs fit with lyrics. This is primarily because I do not have a deep understanding of music and also because there are a metric ton of different sound-bytes and it would have taken me a week in itself to go through them all.
Enjoy.
DICLAIMER: SPOILERS FOR ALL OF FLCL AHEAD! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
DISCLAIMER: LYRICS ARE TRANSLATE DFROM animelyrics.com THERE MAY BE SLIGHT VARIANCE.
DISCLAIMER: I WILL POST THIS IN SEVERAL DIFFERENT POSTS WITH SEVERAL DIFFERENT PAGES BECAUSE THERE IS SO MUCH CONTENT HERE!
