"Bocchi The Rock" and Loneliness [2/3]
Songs to Uplift The Teen Spirit
“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”
—Plato, old philosopher dude-bro
Music. I love music in anime. The way it often builds a scene along with the animation and the quirky characters and also draws emotions into seemingly normal lines. In Cowboy Bebop (1998), the jazzy music feels like a character unto itself, the music also being violently personified in Your Lie in April (2016)— but in Bocchi the Rock, it is a compelling metaphor for life and the mismanagement of one’s youth.
Bocchi dives headfirst into music and her own prolific creation, so much so that she ignores all social cues and ends up trapped in her own little world made of winding musical staffs and handcuffs fashioned out of treble clefs and guitar tabs.
As much as Bocchi finds solace in her music, in it being the one thing that allows her to express herself, she uses it as a shield to keep from interacting with her peers or to make actual, lasting connections.
She’s like me. For real for real.
She eventually finds friendship and kindred souls through music, but only through a 3-YEAR TIMESKIP that takes place in THE FIRST EPISODE and after she’s holed herself into her music and has had no realistic relationship development in that time.
She is already a lonely and introverted kid and her hyper fixation on music and playing the guitar is great until she realizes that being good at her instrument means nothing if she can’t use it to make friends or meet other people.
Music
Are the animated music sequences good?
I mean yeah. It won’t win any awards, but it looks good and fluid enough (especially at the climax scenes) and you get a sense of energy and movement throughout it all.
Is it as good as Kids on the Slope (2012) and the absolute bangers they dished out and the fluidity of JAZZ literal JAZZ performances???
No, not really. But it is still a fun and worthwhile watch to see kids enjoying music.
I think music should always be something to enjoy and to love and I love that they love it.
Me and my good friend Fajita really love music anime in general, and I’ve listed a few of them here already but there’s also:
K-On!
Skip Beat
Nana
But to be completely honest, I am in love with Kessoku Band, the fictional group Bocchi and her friends create in the show.
They dropped a full-length album after the show ended (14 tracks!) and it is amazing and wonderful and just so many other positive adjectives.
I’ve listened to the entire album several times over and I’m still not tired of it. Granted, my Japanese is subpar to a kindergartner’s, but the mood and the overall vibe is just fun and exciting and I can’t help but smile whenever my Spotify runs through it as one of my top tracks.
And as much as I love Kessoku Band, the sad, painful truth of Bocchi’s story is that nothing happens in a vacuum.
Playing music, performing, creating melodies— those are all things that must be done in front of a crowd to reap the rewards that Bocchi is manifesting.
She wants to be rich and famous through her music. She wants interviewers to ask how she was as a kid, and for her response to be melodramatic and cool, an outcast taking the limelight and sharing how her inability to make friends has become a boon in her adult life.
Bocchi lives vicariously through these daydreams, but her reality is a wrenching gut-check each time because every daydream hinges on Bocchi becoming an extroverted expert musician.
Bocchi is far from an extrovert, and only a step or two above a hikikomori. These daydreams are just that: daydreams. She needs to go on an entire hero’s journey and a full 180 on character development in order for her wild (but attainable) dreams to become a reality she can see on her horizon.
Joining Kessoku Band is the first step to that, but until Bocchi finally pulls her head up to look around herself on the stage, to see her band members, to follow their lead, and eventually to see the crowd cheering in front of her, then her field of vision will only ever be limited to her scuffed school shoes and the dark floor of the stage.
Luckily, she was able to find her band mates because of her love and appreciation for music. When all else failed her, she found solace in music and happiness in strumming the guitar chords for hours on end.
When she had no one to turn to, she had her music.
But music, and forgive me for making any sort of generalizations, is best enjoyed with others.
Sure it’s fun jamming out to BTS in your room.
But a live concert? Make it Taylor Swift. Or Beyoncé. Or Post Malone.
The experience is in the music, in the performance, in the collective shared participation with every other fan in the venue.
It’s electric. A vibe that shoots through the entire crowd.
Songs sound better, but feelings are ethereal in a concert setting.
Music connects people and shares emotions and attunes us all to a moment in time where it feels like life is held on the breath of a chord.
So yeah.
Music is an experience, and Bocchi was mostly keeping that to herself (and no, her posting music online doesn’t count because it still enabled her bad habits) and because she was enjoying the experience, she never pushed herself outside of her comfort zone to do different things, even though she desperately wanted to.
The very thing that was her solace became a cage that kept Bocchi from reaching out to others.
And in the same fell swoop, it became the key to grant her access to a world beyond any she ever knew:
Friendship.
[insert upbeat shonen sport anime theme song here.]
