Yasushi Ishii - "The World Without Logos" (Hellsing opening)

Hellsing. This is among my most favoritest anime shows. I got lucky and caught it from the very beginning when it was being aired on one of the movie channels I had subscribed to several years ago. At the time, I had never heard of it and was not watching anything anime yet, I don't think. They showed two episodes per night, back to back, so they covered the whole series in one week. Long-time readers may remember the "guns of Hellsing" post that I had on my other blog when I was at Eponym: the post which drew so much traffic that it continuously crashed my bandwidth until I was finally forced to delete it. Now that I'm back on Blogger, I could put that post back up, and this time make it more detailed and accurate, but I also kind of got tired of the fanboys leaving stupid comments and arguing over insignificant details. So I think I'll just let it die. I still have all the graphics saved, though. Maybe I'll figure out some other way to regurgitate them.

Anyone who has any awareness of the music industry at all knows that copyright laws around the world are, pardon my language, a massive cl*st*rf***. For this reason, the Hellsing DVD releases don't have the same music everywhere in the world, but I'm not sure exactly how it all plays out. I do know that the German release has completely different opening and ending themes, which I've listened to and am not terribly impressed. The music under discussion in this post is on the original Japanese release, the U.S. release, and I found out accidentally, the Spanish release.

So without further ado, the short opening theme version. The "clean" version, without credits.

The credits say this song is titled "The World Without Logos" and is by someone(s) named Cool. It was actually written and performed by Yasushi Ishii, a Japanese singer/songwriter and seiyū (or voice actor--those Japanese have a word for everything!). He's written a lot of music for anime and video games.

To me, this song sounds like the slow, secret smile of a serial killer.

Now, a funny thing about this song. You can look up the lyrics if you want. I won't attempt to reprint them here because I have come to the conclusion that they are irrelevant. At one of the videos I watched, a commenter said that "it's just a bunch of nonsense syllables put together to sound like English." I think that's accurate. But to add to this, I found another commenter who said that it was written in katakana. You can read all about it at the link but here's a pertinent paragraph:

Unlike the hiragana system which is used for Japanese language words for which kanji does not cover, the katakana syllabary is primarily used for transcription of foreign language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo), as well as to represent onomatopoeia, technical and scientific terms, and the names of plants, animals, and minerals. Names of Japanese companies as well as certain Japanese language words are also written in katakana rather than the other systems.

So I think it might be okay to assume that the lyrics were written in katakana to sound like English. Like I said, you can look them up, but you'll find several different guesses as to what they are and none of them will make sense, although they do definitely sound like a bunch of English words strung together for some reason. But then I guess it would also be easy to make the argument that they don't make any less sense than a lot of other rock lyrics.

So here's the full 4:10 version of "The World Without Logos" by Yasushi Ishii, with a bunch of Hellsing wallpapers for a slide show.