Session 06: Sympathy for the Devil
For one month, The Dot and Line is publishing essays, interviews, and discussions about each episode of Cowboy Bebop, which turns 20 this April.
Gratingly precocious children are something of a cliché in anime, and Wen, the succboi of the week from Cowboy Bebop’s sixth session, must rank among the form’s most grating and precocious. That is, of course, because he’s not actually a child, but an ancient and miraculous survivor of a man-made cataclysm that shattered the Moon, left the Earth a shambles, and…killed his parents, maybe? No wonder he picked up the blues!
Either way, it left him ageless and undying, so all that smugness and mercilessness aren’t so much precociousness as the inevitable responses to living with no consequences. (He’s basically a defanged Pride from Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, for all you homunculi out there.) If all those hoity-toity Tolkienian elves didn’t turn you off of the idea of living forever, this prick totally should. Especially because he broke up the most adorable couple Cowboy Bebop ever even hinted at: Zebra and Giraffe, whose incredible monikers would be enough to make these two former Self Defense Volunteer Squad members perfect fodder for fan fiction if Zebra’s hair and Giraffe’s wild-eyed concern for his former comrade weren’t enough without them. I mean, come on, now:
Regardless, this episode—like pretty much every single episode in this show but for, uh, maybe three of them—pretty much has it all. Spike flashbacks. Old Jet friends with absurd bluesman names (Fatty River? What, was Howlin’ Wolf already taken or something?). Hilarious Jet quotes: “I started wailing the blues when the doctor whacked my bottom on the day I was born.” Cringeworthy Jet quotes: “Betrayal may come easily to women, but men live by iron-clad codes of honor.” (Nah, dude.) Faye snark, surprising approximately no one. A deus ex machina in the form of a stone bullet made of concentrated energy from a hyperspace disaster that looks like it’s made from a Rose Quartz gem from Steven Universe. Philosophical meanderings surrounding the ethical dilemmas inherent in our perceptions of the nature of immortal life. Consequential yet deliberately vague world-building. And a little kid who can wail the blues.
The Bebop soundtrack is justly lauded for the brilliance and technical complexity of its jazz, but its blues bump just as hard. I once had a friend who wanted to pick up the harmonica for the sole purpose of learning “Spokey Dokey.” He figured that by the time he could play it, he’d be an expert. It’s hard to disagree.
And yet Wen’s track, “Digging My Potato” (don’t ask—we don’t know either), burns just as sweet, if more subtly. It’s a wompin’, wailin’, foot-stompin’ sucker of the kind to make Sonny Boy Williamson proud. It’s the kind of patient, hypnotic blues whose slow creep toward its rapid-fire finale makes anyone in the room with an even passable ear for music hum along incessantly as if anybody wanted to hear that shit.
Let’s face it. The man-kid was super annoying. But boy, were his blues sweet.
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