Interview with Kazz Noguchi & Hamada Maria
The evolution of "Paradox Live" from hiphop
--Please share what the two of you are responsible for as it pertains to music production for Paradox Live.
Kazz: It's changed a little from the first season going into Road to Legend and then Battle of Unity, but from the very start, Hamada-san contacted me and asked our creative team to handle the music production. She basically said "do whatever you want" and "just make it cool"! [laughs]
Hamada: That's right. [laughs] I work with Sumzap on the general creative aspects like the worldview and the characters for the entire project. For music production, I determine the theme and the concept for each song, as well as the battle theme for each CD. We handle the overall production for each of the teams, including art direction, music style, and general planning of other activity. Compared to how Paradox Live started in 2019, we have more staff now, but I don't think the way that I work together for music-related matters has changed very much.
--Was it decided from the start that the concept would be four teams doing battle onstage using hiphop?
Kazz: During our very first meeting, Hamada-san said that four teams would be competing, and a lot of the initial discussion was about how those teams were going to be divided up... that much had't been decided yet. BAE were the first team, and the face of the project, so we discussed really making them approachable and vibrant to make sure they made a good first impression. So we talked about giving them the appeal of dance pop and K-pop that was really catching fire in the western music scene at the time, so they'd be the kind of thing that a wide variety of people could easily enjoy.
Hamada: From the start I told them that I wanted to do authentic hiphop with each of the four teams, and that each character had a trauma. Then we debated about whether K-pop counted as a genre. [laughs]
Kazz: Yes, we did. [laughs] So when I was shown the BAE characters, I thought that they had a very international feel, so I found myself thinking, "I bet we can use a lot of English with them", so I put that forward as a challenge I'd like to take on. In fact, I even told MICRO, who is in charge of writing their lyrics, that it would be okay if their lyrics were mostly in English.
Hamada: I remember that! Kazz-san asked me if BAE's songs might be in English, and I happily answered, "yes, of course they could be in English!". After that, they were able to strike a good balance between English and Japanese.
Kazz: For TCW and Akan Yatsura, we considered dividing each team's style up into East Coast and West Coast. But we thought it might be a little hard to convey the East vs West dichotemy through the music alone, without any extra explanation, for people who aren't really familiar with hiphop already. So rather than focusing on "East coast", per se, we suggested that TCW emphasize the nuances of jazz hip hop. And on the other hand, for Akan Yatsura and their west coast elements, we proposed incorporating cheerful, open-minded elements like reggaeton and Chicano rap, which have spread from the west coast all the way down Latin America.
Hamada: That was the part I struggled with the most. Kazz-san helped me to figure out how to express the ideas I had in my head just through the lyrics and music. Without roots, it can very easily become inauthentic, so we made very sure to try and connect and refine the connections to convey the joy of hiphop while still maintaining the throughline of anime music and character songs, where the characters have solid roots that are easy to grasp.
Kazz: This was pretty early on-- about a year and a half, two years, before the first CD was released.
Hamada: Rather than just focusing on "what's trendy right now?", I tried to think about what kind of musical feel is popular, and there's a lot of complex factors to that-- what the BPM is, what the instrumentation is like, and the way the rap itself is delivered. I had an image in my mind of the character, the artist, and the sound in my mind, and I studied hiphop a lot to refine that.
Kazz: I'll be honest, at the time, I thought that 2D content and hiphop didn't belong in the same world as each other at all, so I was kind of confused at the start. Nowadays, hiphop has become a huge and important part of the entertainment maket, but it started out in the Bronx in New York in the late 1970s by young Black and Latino people, a piece of shared urban culture that came to be as a way of expressing their reactions to social problems like discrimination, poverty, and urban decay. As a musical genre, hiphop is really only one of the elements that makes up the whole culture-- you've got DJing, MCing (or rapping), breaking (or breakdancing), and graffiti. Behind all of that is a really clear history and social structure, and the ideas, spirit, and lifestyles that have their roots in it are really deeply interconnected. This is why it's so sensitive to new trends, and why arguments about "this is hiphop, but that's not hiphop" are so common. In a sense, it's a very delicate, profound culture. But half a century has passed since the birth of hiphop, and I think it's matured into an open-minded culture that can accept a variety of values within it. It's completely nonsense to think that you're going to be the one pushing boundaries, but even so, when you're expressing hiphop as music, it's really important to take its cultural background and context into consideration. It's essential to have an attitude of understanding and respect and to make an effort to communicate it carefully.
--Do you ever feel like the content doesn't mesh with that?
Kazz: No; in fact, I think quite the opposite. Hiphop has always accepted diverse values and developed in unique ways around the world, being influenced by all manner of regional differences, the era, the lifestyles of the people, and the cultures that those people give rise to. I think this flexibility, this omnivorousness, is the essence of hiphop, and part of the reason for its universal appeal. The setting of Paradox Live is different from anywhere in reality, in terms of locale and time period, so I think it's going to result in music that's different from real-life hiphop. With that in mind, what we need to do is not simply follow the template of what hiphop that exists in our present reality, but create something new called "Paradox Live". The idea is, we are trying to pursue a sense of originality that can only be born from a specific worldview and era. This philosophy is the core principle and driving reason behind my involvement with the project to this day.
Hamada: We wanted Paradox Live to be its own evolution of hiphop, rather than just a two-dimensional project that barely scratches the surface of real hiphop.
Kazz: I wanted to create a sense of realism for the characters, whose background are all deeply rooted in and influenced by hiphop. I think it's amazing how the characters, hiphop, and the music itself come together to create the series' world view. But I guess I'm speaking from the outside looking in. [laughs]
Hamada: No, you're a part of it, too?! [laughs]