Sound Check — Geoff Carter: This Yoko is easy listening

Friday, Oct. 20, 2000 | 10:41 a.m.

Geoff Carter's music review column appears Fridays in the Sun. Reach him at carter@vegas.com.

I'm a terrible music critic. A complete and utter failure on every front. I've never been to South by Southwest, own just one Neil Young record and could care less about Greil Marcus. Man, I haven't even heard Radiohead's "Kid A" yet.

Heaven knows how I got this job. If you want to know how my opinion of today's popular favorites stacks against those of Rolling Stone's critical pool, you had better stop reading now because I don't have one. And while Rolling Stone is singing the praises of Nelly Furtado or some such, I'm going to celebrate the work of a Japanese soundtrack composer whose seminal work came out more than a year ago.

I've been plugged into Yoko Kanno's music for the hip anime "Cowboy Bebop" for the better part of three weeks, almost to the exclusion of all else. I found it through a friend's recommendation and Napster; from that point it was just a hop, skip and a click to Anime Castle (animecastle.com/mcowboybebop.html) and bliss. I even got into "Bebop's" namesake series, snapping up the six DVDs two at a time despite the fact that I'd rarely had patience for anime in the past, being a bigger fan of pre-1960 Warner Bros. shorts and the feature-length animation of Disney's "Nine Old Men."

Now I'm hooked, and anyone who's heard "Cowboy Bebop's" opening theme, the big-band jazz stomper "Tank!," doesn't need to ask why. It's a Henry Mancini-esque rave-up with the heart of a carnivore: it doesn't just fill a room, it devours the room whole. "Tank!" is the best television theme I've heard in years; it deserves to become a standard on both sides of the Pacific. The rest of the music is, by and large, just as exemplary. "Cowboy Bebop" -- the series -- is a gleeful mishmash of film and music references, dry humor, stark horror and pop-culture flotsam.

Its quartet of late-21st century bounty hunters are just as likely to spend their time doing their laundry, tripping on mushrooms and hunting down a predatory beast that grew from moldy leftovers as they are to do their jobs, and Kanno's playful, diverse music follows them around every strange corner.

Listening to the soundtrack discs -- there's four of them, plus one remix album -- it's impossible to figure how all the styles could possibly serve one show. "Bad Dog No Biscuit" gallops along on a perky ska riff. "The Real Man" is a maleficent acid-jazz nightmare that wouldn't sound out of place in DJ Spooky's oeuvre. The blues-folk numbers, "Waltz for Zizi" "Digging My Potato" and "Forever Broke," are as gorgeously American as any you've heard in an Arizona bar. Kanno appropriates American artists as handily as the anime references Stanley Kubrick and John Ford. Much like another composer who made his mark in animation -- Warner's legendary Carl Stalling -- she views the entire history of popular music as fair game, and grabs what she needs to do her job: Kate Bush for "Flying Teapot," John Barry for "Spy," Devo for "Cats on Mars," Jack Keller's theme t o "Bewitched" for "Car 24," Vangelis for "Space Lion." Saxophonist John Zorn, a Stalling devotee, doesn't change suits as e! asily or completely.

The music to "Cowboy Bebop" really should be listened to as a body of work (hearing it within the context of the show isn't a bad idea, either), but if you want to get a quick feel for the music before you lay money down on a bunch of imported discs, there's MP3 clips of the songs all over the Web. Find "Tank!," "Car 24," "The Real Man" and "Space Lion" and give them an ear. In return, I promise to borrow Nelly Furtado's debut from somebody and try to knock myself back into the mainstream. You've got the fun part.