Multimedia Adaptation by Pine Jam
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

Absurdly pretty rapping youths duel each other with their Phantom Metal, an accessory that resonates with the wearer’s emotions to produce image and sounds. Legendary club “CLUB Paradox” hosts a rap battle competition between four teams; BAE, The Cat’s Whiskers, cozmez, and Akanyatsura. Which pretty but comically unskilled rapper will take the prize?

Gee’s verdict: Negative Flow

As Glorio’s resident hip hop liker, it appears it’s once again my turn to complain about hilariously bad Japanese corpo rap. There really isn’t much to say about these shows because whatever criticisms I have don’t really matter in relation to the intended purpose of this type of product. This type of multimedia project exists to sell merchandise based on the pretty boys and on some level the quality of the music or writing really doesn’t matter. You follow something like this because you like the characters or the VA associated with them. It’s not trying to sell good hip hop nor does it care to.

And yet, as the first and final warrior ready to defend the honor of dearly departed Nujabes, I cannot let it stand. The hip hop in this anime is total dogshit! Taku Iwasaki was brought on as the show’s composer and his background tracks have better flow than the actual licensed tracks we’re meant to pay attention to. That makes a lot of sense because Iwasaki has a pretty solid track record of incorporating hip hop into his work. And maybe that’s the low key infuriating thing. There’s actually a lot of decent Japanese hip hop, even if you restrict it to composers with experience in anime/video games. Mabanua did fantastic work for MEGALOBOX and Lotus Juice will happily rap complete nonsense for you if you pay up. Punpee and Skirt probably aren’t up to anything now that the Odd Taxi movie is out. Fuck man, get Daoko on the phone. She hasn’t rapped in like 10 years but I bet she could still do it. And all of this isn’t even getting into Japan’s really impressive catalog of hip hop over the last 30 years. You had guys like RHYMESTER and King Giddra effortlessly emulating 90s style, leading to the jazzy vibes of Shing02 in the 2000s, and more modern talents like MIYACHI and JP THE WAVY.

Anyway I recognize none of this really matters, but if you’re even the slightest bit interested in the world of Japanese hip hop, there’s a lot of great examples to hit up, both old and new school. You don’t need to settle for Paradox Live.

Artemis’ verdict: Phantom Hip-Hop

Anime has a bit of a history of calling music ‘hip hop’ and then churning out songs that sound like generic idol group material with vague inspiration taken from the aforementioned genre. I doubt anyone’s shocked that Paradox Live falls into this category, but the fact remains that despite Japan actually having a very respectable hip-hop scene, this show pulls from absolutely none of that – it’s just an overly large cast of pretty boys dancing around in baggy clothes singing words with little rhyme and zero story. The background music is far, far better, so it’s a shame this wasn’t used for the actual main music parts.

I might have been okay with this if Paradox Live had gone the camp route and dialed everything up to 150%, a bit like SK8 but for hip-hop (even if it still wanted to use that phrase with scare quotes). Unfortunately, the anime plays everything entirely straight, and without the energy required to make it funny for more than a couple of scenes. It’s probably a good series to watch with a friend while pausing every few minutes to point out how ludicrous everything is, but other than that, I don’t see much value in this.