Review of Detroit Metal City
“I will accomplish the feat of saying 'rape' eleven times in one second” -Krauser, Detroit Metal City This show is utterly ridiculous. Recommended by a MAL friend for its "give no fucks" vulgar and insensitive humor, Detroit Metal City certainly had quite a name to live up to. Do the rape and satanic jokes go too far? Well, there was only one way to find out. Adapted from an iconic manga written by Kiminori Wagasuki, DMC has one of the most memorable anime intro sequences I can recall. You find the main protagonist, Soichi Negishi riding a train and taking about joining high school with the aspiration ofwanting to become a modern folky pop artist. His music is light and melodic, and is reminiscent of something you'd hear in a frozen yogurt parlor. But... Negishi didn't quite fulfill his dreams of becoming a pop star... actually quite the opposite occurred. He ended up singing lead vocals for the most popular underground death metal band in all of Japan.... named after the famous KISS song, Detroit Metal City. Although how exactly he got there is never really explored in DMC's short 156 minute cumulative run time, I don't really think it's necessary. You basically follow the heinous escapades of Negishi and his death metal band as he struggles to find solace while trying to quit the strange life he has found himself in. All while spitting lyrics about killing his parents and humping Tokyo Tower in the rain. I can't even make this shit up.
To watch DMC properly, I'd recommend coming in with no expectations or high sense of politically-correctedness, and just turn your brain off. There isn't much of a storyline, and there's no analytical character development. Just raw, unadulterated vulgarity spewing left and right. I mean I'm pretty sure there's a line where Negishi actually calls a girl he cares for a "trash cunt". I literally spit my beer out when I heard that. There were literally times I was gasping for air I was laughing so damn hard. It's certainly not an anime I'd show my kids, until their older than 18, or 21 or at least 25... DMC pulls no punches, and for that I'll give Studio 4C mad props. You can't get humor like this in any other anime I can think of, maybe the closest would be Chromartie high school. And the jokes in DMC make Chromartie High School look like an episode of Sesame Street. The whole premise is actually a tad depressing, almost like Negishi suffers from a messed up version of schizophrenia. The way his Krauser persona flips on like a light switch is nuts. You could see it building like a gurgling volcano about to erupt.
There's not an exorbitant amount of character development in DMC either. There's some with Negishi, and also a tad with “The Capitalist Pig”, a middle-aged Japanese man he tortures onstage at each concert. Negishi actually ends up coming to his rescue once he finds out he doubles as a convenience store clerk in one of DMC's rare moral moments. His crush has possibly the worst perception known to man, as somehow she never mistakes Negishi's rude outbursts as routine behavior, or that he is even living a double life. His band mates are equally as lude, and push Negishi's boundaries of sanity and morality during each show. Perhaps the funniest part of the entire show is that virtually none of the humor is meant to be funny when delivered by its respective characters. Most notably are the die hard fans of DMC trying to explain exactly what they believe Krauser (Negishi's metal alias) is doing. He trips and falls on a woman and they think he's raping her. He leaves a tv interview to juggle a date with his secret crush and they assume he went to hell and back a few times. Not to mention, DMC's manager is some sort of psychotic nymphomaniac who gets off on Krauser's derelict behavior. Did I mention how utterly ridiculous this show is?
The OST is nostalgic in a way to me because of all the heavy metal I used to listen to in high school. The type of music with words that can be incoherent and no one seems to care, but the heavier and faster, the better. Every time Negishi played his pop music, it made me chuckle because of the vastly different vibe it gave of in the show. Especially hysterical was how he was constantly shut down or interpreted in a joking matter when he played his acoustic nonsense. The OP was epic and I often listened to it, and the ED was more poppy, probably to illustrate the juxtaposed dual personalities Negishi occupied. The art is nothing stellar, but it gets its point across. When an anime has this lax art style, I tend to take it less seriously, which is really only to my benefit if it's a comedy.
As much as I did laugh my ass off, on a critical level DMC is sort of a "one trick pony". As aforementioned, there's nothing complex and intellectual going on in the background here. It's brash and unapologetic, and it's just a nice break from modern anime normalcy. I enjoyed it for what it was. I would only recommend this series to someone in need of a good laugh and who isn't easily offended. I mean, seriously, do not watch this unless you are apathetic and vulgar-minded. But... if you stay with it, this show is some seriously good shit. A comedic masterpiece. I enjoyed every second of it. Thanks as always for reading!