I went in expecting a joke. That was my mistake. A new piece over on MSN takes apart the music of the idol arc from The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You, and the short version is that a comedy anime about a guy with an impossible number of soulmates has been quietly building some of the most deliberately unhinged pop music in current animation.

The show was already a chaos engine before the idol arc. It runs on hyperbole the way other shows run on plot. But the music, according to the piece, is where the production stops winking and starts committing. Guitars that lurch between genres mid-phrase. Arrangements that parody idol-pop tropes while somehow also nailing them, which is the hard part. Anyone can make fun of a thing. Making the fun version also slap requires actual musicianship, and apparently this crew has it.

What got me is the meta layer. The arc is about idol culture from the inside, picking an oshi, the economics of devotion, the whole machinery, and the songs are written as functional artifacts of that world rather than commentary floating above it. The parody only works because the songs would survive contact with the real industry. It's the Spinal Tap principle: the fake band has to be a real band first, or the joke evaporates.

And deliberately broken guitar work always gets me. A guitarist who plays wrong on purpose is doing something harder than playing right. You have to know exactly where the line sits to step over it with that kind of precision. The MSN piece frames it as unhinged, and it is, but it's the unhinged-ness of a controlled experiment. Every wrong note is load-bearing.

I keep thinking about the trope layer too. Idol anime has accumulated decades of formula at this point, and audiences know the beats the way they know a nursery rhyme. So when a show bends those beats even slightly, the whole song tips sideways and you feel it in your sternum. The trick being described here is exactly that. Familiar enough to sing along with, warped enough that you're never quite safe.

Comedy music lives and dies on whether it earns a second listen. Joke songs usually don't. The joke lands once and then the file rots in your playlist forever. But the stuff described in this arc sounds like it's built to survive the joke, which is rarer than it should be and worth sitting with at 1 AM with the volume higher than it needs to be.

If you've been sleeping on the show because the title reads like a dare, the music might be the side door in. It usually is.