YMMV / Yoko Kanno

• Awesome Music: The Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, for starters. It's probably her best known work, due to the show's large fandom and longevity in The United States.
  • Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex's music is also a legendary example of techno and modern classical ear worms.
• Fandom Rivalry: Fans of Yuki Kajiura and fans of Kanno can really battle it out. But each side has its friendlies for both women.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Despite the majority of Kanno's work being original compositions, this is bound to happen in a catalogue as large and as varied as hers. There are even several YouTube videos claiming that Yoko has plagiarized or lifted from other composers.
  • Macross Plus' "Go Ri A Te" directly borrows from Ryuichi Sakamoto's "Thousand Knives."
  • "Ark" from the Brain Powerd soundtrack starts off like the Terminator theme with bagpipes. Och, I'll be back, laddie!
  • "Jig" from ∀ Gundam resembles John Williams' "Letting Off Steam" from Far and Away.
  • In Genesis of Aquarion, Kanno's piece "Exodus" borrows from "Victorius Titus", from the Titus score by Elliot Goldenthal.
  • "be human" from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex skirts a little too closely to Spiritualized's masterwork "Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space", down to opening with a vocal sample; and the little beeps sprinkled throughout.
  • "The Borderline", also from Macross Plus, is a pastiche of the David Lynch-produced Julee Cruise's album The Voice of Love, which included songs used in Lynch's film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, a film that the Japanese have an obsession over. One song off that album, "Up in Flames", contains the famous bassline that "The Borderline" paid homage to. Perhaps to underscore this point, the song is subtitled "dedicate for David" in the liner notes.
  • Several other songs fall squarely into pastiche territory, such as Stand Alone Complex's "CHRisTmas in the SiLenT ForeSt" hinting at Björk's work; "banquet firewall, which sounds like a remix of "Lux Aeterna" from Requiem for a Dream; or, her most damning piece, Cowboy Bebop's "On the Run," which is even named after the Pink Floyd song that it references.

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