15th Anniversary of the Kenji Yamamoto controversy.

[TheBigBoy]

His Kai score was great. Let the man rip off songs who cares.

[rweasp]

Here is a recentish image of him along with some the Budokai music team members from 2024 in a sort of mini reunion.



From L to R: Teruo Murakami (recording engineer), Kenji Yamamoto, Unknown, Kanon Yamamoto (his daughter and fellow musician), Simon Phillips (drums, former drummer of Toto).

He seems to be doing quite well judging by Kanon's socials.

Also, as a fun little titbit, I asked him who his favorite DB character was.



Never would have guessed 18, thought maybe Trunks given the amount of amazing themes he has.

[MCDaveG]

What a bummer! I fell in love with Super Butouden 3 Themes back in the day, I did like the Budokai 3 music as well...
It wasn't long, until I found many of these comparisons on the internet. It was mostly 70s/80s tracks and I thought, well, that's quite a homage here and there... then I finally heard Propaganda versus Battle Point Unlimited and though whoa, hold your horses.

It was problematic even then but when he outright copied music from Avatar and Horner... come on, that was unhinged and honestly pissed me off. As a musician myself, I am OK when you get inspired by something good, like bassline idea and tweak it or use it somewhere in part as a nod.
As a listener, I really like work of James Horner, since Aliens. While I don't like Avatar as a movie, the war piece of music was great
and then in Kai, you hear the same thing. Flatout steal, something that was composed for something else, it doesn't have a place in Dragon Ball.

Yamamoto was great arranger and musician by skill, I really liked the setup and sound design as well, but he wasn't a great composer sadly, having to rely on stealing other's ideas and that is a shame, because I really liked some of his pieces and I will always love OG Chala Head Chala with his signature, but his approach during Kai got even more blatant and stupid.

[coola]

I'm surprised it took this long. Even back in the 2000s, I knew the Budokai music sound a bit off.

I would guess Toei just didn’t care until international pressure?

Like Dairanger has a recurring motif that is blatantly a rip off of the Imperial March from Star Wars but since that show didn’t really leave Japan beyond a very late DVD release in 2017 I don’t think it really mattered to Toei

And it was not just one rip off

Spoiler:

Ryo father was basically Vader and his redemption arc was 1:1 copy paste

[PowerPhantom245]

It's hard to believe it's been 15 years since that was a thing. lol

[rweasp]

I've always thought that Yamamoto was probably kicking himself so hard considering this happened literally right before the Dragon Ball resurgence with Battle of Gods. I think its safe to say he would be composer on it if he didn't get fired. And I have always wondered what he could do with a huge movie budget with extended time to compose - I like to think he would be less inclined to look at other works in this situation given the scale and exposure. But maybe its for the best that he was let go when he was considering that any accusations against him in a huge international movie release would probably bring more attention and increase the likelihood of actual lawsuits against Toei. I think some people need to remember that neither he or Toei were sued or had any kind of legal action taken against them, he was simply let go.

But on the flip side, there's also quite a lot of trigger happy responses on YouTube by armchair "investigators" that really don't know what they are talking about regarding what counts as plagiarism. A good example is from people claiming that the Super Butoden 2 intro is "plagiarized" from a tiny section from Eleanor by the Beatles, which is such a basic and small melody that I have heard it numerous times before in other songs. Like I said, people have now become so trigger happy that they are now comically scanning for literally any similarity to other works and letting it cloud their judgment with nothingburgers. As a professional musician, it is actually quite annoying because instead of focusing on the truly egregious and indefensible cases (BPU, Avatar, etc), the rheteric has shifted to comical over analysis that overlaps with normal song writing, regular chord progressions, riffs, etc. Yamamoto WAS a plagiarizer, a big one in some cases, but not to the extent that some people have decided to claim. HOWEVER, he 100% only has himself to blame for this (potentially erroneous) behavior from fans.

As for what he is up to now, I only know that he works at Music Airport with his close friend Hideki Matsutake. There was also a video of him from a few years ago performing with his daughter Kanon and Kageyama at some kind of annual family performance, suggesting that he and Kageyama are still really really close. And then of course you have the image above with him and his friend Simon Phillips from Toto. Honestly, it really doesn't seem like what happened affected his personal or professional relationships with people that much, if at all. His reputation is still in the mud at media companies and no one will ever hire him, but its at least nice to see he still has a life and his friends are sticking with him.

[GhostEmperorX]

There was also a video of him from a few years ago performing with his daughter Kanon and Kageyama at some kind of annual family performance, suggesting that he and Kageyama are still really really close.

Additionally, he tends to be mentioned on Nana Kageyama's channel as "special thanks", and she's Kageyama's 2nd daughter (who also happens to be the arranger of her father's new Sparking Zero song).

[JulieYBM]

Two Kageyama family members working together on a song is kinda really fuckin' cool, not gonna lie.

[funrush]

The Budokai soundtrack is one of my favorite video game soundtracks ever. Those Steve Lukather guitars rip. And although I think Kikuchi still holds the crown when it comes to Dragon Ball scores, I think Yamamoto made an insane amount of progress in only like two years scoring the show and if he were allowed to stay on through the rest of Kai and Super he probably would have eventually become the GOAT Dragon Ball composer to me. There are so many awesome songs just on those first two Kai CDs. A lot of really catchy and epic stuff. Up till the very end it was heat, I love that SS2 Gohan transformation song and it's too bad it never came out on a CD and we just have to make do with edits where people have to splice Gohan/narrator out of it. Some of them sound surprisingly clean but obviously not gonna be CDQ since you're ripping out a range of the frequencies.

I get why they got rid of him. Even if he's only interpolating every 1 in 20 songs or something like that, it only takes one person to say "you didn't ask me if you could use that, I'm suing you" and the people in charge of Dragon Ball don't want to risk going to court over this shit even if they get an awesome OST in exchange.

It's just unfortunate. Not only cause we lost out on potential cool future songs, but also because of the whole clusterfuck of replacing his stuff with Kikuchi's last minute and now there's the whole thing of "which score do I watch" and Yamamoto's score cuts out after a certain episode. His score is replaced on the Budokai rereleases. Even if you buy the Kai DVDs off Amazon now and forget Yamamoto's score exists, Saiyan thru Cell have an assortment of Kikuchi songs and Buu brings on Sumitomo, it would have been nice if it could have been the same guy throughout the entire Kai and we probably would have got that if it weren't for the scandal. The other part that sucks is you just know the scores this guy did are probably low priority if not outright blacklisted when it comes to reprinting the CDs or putting it on streaming.

Anyway that's my thoughts. That's crazy it's been that long. Much love to him (and you all), hope he's been alright the past decade and a half.