In the early 2000s, Dragon Ball Z and nu metal became interwoven thanks to fanmade music videos that molded the adolescence of an era.
It’s 2003. I’ve just downloaded a tribute to Dragon Ball Z’s number one anti-hero Vegeta set to Linkin Park’s hit single ‘In The End’ on KaZaA. The melodrama of Vegeta’s many headstrong defeats set to a bittersweet ballad about failed romance causes my 13-year-old self to choke up, completely absorbed in his misunderstood complexity and Chester Bennington’s gorgeous vocals.
Linkin Park were my favourite band, Dragon Ball Z my favourite anime show, and their combination was a complete summation of my early teens. Linkin Park’s music was loud and distorted yet emotive and poetic, answering the macho-but-principled ideals of Dragon Ball Z’s heroes, who were driven to cascading new levels of rage-induced power by seeing innocence suffer and their friends killed.
When mixed just right, cuing transitions and changes to the right melodic shifts and sections, they seemed made for each other. The sampling at the start of ‘In The End’ lines up perfectly with the crackling of Super Saiyan Vegeta’s aura, and Bennington’s soaring bridge of “I put my trust in you…” becomes transcendent when placed over Goku and Vegeta’s forced allyship to defeat Cooler.
I tried so hard
Piccolo got a treatment with the same song, an adage to his role as the unsung lynchpin of the Z Fighters. I watched both over and over, awash in all sorts of emotions surrounding girls and bullies and school, in between sessions of Pokémon and Final Fantasy games. A troubled home life occurred outside my headphones, and these videos acted as a conduit for those bubbling emotions.
A slightly less tearful one involved Linkin Park’s ‘Forgotten’, another cut from the genre-defining album Hybrid Theory, put to Vegeta and Goku’s mammoth scuffle with Saiyan muscleman Broly. The bouncy chorus matched their martial arts moves, and the underrated, ambient, slightly electronic quality of the verse sat right atop the dystopian wasteland that was their battlefield.
Linkin Park always had a clear anime influence, with a mech on the cover of Reanimation, a Gundam appearing in the video for ‘Somewhere I Belong’, and ‘Nobody’s Listening’ on the group’s second album, Meteora, featuring shakuhachi, a Japanese flute. But even without those signs, you could hear it in the compositions, where pop, metal, hip hop, and electronica all synergized similarly to Dragon Ball Z’s fusion of sci-fi, fantasy, comedy, horror, and action.
And got so far
Neither had much regard for genre, Akira Toriyama escalating Dragon Ball as he saw fit, just as Mike Shinoda and the other members of Linkin Park would hop between soundscapes song-to-song. They were each cornerstones of alternative culture, the CDs that were in constant rotation and the TV that simply couldn’t be missed.
Dragon Ball Z was the first thing I needed to watch every week, come Frieza or high water. I’d call my best friend after nearly every episode to dissect what just went down. I tried everyone’s patience by attempting to record the entire Namek Saga on VHS when Cartoon Network held an all-day rerun, coming into the living room to switch tapes repeatedly. My life was shaped around Goku, Gohan, Vegeta, Piccolo, Trunks, and Krillin and their endeavours to stop every villain that dared threaten Earth.
Hybrid Theory became the first album I bought using my own money, for what I’d soon learned was distinctly too much from a local music, games, and trading card games story built into the back of a newsagent. Didn’t matter, because that record justified every penny within months of being played and played regardless.
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But in the end
They were my first conscious obsessions. I’d been a big fan of Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and WCW, but this was different because they were things I felt like I discovered on my own, and — perhaps more importantly — my mom approved of neither.
Dragon Ball Z seemed way more violent than other shows (considering the amount of attempted genocide, I can see why), and Linkin Park was a fashionable heavy metal band. Luckily for me, they didn’t use expletive language like Slipknot or Korn, so when the Hybrid Theory lyrics sheet was grabbed out of my hands, there was nothing to confirm suspicions I was being poorly influenced.
I was drawn to them because of their artistry; feeling rebellious for doing so only pushed me in further. Their crossover, then, created a singularity. Something of an early-noughties equivalent to Nine Inch Nails being on The Crow soundtrack, except for young teenagers wearing tracksuits who ration a couple of hours dial-up internet a week to find out more about anime movies and JRPGs their small town shops will never stock. (I’d learn much later Deftones were used in some American Dragon Ball Z releases, making the connection very literal.)
That became a side effect of the AMVs: piecing together scenes from the anime show and associated anime movies that I couldn’t get through our cable package. Through the clips I managed to discern Broly and Cooler, tracking down forum discussions and fansites that ran down their respective feature films.
It doesn’t even matter
From there I learned about the wider Dragon Ball franchise, able to at least read about things I wouldn’t get to see for years. Dragon Ball Z was eventually moved from Cartoon Network to the Sky digital-exclusive Toonami UK right as the Majin Buu Saga was heating up. I was crestfallen (and still a bit sour, if I’m being totally honest) since going digital just wasn’t something we were going to do, but at least I had some way of engaging in what I was missing.
The anime music videos were like beacons, sent out into the digital aether by nameless, faceless fans. Finding them made me realize there was a huge community of Dragon Ball and anime fanatics, people who cared as much as I did, and if I trawled the information superhighway, maybe I’d find them.
It’s hard to articulate the lasting effect Dragon Ball Z and Linkin Park have had on me, given I still actively enjoy both. They changed my life in numerous ways. What I can say is that downloading those mysterious AMVs off the internet made me feel as cool as I’ve ever felt. Really, what else does a 13-year-old want in life?
Check out our guide on how to watch Dragon Ball if you want to go back to the start of Goku’s journey, and we have a list of the best anime like Demon Slayer if this has you in the mood to watch something action-packed.
