Before I watched any Cowboy Bebop, I interrogated the title. It’s a weird title: it’s not the name of a character, and it doesn’t describe the setting. I considered how the title might reflect on the themes in the work, and I concluded it partially represented the emotional unavailability of the Wild West cowboy. Industrial farming made the cowboy obsolete at the turn of the twentieth century. However, the cowboy continues to exist as an archetypal image of a kind of Jungian hero. The cowboy is a lone wanderer who lives in an expanse of primordial land and sky in the American frontier; he moves from town to town without obligations or permanent connections. The cowboy does not seek adventure, but he finds it wherever he goes; he will only stop when he either catches his last bullet, or when he learns there’s more to life than dodging bullets. In Spike’s case, he wanted to give up his life of gunfights but couldn’t.
From a Jungian perspective, the cowboy is a Hero who has encountered some kind of Initiation that threw him into a life of action. The cowboy seeks understanding in a world of action and reaction--the West is too dangerous for introspection. He is not a hermit since he is driven to connect with people in small towns. The cowboy cannot ride the plains forever. At each town he arrives in, his masculine instincts encourage the cowboy to resolve a crime, right an injustice, or defend innocents by way of violence. When his job is done, he may leave, having not encountered any transformative events (in this way he is a static character), or he may stay, having found a community that understands him or a woman he loves. Throughout most of the series Spike is static; his character doesn’t change between jobs, and up to his final fight with Vicious he is hotheaded. Spike Spiegel is a cowboy insomuch as he is a sophomoric drifter always looking for the next job, and always searching for his perfect woman.
The “Bebop” part didn’t click with me as strongly as the “Cowboy” part did. Yoko Kanno and Seatbelts wrote and recorded a few jazz compositions for the soundtrack, although much of the original music is blues-inspired. In my research, I found an old blog called The Jazz Messengers, written pseudonymously by Fata Morgana. In a post titled “What’s in a Name?”, Morgana suggests that “Bebop” describes the flourishes in the script and by the crew aboard the Bebop. First, the myriad musical and (dated) pop culture references are akin to jazz musicians quoting portions of well-known songs as part of their performance. Cowboy Bebop pays homage to John Woo and Bruce Lee; it lampoons Yuri Geller and Theodore Kaczynski. At no point does writer Keiko Nobumoto hide what she’s quoting and restyling. Neither does Kanno. Online commenters like to bill Seatbelts as a jazz band, but their influences are legion. “Tank!” is a jazz song, yes, but “Bad Dog No Biscuits” is a 1950s ska song, and “Waltz for Zizi” is, well, a waltz. “Felt Tip Pen” is a honky-tonk inspired song that makes heavy use of blues notes on a steel guitar, both of which are aspects of blues not found in jazz.
Second, Morgana says the Bebop crew are boheme
just as the founders of bebop jazz were. Jazz lost favor with the masses
when it morphed into bebop, but the musicians leading that movement were unaffected by jazz’s transformation into art music.
They played and developed their style throughout the 1940s without regard for their mass-market popularity. Spike and company operate in a similar way--they [do] their own bad shiz,
and they don’t care for fame. Each member hunts bounties for personal reasons, and not for the notoriety alluded to in the beginning of “Cowboy Funk.” And the Bebop crew behaves like a jazz band, improvising through their escapades with little more than a starting melody. They play off of and react to each other to capture their bounties, with little direct communication between them. Consider both parts of “Jupiter Jazz,” where Faye, despite leaving the Bebop, collaborates with Spike and Jet to foil one of Vicious’ arms deals.
Synthesized, the title, Cowboy Bebop, represents a line-up of bohemian bounty hunters, too brash for their own good, trying to make a woolong the easiest way they know how: shooting, chasing, and KOing guys with Jeet Kune Do. While they work together, the team members rarely work side-by-side. One bounty hunter will take the lead in a chase, and their partners will back their play but never plan it ahead of time. Fame and vast wealth are never the goals. Faye wants to pay her debt; Jet wants to enforce the law on the edges of society; Ed wants to have a good time; and Spike wants to find Julia. Not one of them will give up. Their fate is to go out with a bang.