Make Believe Melodies Logo

Category Archives: J-Pop

The “Swag Of The Year” Award/Best K-Pop To J-Pop Crossover Of 2011: “I Am The Best”

Posted on by

Regardless of what claims borderline-nationalist J-Pop fans squawked out, Korean pop artists locked themselves into the Japanese pop-culture landscape this year, going from foreign curio to accepted face on the music charts. Girls’ Generation and KARA started releasing Japan-only songs and albums, releases which did very very very well. K-Pop boy bands started hitting the jackpot here as well, and even more girl groups like T-ara and Rainbow debuted in Japan. Most importantly, they became part of the cultural language – Girls’ Generation and KARA appear on TV regularly, K-Pop plays in the background of commercials and variety shows, and child star Ashida Mana flipped out when KARA came to her birthday. Personally, I saw the true tastemakers of this country give K-Pop the seal of approval – my junior high school students embraced KARA and Girls’ Generation. Now I regularly have students talk to me about their favorite members (“Mr. Patrick, do you like Tiffany?”) and I see them choreograph dances to “Gee” alongside the latest AKB48 song. Save for the one kid who wrote “K-Poop” on the board, that is.

So as the year comes to a close and we sift through a lot of great K-to-J pop songs…and more to come, where is “Bubble Pop” man?…choosing the best should be hard, right? Lots to go through, yeah? Nope, this couldn’t be easier. No K-Pop song shipped to Japan sounded better than 2NE1’s fist-meet-face banger “I Am The Best.” Hell, no pop song anywhere might have sounded better in 2011.

2NE1, a Korean four-piece that criss-crosses between singing and rapping, proved to be the most divisive K-Pop act to debut in Japan this past year. Most of the Japanese English-speaking press/media types championed Girls’ Generation and (to a much lesser degree) KARA as welcome alternatives to the ham-left-out-in-the-desert smell of most contemporary J-Pop. People who mainly tweet about complex legal scandals and old woodblock prints were suddenly raising the SNSD flag or commenting on how let-down they were by “The Boys.” But 2NE1…2NE1 splits people. Ignoring lame dismissals like “they are ugly” (nope), a lot of people singing the praises of “Mr. Taxi” became hesitant in the presence of 2NE1, the group’s hyper-maximalist production and rapping bits throwing people for a loop. Plus, 2NE1 are one of the few groups not to really set the J-Pop world on fire yet – due to poor timing around the March 11 earthquake, their debut EP received no promotion. Things picked up at the end of the year, though, with the release of the single “Go Away.”

2NE1’s 2011 mini-album, though, hangs around with Girls’ Generation’s Japanese debut…and slays anything KARA put out this year in Japan. SPIN named it the sixth best pop album of the year…on a list featuring Girls’ Generation at 18 and Perfume’s JPN at 14. “Ugly” and “Lonely” show how to write a ballad that isn’t a ctrl + c type, the sort littering the J-Pop landscape. Despite having its video scraped clean of any social commentary, “Go Away” (not on the mini-album, but released later) remains a catchy kiss-off. 2NE1…really good pop stars!

Yet their single “I Am The Best” exists outside of their discography, outside of any national ranking system and possibly beyond the total grasp of the human mind. “I Am The Best” is a thousand distant suns supernova-ing to form a giant, flaming cosmic middle finger aimed at some unspecified “you,” a celestial “fuck you” directed towards an unimportant speck. “I Am The Best” is the pop song about being in the club to end all pop songs about being in the club, the members of 2NE1 basically becoming the club and throwing everyone out. Ya know that Fleet Foxes’ song about wanting to not be a special snowflake and just wanting to work in an orchard? “I Am The Best” hears Robin Pecknold’s helplessness blues, throws him to the ground by his grungy beard and steals his apples.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7_lSP8Vc3o”]

As you can see from the last paragraph, I can only talk about this song in terms of violence and/or explosions. Appropriately, let’s turn to the world of professional wrestling to discuss how this song sounds. Going by Survivor Series rules, the members of 2NE1 stare down a team composed of cocky Diplo, flamboyant David Guetta, dastardly will.i.am and a mysterious figure representing all of Asian pop music manifest in the body of Rain. Match starts, Diplo charges out the gate only to get chokeslammed Undertaker-style down to the mat, hand still clenched around his throat to prevent any dumb vocals to mar the song. David Guetta is more stylish…more European…but 2NE1 match him with stylish brutality, explaining why the dude is locked in a Sharpshooter tapping out hard. will.i.am, aware his version of pop-rap just can’t compete, drags in chairs and tables but…thwack, powerbombed right through some wood. Rain is no competition so 2NE1 make like The Rock and have some fun with this one, adding in a vague “Asian” feel to the song….errrr, throwing him through the Spanish announcer’s table.

OK, metaphors off for a second. “I Am The Best” sonically grabs from a wide array of Western sources and transforms them into something that sounds nothing like the source material. “I Am The Best” sounds bigger, more threatening than anything else I’ve heard all year. I heard this in a club and people lost it. Yet what really pushes “I Am The Best” above everything else is also what made everyone fall in love with Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy last year – this absolute, unflinching belief in how hot-shit they are, 2NE1 going even further by not admitting they may be assholes. It’s nice to have big confident music during bleak times like this, not to mention a thousand times more enjoyable than most of the “self-reflective” (read: boring) music 20-somethings pumped out this year. Just…how nice is it to hear something oozing such confidence, even if it is probably misplaced bluster? One line of this song translated goes “Even if you were me, you’d be envious of this body,” while another one goes “If we’re talking about my value, I’m a billion dollar baby.”

Best part? Whereas so many other K-Pop groups had to make Japan-specific videos for their music, the Korean clip for “I Am The Best” just came to Japanese shores basically the way it was – full of 2NE1 smashing baseball bats against glass and spraying machine-gun bullets into nothing in particular. Though the song itself is a labored-over track taking musical trends and juicing them up, the lyrics and video give off the sense 2NE1 just don’t give a fuck. “I Am The Best,” in a year where the word got overplayed to death, was real swag.

Review: Perfume JPN Part 1

Posted on by

The Only-Music Review Of Perfume’s JPN

The following only deals with Perfume within the context of Perfume – no mentions of outside artists, or outside distractions. Stay tuned for part two, which will tackle those issues.

The easiest knock against JPN is that it barely constitutes a new album, more of a glorified compilation disc given the fact nine of the 14 songs here were released as singles over the last year and a half. Dismiss “The Opening” as simply an opening and that leaves only four new tracks from Japan’s premier techno-pop trio. Even the hardcore types populating Perfume message boards wish for more fresh material, seeing as they already own all these singles and are essentially paying $30 for a quartet of tunes they haven’t heard.

Yet two thoughts make me view this complaint as silly. First, Perfume are a big, popular J-Pop act and not every Japanese person is an obsessive shut-in ordering 7,000 copies of the latest pop single to boost their imaginary girlfriend’s sales. Nope, they are ordinary people who probably buy like three or four new CDs a year, and Perfume might as well be one of them so naturally it is a collection of material released over the past year they’ve heard on TV but would also like to play in the car.

Second, and more convincing to me, is that these singles are strong. I’ve written about nearly every track on JPN at some point starting in 2010 which is why scribbling this seems sorta difficult – I’ve already gushed about or gnashed my teeth at the bulk of this record, and just seeing the tracklisting for the first time convinced me I could write the majority of this review back in October. This series of six (!) pages probably work better than the following sentences, as those see me reacting to each new Perfume song as they appeared. “Voice” remains a classic slice of auto-pilot Perfume, while the stutter-stepping “Nee” comes off as clumsy compared to the much-better executed retro whirl of “Laser Beam” (here presented in a slightly choppier mix that isn’t as strong as the single edit, but hardly torpedoing it). “575” still stands as Perfume’s sexiest hour, all sleek synth minimalism and fuzzy longing building up to a joyful “rap” segment. “Natural ni Koishite” is pure pop written in Batman “bams!” and “zonks!,” still gushworthy. “Kasukana Na Kaori” remains one of the worst, middle-of-the-road types of balladry by a group who shouldn’t be reduced to such end-credits drudgery. Only “Fushizen Na Girl” sees me swinging my opinion around – back in spring of 2010, this song sounded like ho-hum Perfume, especially compared to the boom-bap of “Natural.” Here, positioned as the penultimate track, it ends up a surprisingly memorable number, a wooshy rush that feels like a climax on JPN.

So that’s two personal best-of locks (“Natural,” “575”) two really really really good songs (“Laser Beam,” “Fushizen”), one pretty good number (“Voice”), one meh (“Nee”) and one unmitigated disaster. That’s a pretty solid hitting average, yet to be honest JPN feels like a slight disappointment because it COULD have been much better. Going into Tower to purchase this thing, visions of this being a top-three album danced in my head – the existing singles just needed a push from the new tracks. Unfortunately, the four debuted songs on JPN aren’t strong enough to elevate this LP to the next level. Three of them are solid enough – “My Color” boasts copy-paste Perfume verses but also features a strong chorus, highlighted by burbling electronics and particularly high-pitched synths. “Have A Stroll” sees producer Yasutaka Nakata summoning up the spirit of Perfume around the time of <em?Complete Best, the ultra-simple structure bringing to mind “Vitamin Drop,” yet also standing as a reminder of how much Nakata and Perfume have grown since those days. The best new cut is “Kokoro no Supotsu,” which works like a reverse “My Color.” The intro is all rain-against-car-window keyboard as Perfume gaze out and sing wistfully about something (at this point it is important to note lyrics rarely prove to be of much value to Perfume’s music), a surprisingly lonely backdrop for the usually cheery bunch. Everything surges into a “why am I so sad!” chorus, a catchy bit that also isn’t as interesting as those more sparse seconds. Rounding out the new songs is “Toki no Hari” which makes the aforementioned “Kasukana Kaori” sound like Revolver. Although this song presents a cool idea – a song where Perfume aren’t vocally manipulated by computers – Nakata wastes this on sub-nursery school marching music existing only to appear on the CDs wedding houses have on hand when the couple forgets to click “burn” on iTunes. Just dreadful.

What got my hopes up for JPN to possibly be a blockbuster album were the two singles dropped a month before the official release of the album, a pair of songs that stand as some of the group’s sneakiest, best work to date. “Glitter” is pure ecstasy, Nakata’s maximalist pop production sparkling extra bright. Perfume have often been labelled as “dance pop” or “techno pop,” yet “Glitter” actually comes close to sounding like dance or techno music, run through the group’s chart-focused filter. Check the album-mix intro, shining off until Nakata peels back layers to reveal some piano chords that could have been jacked from “The Strings Of Life.” It builds up and then…Perfume themselves enter and “Glitter” turns into pop delirium. It’s the sound of Nakata shunning proper structure in favor of a spinning feeling, spiked by the way they murmur the titular word post chorus, like the sounds coming out of their mouths were made of the party supply.

And then there is album closer “Spice.” Initially it sounds like something Nakata could toss-off before slipping to sleep, a Perfume song unfolding at half the speed and seemingly without most of the digital fireworks that have come to define their sound. Yet “Spice” hides considerable depth on the production side, Nakata constructing a catchy Katamari of a song that just rolls over everything, pushed on by one of the better vocal performances the three singers could give. Deep in the mix Nakata sprinkles some 8-bit bloops around (which, to break the central tenant of this review but is needed, brings to mind The Avalanches or even small-scale Timbaland), while he also plays a perfect game of Tetris with the vocals, placing them so they cushion and bounce off of one another just right. He even practically winks at the camera with one sound – the singers in Perfume have long been dubbed “robots,” “Auto-tuned” out of their minds and serving a role any schmuck could (allegedly) do. There are snippets of truth – Nakata is the architect for sure – yet on “Spice” he makes one synth line a particularly high-pitched sample of the group singing, as if freeing them up to not be apps here.

And that is what ultimately makes “Spice” a standout – the singing, one of the best performances from all four members of the group (Nakata swooping in with the tuning when needed and arranging it just right). The best moment comes late, when member Ayaka Nishiwaki’s voice suddenly slips out of Auto-tune and just comes out naturally. Nakata fiddles with this trick at various other points on JPN, and even devoted an entire terrible track to the idea, yet on the final song this moment feels like a legitimate surprise and like a glimpse at the group’s humanness. It doesn’t last long, but it’s a nice detail in a song loaded with them.

So that’s JPN – a handful of amazing singles, a lot of really good albeit par-for-the-course material and a brutal three-song stretch in the middle featuring two of the group’s worst songs. Heading into this I expected a masterpiece and heading out I felt a little letdown, but with time I can see exactly what JPN is – a Perfume album. Obvious, yes, but I’m talking about how this is an album from a singles-oriented outfit whose previous full-lengths highlighted the big hits, threw in some solid filler and also featured some annoying missteps (see the grating taxi-cab techno of Complete Best’s “Perfume” or Triangle’s “Edge,” my personal most hated Perfume song…one of the best aspects of JPN is it doesn’t feature plodding bloghouse dress-up). Like previous efforts, Nakata has created some interesting steps forward for the Perfume sound while mostly delivering mutations of the trio’s established sound to a public that has come to really said sound. JPN is Perfume being Perfume, and that sounds fine to me.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edyARJq9sgM”]

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R-fu2jHvrw”]

UPDATE: A few edits were made tonight, mostly just fixing some grammar and spelling errors. The only content change came with a line about the Western media and their perceptions of Japan – I realize I’m not completely sure about my statement so I deleted it. Gonna go eat a burrito now woooooo.

Controlled Karaoke: Arashi Suffer Technical Glitch Live, Real Singing Voices Come Out But Really I Am Here To Tell You A Story About Girls’ Generation

Posted on by

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqtf5TOr3Ac”]

So Arashi went on a Fuji TV music show a few days ago and had some technical difficulties. The group’s pre-recorded vocals failed to play, forcing the group to gasp actually sing. This news comes from Japan Post who slapped the headline “Sound Equipment Failure Reveals Japanese Boy Band’s Atrocious Singing” which I don’t blame the dude for going with…that’s quality “grab attention” work, good hustle…but like most headlines aimed at grabbing eyeballs, is pretty overblown. Watch the above clip and…they don’t really sound that bad. Yeah, it is a far cry from the studio perfection they usually coast on, but hardly “atrocious.” Naturally, the comment section nosedives into high-school jock music analysis (“don’t people realize that pop music is as real as pro wrestling?” thanks dude you have opened my eyes by the way going to the harvest dance?) and a discussion of the difficulties of singing while dancing.

Yet that is not why I post this – the online conspiracy theories to this, though, are a hoot! Japan Post writes some groups think Fuji TV – who nationalistic groups protested back in August for showing so many Korean dramas, which I used for my opening paragraph for this Atlantic story I’m shamelessly plugging once again – intentionally sabotaged Arashi while K-Pop groups like KARA and Girls’ Generation performed unscathed. Well, so did EVERY OTHER JAPANESE ARTIST ON THE SHOW, but hey details! So yes…crazy people, doing things.

Yet these tin-foil-hat types give me the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite live experiences of the year and the winner of the 2011 “The Inside-Job Award For Incident That Looked Like A Possible Conspiracy That Probably Wasn’t” honor. Back at Summer Sonic, Girls’ Generation closed out the Tokyo leg of the festival with a brief live set. It was deeply bizarre given they went on after headliners The Red Hot Chili Peppers, attracting mostly a gaggle of curious shirtless dudes and ladies wearing head scarf things. Anyway, they got to the final song “The Great Escape” and right before the first chorus the backing track cut out, leaving the members of the group singing with their natural voices. And…they sounded nice! Soon I thought “oh they did this on purpose to show they can really sing, grassroots cred building!” It probably was just a glitch…but you never know [cue X-File’s theme].

Station To Station: Music Station For Debember 9 Featuring AKB48, Kis-My-Ft2 And SMAP

Posted on by

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQg8SdQ1dHo”]

If you follow our Twitter (which you should!) or our recently minted Tumblr (which you should!), you have probably seen the above video. It’s basically propaganda for Korean food…with a song by great K-Pop group Wonder Girls. I don’t believe in “guilty pleasures” but I feel a twinge of shame admitting “K-Food Party” is the song I’ve listened to the most in the past week, considering it is an ad for kimchi (which is delicious!). If nothing else, please jump to the 2:33 mark to hear the rapping member of Wonder Girls just make the clip with the following:

1. the way she raises her eyebrows when she sings “I gots to eat good.”

2. “I’m K-swaggin’ it,” doomed to be the words I get engraved on my back in Comic Sans when I decide to get a drunken tattoo.

3. the implication I am some how angry at K-Food. I love it, I love it!

I fear none of the following Japanese pop songs will wow me the same way this apple-filled tune did.

AKB48 “上からマリコ”

GO HERE FOR LIKE FOUR DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE STUPID LONG VIDEO

Member Shinoda Mariko won the rights to be the main attraction of this, AKB48’s 24th single, by winning the group’s annual rock-paper-scissors tournament a few months ago. This storyline…look her name is in the title, and she plays the role of giantess on the cover art…conveniently distracts from the fact that the actual music sounds virtually the same as the music that appeared on most of the 23 previous singles, complete with gratuitous guitar solo. By now, it has been well established the actual music of AKB48 plays but one role in their success, the draw of individual members and their storylines (see, Mariko’s run to get to this point) doing just as much.

All that said…I kinda like the actual video for this song. I wish I had the HTML skills to make the font for that sentence really small but…I kinda enjoyed the story (basically, the group’s rock-paper-scissors tournament played out in a high school) and even the portion featuring the song was fun in a ridiculous way. I’ve reached the point where the insanity of AKB48 makes these clips kinda fun – like, how the shots during the actual tournament go from these sorta dramatic matches (featuring members of the group dressed as…nuns?) to them dancing around like idiots. Next time you see me, smack me in the jaw.

Kis-My-Ft2 “We Never Give Up”

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOl4PUi8GkQ”]

Ahhhhhh, the ol’ Johnny’s tease strikes again. After a corny DRAMATIC GUITAR opening, Kis-My-Ft2’s latest properly starts up and…sounds pretty good??? Yep – the group’s all-together-now singing actually works over a really bare backdrop, the chanting of the chorus being kind of silly but in a surprisingly listenable way. Then come the dollar-bin techno flourishes and for a bit, Kis-My-Ft2 stay on the path. Then the stomping and shouting go away and it turns into typical Johnny’s pulp, this time stabbed with the sort of sounds you hear in all those European music videos featuring a CGI animals singing kids songs. Like this piece of work. The chorus still works better than the verses, but the recycle bin electronics hurt it. The best song I have ever heard these guys do, but not exactly worthy of much beyond this paragraph.

SMAP “僕の半分”

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBD8qUjY_v4″]

Another Johnny’s song that doesn’t sound like typical Johnny’s crap, but whereas Kis-My-Ft2 teased with something potentially interesting, SMAP just deliver this rudderless acoustic joint. Other than watching members of SMAP dancing awkwardly in the above clip, there is really nothing of interest…either to love or hate…present here. Just an archaic pop group doing what they do.

Emi Takei “恋スルキモチ”

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sedWp3fGqCM”]

Only a short clip above, but the ballad-like nature leads me to believe this isn’t a bad thing. Only thing worth noting – Emi Takei sounds vaguely like the lead singer of the really great band Asobi Seksu, a factoid that makes me want to listen to Asobi Seksu! Instead of the above video, go listen to their song “Perfectly Crystal,” one of my favorite tracks of the year. Dreamy but never languid!

Flumpool “Present”

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woLgMZNejlg”]

Yawn, did you know you can take the letters in Flumpool and rearrange them to spell “Lump Fool?” It’s true! That’s how I feel.

Because that song left so much to be desired, let’s hand out an award for the year, this one for the best performance on Music Station. It’s a landslide win for Sakanaction, who made their first appearance on the show count courtesy of this performance. I love how electronic it is. Needless to say, not the bit of praise I’m going to throw this band’s way this month.

BoA “Milestone”

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49PaOTJMyaI”]

The original Korean crossover into Japan, BoA now exists in this weird limbo as the new Korean wave sweeps over Japan. Her sound, for the most part, has always seemed more in line with what J-Pop is all about – a lot of ballads with a few curveballs thrown in for added measure. The latest crop of K-Poppers, at least initially, played by their own rules and introduced the sounds they used to wow their native country to Japan. Now, BoA “returns” with a single that doesn’t find her trying to imitate any of Korea’s new generation…no mid-verse rapping, no Diplo-inspired beats…but rather sticking to what she knows. “Milestone” is a ballad, but a surprisingly good one because of her decision to stick to minimalist sounds, at least early on. It’s just her and some simple piano, a lonely sound that works well with her hushed singing. The chorus adds some cliche strings, turning “Milestone” into a bland workout for a bit, but she quickly revisits the starkness. It’s flawed, but overall “Milestone” is a good bit of simplicity from BoA.

Winner Of The Week – BoA

New Kyary Pamyu Pamyu: “つけまつける” (or “Tsukematsukeru”)

Posted on by

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLy4cvRx7Vc”]

This popped up seconds before I was going to go to bed. Harajuku fashion idol turned singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s new song “つけまつける” just hit the web, and you can watch the predictably nutty video above. I like when she pulls the sparkle rope out of her mouth…or maybe I really like the part where her chest has a floating mouth inside. Watch, and tell me what the hell is her skirt made of, I can’t tell…chip bags??