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Category Archives: J-Pop

Watch The Throne: Ayumi Hamasaki’s “Brillante”

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Nobody else in the Japanese music landscape could have pulled this, a Sphinx-sized ballad coping ideas from the Middle East and summoning what might as well be a chorus from a Greek epic, off. On paper…and maybe on initial listen…this seems bloated and ridiculous, pretty much the opposite of Occupy Wall Street manned by an pop star that’s a super-easy target for hate. Yet here the wealthy triumph, sheer bigness that nobody calling themselves even “middle class” could dream of buying towering tall. Ayumi Hamasaki’s “Brillante” eclipses nearly every J-Pop ballad released this year and maybe in any year, at least in terms of grandness.

To some degree, it’s not an easy song to like. I spent more than a month trying to digest this, will myself to ignore the fact Ayumi Hamasaki might be the polar opposite of an underdog in the Japanese music world. She’s already established herself as a capital “s” Star, and routinely spends millions of dollars on lavish music videos and a ridiculous live show. She has her own pachinko machine, for god’s sake. Hamasaki doesn’t deserve more attention, right?

Nope, she does, because she knows that to get all eyes on her you’ve just got to straight up out-size everyone else. So…”Brillante,” which is a not-complex single James Cameron-ed into something continent sized. This is, to some degree, a ballad and most of the time those crash mighty hard (though, Hamasaki has pulled this off before). Take a look at the lyrics too, and you’ll discover the subject matter isn’t all that “epic” either – it’s a simple breakup song. Pedestrian, yeah?

Well, Hamasaki has the ego to blow these issues into something that sounds like the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The song pretty much speaks for itself, and I also think The Singles Jukebox did a good job touching on the details. The video adds an extra layer of pomp plus intrigue – there seems to be some sort of gender/sexuality commentary going on, but I’m not gonna make a fool of myself on that front. Finding words to describe what is going on here is actually hard…unless you like “big” repeated over and over again….but this thing just looms so much larger than all the other similarly-minded J-Pop trying this. They are dramatic chipmunk to her 10-hour epic sax guy.

So yes, the rich get richer and Ayumi Hamasaki grows larger. Thing is, she deserves it.

Watch the video here.

Controlled Karaoke: Kids React To Hatsune Miku

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[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egcfC7PCneQ”]

Some ambitious YouTube uploader decided to show American children Japan’s holographic Vocaloid artist Hatsune Miku and film their reactions. Some notes:

– “People go to see that? But she’s not even real????!!!” Yep.

– “They had glowsticks and everything” really killed me for some reason.

– These kids have the pop industry down pat, ahhhhh I’m glad innocence gets shredded to pieces at a much younger age nowadays.

– I didn’t know that about Nyan Cat, thanks for the fact!

– These kids are so darn cute!

– Semi unrelated, but geez when did Japan Probe get so grouchy? Dude posted it first and I thank him for that, but man he comes off like a real sourpuss. ‘I found the kids so annoying that I couldn’t watch more than 30 seconds of the video.” You mean the 30 seconds where they say “what’s this?” and are generally confused like any person not exposed to this stuff would have? Honestly, the whole site has had a more old-man edge to it in the past few months, at least with anything political. Take it easy man, you run one of the best blogs on Japan, be happy!

– If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to meet me in real life, just take a listen to 11-year-old Jake. He has the same vocal inflection I’ve been cursed with plus all my hand mannerisms. Shit, I’ve compared J-Pop starts to Final Fantasy too! I literally stopped the video and had to process what I saw.

The Terrible Metamorphosis: KARA’s “Step” Vs. KARA’s “Winter Magic”

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South Korean pop outfit KARA have a new song and, by goodness, it might be the best single they’ve released yet. It’s a flurry of rainbow keyboards and lovely group singing culminating in an energetic little chorus. They shriek at times like they saw Michael Jackson rise from the grave. There is a mid-song freak out where it seems like speakers might blow up…and that quickly segues into a ice-smooth bit that lasts only a few seconds. Then KARA run through the Fruit-Loops-colored keyboard storm once more before calling it a day. It’s lively, it bumps and trumps stuff like the plenty-enjoyable “Mister.”

It’s also not a Japanese single.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYoYoBtLqOY&ob=av2e”]

“Step,” at the moment, serves as KARA’s “comeback” single in South Korea as they spent the last six months (an eternity!) focusing on the Japanese market. It’s very possible that, like many K-Pop songs before it, “Step” will eventually get the Japanese treatment and be released in this country. Yet KARA aren’t abandoning Japanese fans…a new Japan-only single called “Winter Magic” is coming out soon.

This song sounds very Japanese-market ready. Which, naturally, means it sounds kind of terrible.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y2H-tEmBmc”]

Moving at a much slower tempo, “Winter Magic” sounds like the sorta-borderline ballad songs frequently clogging up the Oricon charts. The chorus reeks of AKB48, and even the Spanish guitar interlude isn’t original – Nishino Kana did it early this year, and better at that. The whole joint just comes off as being phoned in, even the music sounds like it is five minutes away from being piped into my nearby supermarket. Especially when played after “Step,” “Winter Magic” seems like marketing at its worst.

For KARA, though, this seemed inevitable. The Japan Times’ Ian Martin argued that the group remade themselves in the sonic image of AKB48, though I still hold the Japanese single “Jet Coaster Love” does enough to avoid falling into such dreaded depths. Martin is dead-on, though, when applied to “Go Go Summer,” which (ignoring the opening 20 seconds, which are pretty rad) does fall off the cliff into AKB oblivion, albeit the whole thing manages to be a little dance-ier. The next seasonal single digs even deeper – KARA must have been told what most J-Pop fans will buy, and decided to go where the money was.

Which is a shame, because one of the best aspects of K-Pop’s rise in Japan has been how the groups crossing over into this country didn’t change their sound. KARA and Girls’ Generation vaulted up the charts with songs sounding completely different from the J-Pop around it. Part of the thrill of seeing this stuff emerge was having a new…and, frankly, better…pop sound appearing everywhere. Now, KARA seems to have given up on that in favor of catering to the masses. Girls’ Generation has yet to do that, and 2NE1 have only just debuted in Japan so time will tell what they do. Hopefully, they stick with their sound.

Yet wanna know what’s surprising about all this? “Step” isn’t being marketed in Japan, yet it currently ranks as the number one ringtone of the week. Maybe one day, “Magic Love” will be an antique and things sounding like “Step” will me the norm. Hope remains.

New Kaela Kimura: “Chocolate”

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http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xlbtfw
kk-chok 投稿者 kk231mj

Kaela Kimura slows things down on new single “Chocolate,” a potentially deceiving single working as a, gulp, ballad. How could she be pulling the wool over our eyes, you ask? Well, watch the above video and note how strange everything sounds. Kaela’s voice sounds almost recorded to camera, as the toybox electronics making up the actual music sounds quite low in the mix. A little bit of music-video trickery meant to emphasize how good her “real” singing voice is? Or is this how it will actually sound on her new album? If it’s the first, then this piece of “Chocolate” (sorry) is just a pleasant bit of marketing that really shouldn’t be judged all that heavily.

YET if this actually is the final product, Kaela Kimura’s done a swell job of rope-swinging over the usual J-Pop ballad trap. The musical arrangements sound like they were recorded on a Fischer-Price My First Boombox…and it’s gorgeous in the same way Lullatone’s early hyper-minimalist recordings were (similarly, China’s The Marshmallow Kisses). This playroom-atmosphere also allows her vocals to really shine, Kimura choosing not to oversell like Ayumi Hamasaki but rather to softly sing them as if she were humming a tune while putting together a grocery list. For a ballad this seems a bit too good to be true…which is why we will hold out final judgement until that album slides through our mail slot. Regardless, this version is quite the treat. Click the pic to see it, or the video link at the top.

Perfume Reveals Name Of Next Single – “Spice”

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Yep…it’s called “Spice,” and the song will also serve as the opening for some drama I don’t care about (though the title Detective Housewife – I’m Shadow sounds cool). The above art looks like the opening to a Looney Tunes short.

If this song isn’t about/advertising for fake weed, I’m going to be mighty disappointed.

Perfume’s English site also sheds a little light (whoa, rhyme!) about forthcoming album JPN. Remember all those singles that came out following Triangle? Yeah, they are on it…save for maybe “575” which just isn’t right.