J-Pop is taking over my life…

So I guess this would be my first official rant here, not that my last tirade didn’t count, but I guess I just saw that one as an intro of sorts.

So onto the topic of the day, and one that I’ve actually been thinking about for a while: J-Pop. For those of you who didn’t know or who hadn’t guessed, J-Pop is an amalgam of the words “Japanese” and “Pop”, so essentially Japanese Pop music. When I think of J-Pop, I mostly think of the American equivalent of bubble-gum pop. I actually find that I tend to term all Japanese music J-Pop unless I know for a fact that it’s considered J-Rock or Hip-Hop or whatever. For some reason genres such as alternative and electronica don’t seem to exist when I think of Japanese music. But I digress.

My obsession lately within J-Pop has been of the idol boy-band variety. And again, for those of you who didn’t know, the idol culture in Japan is a kind of fixture in entertainment media: guys and gals churned through the entertainment industry as singing, dancing, modeling, acting, and everything-else-in-between entities, who by the way, have to look dang good doing it. It’s like the Mickey Mouse club, except bigger and very much alive. Granted I was on the boy band wagon in my high school days, good ol’ Backstreet Boys, N*SYNC, 98˚ and whoever else popped up during the ‘90s, but this extreme fascination with J-Pop boy bands has left me a little confused. While I do have Japanese music that does lean towards rock and alternative, in terms of percentage, J-Pop seems to dominate my Japanese music while American music is taken over by alternative and rock. I don’t hate pop, but I don’t particularly like pop, so why do I seem to like it so much in another language? And here’s the kicker: I don’t even understand Japanese. I understand a few words here and there, but it’s not enough to string together a coherent sentence.

I think what really perplexes me is that it’s the boy band variety of J-Pop that I like and not something else within J-Pop. Why?! They’re cheesy, have stylists that apparently worked with Liberace, are decent singers, but nothing to write home about, and usually have embarrassing choreography. The lyrics to their songs are also sometimes really laughable, but that’s a whole other post, and yet I still find myself watching their videos, their concerts (cheese galore…) and listening to their music. So excuse me while I YouTube some more videos of NEWS, KAT-TUN, Kanjani8, and Tackey & Tsubasa. Geez, even their names are cheesy…

Sorry, I couldn’t resist and had to post some pictures…

foray into the world of blogging

In starting this blog, I think I have almost come to the full realization of how scary blogging can be. I didn’t think that starting a blog would be such a daunting process; blogging always held a strange portion of fear for me, but I never thought the actual process of starting a blog would be so difficult. I’ve always thought of myself as an extremely private person and so the prospect of publishing thoughts on my life and the environment around me for people to read, provided anyone reads this, was scary. I would be sharing things with people that I couldn’t see when I didn’t even share some things with people I did see. Being judged by people I didn’t know was also scary, but I’ve come to believe that being read and potentially judged by strangers isn’t as scary as being judged by people I knew. I wouldn’t have to physically see the strangers the next day and constantly think whether or not they thought a certain way about me. I also think that I’ve just matured and grown up a little and thus can say that peoples’ opinion of me don’t really bother me too much. Of course it would bother me if a large population thought that I was a jerk, because that would probably mean that I was being a jerk, but I at the end of the day, I don’t feel the need to answer to those that might not agree with me. So yay for essentially not caring. Now I just sound like an insensitive jerk… that and my inner monologue and random conversations with myself look stranger in print than I imagined. They just don’t have that light, fleeting, and almost cotton-candy like texture when they were just thoughts floating through my head. I think that’s the first time that I’ve compared thoughts to cotton-candy…

But seriously, starting a blog was daunting. And here I mean the actual physical process of filling in the form to sign up for a blog. It sounds weird, but it seems like it would be an easy process, right? I mean, isn’t that how it’s sold on every blog host? Things like, “it only takes a minute”, and that it’s a “simple and easy” installation (I was going to say “so easy a caveman could do it” but that’s for GEICO). And it was just so amusing why it was so daunting. Provided that picking where to blog took a while, but it was deciding on a name that took forever. It’s like you don’t want to be generic, but at the same time you don’t want strain yourself and get so literary to the point that even you don’t understand what the heading means. So after thinking about the title for what was probably way too long (and the tagline mind you, that’s what really killed me), all I’ve come up with is this pretentious sounding title set against a pretty picture of the ocean. But I’ve thought for too hard and too long to go generic, so the title is here to stay. Would this blog be the same with something more generic? Probably, but I think I secretly (or rather, not so secretly now) like it. But that just might be the part of me that thinks it’s a poet talking…

Well, I can feel it now. This is probably going to become a lounge for all the random thoughts that come to me during the day. Now instead of letting them grow in potentially strange ways in my head as I converse with myself, they’re going to hang out here. And if this blog is going to be representative of what goes on through my head, I think the focus of this blog really is going to be hazy.