lukewarm for ayumi hamasaki

So, I can’t decide if I like Ayumi Hamasaki or not. I’ve listened to her GUILTY album quite a few times and I’m still unsure. I’m not really a fan of trance or electronica all that much and I feel like she has some of those influences. That and power pop, which I’m not a big fan of either. I really think it’s this power pop aspect that really gets to me because I do like some electronica influenced music (à la Hikaru Utada). I don’t know if some of her earlier stuff is R&B influenced, but since I didn’t really know her music beforehand and was expecting the R&B influence, her sound really took me by surprise. This is definitely a case of my preconceived notions that weren’t even grounded on her, but rather on her similarity to Jolin Tsai, who does fall into the R&B influenced pop category. But the weird thing about Hamasaki is that she seems to be power pop to at least the 10th degree. She really brings the melodrama with the guitar riffs and those epic violins you would find in some Hollywood feature film epic like Lord of the Kings or Braveheart, maybe even some Titanic thrown in there for good measure. While I don’t mind the epic, Hamasaki just feels… too much. Maybe it’s just this album. I need to go and listen to some of her older stuff to really make an informed decision, but at this point… Hamasaki is looking pretty mediocre, which confuses me because I know that she is immensely popular in Japan, so there must be some grounding for it. But maybe she’s just too pop for my taste…

namie amuro tells me not to cry… repeatedly

So I’ve never really been a big fan of Hip-Hop and now that I’ve been on my J-Pop trip, while I find that there are some Hip-Hop and R&B songs that I do like, it seems that on the whole I tend to steer clear of them. But lately, one song has been stuck in my head non-stop. I’ve been listening to it over and over and over and it seems to have found its way onto several playlists and helped to sprout some new ones.

I recently finished the J-Drama Himitsu no Hanazono. Let me first say that it was pretty entertaining. It’s a comedy about a fashion editor who is moved to the manga department and is put in charge of a popular mangaka named Hanazono Yuriko who secretly turns out to be four brothers.

But it was the opening theme that was stuck in my head, and is still stuck in my head. I think it’s been at least a week. For some reason I’ve always kind of glossed over Namie Amuro. I think it’s because she fits into that Hip-Hop influenced Pop that I seem to be unsure about whether I like it or not. But the track “Baby Don’t Cry” from her PLAY album is really, really addicting.

I think what really gets me is the beat. Since I don’t understand Japanese it’s hard for me to appreciate ballads, even if it is musically gorgeous, I just feel like I’m missing out on half the song without the lyrics. If the song is catchy and danceable then I’m definitely going to like it. And this is where “Baby Don’t Cry” fits. But I have to say that I’m a little disappointed in her live performances of the song. For some reason, I’ve always envisioned some kind of dancing with this song, but seeing her stand there and deliver the song, no matter how beautiful she is, seems a little boring. But maybe that’s just me.

I found that I’ve also glossed over Ayumi Hamasaki for similar reasons. And this next reason may sound really shallow, but for some reason her image bothers me a little. I can’t really put my finger on it. I think part of it is that she reminds me of Jolin Tsai from Taiwan. Well, I have heard the argument that Tsai is the Taiwanese version of Hamasaki and is really influenced by Hamasaki, in terms of at least image (those nails I tell you…), in terms of music I’m not sure, so I guess that makes sense. But I’m not a huge fan of Tsai so that connection isn’t helping. Hopefully I get over it though so that I can at least check out her music before I make any real judgment on her as an artist.

I think with Namie Amuro’s “Baby Don’t Cry”, I’ve become fully convinced of the power that music has on one’s emotions and mood. These last few weeks have been really stressful and by just putting this track on, it makes me happy and makes me forget my stress for a little bit. Awesome and scary at the same time. Awesome because it’s hard to believe that humanly organized sound can have such a huge impact on my mood. Scary because I think I’ve been putting the track on way too often and might be using it to run away from my stress and my problems. Sigh. Cue epiphany music…

music and bad lyrics… plus some more J-Pop to go around

I’ve always thought of lyrics as an important part of music, something that can either add to or take away from the piece as a whole. I think most people will agree with me that sometimes lyrics will either make or break a piece. However, nowadays, it seems like that even if your lyric penning skills are subpar, if you put the lyrics over a catchy beat, then you can get away with almost anything: the chorus of Mims’s “This is Why I’m Hot” comes to mind. Then there are awesome songs that I really don’t understand the lyrics to, even though I could recite the words off the top of my head: Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova” comes to mind here. I understand the individual words, but I don’t think I really grasp what the lyrics actually mean. My knowledge of the English language doesn’t really give me a leg up here; they might as well be speaking another language. Unfortunately, many times I find myself not listening to the words anyways. I always seem to have music playing so I don’t think my daily life is ever really quiet. Most of the time I’m listening to my iPod while I’m studying or walking to class and not really listening to the words of the song. I hear it, but I’m not necessarily thinking about the meaning behind the words 24/7. I think that’s why I can listen to foreign language music and not be too bothered by the fact that I don’t understand what they’re saying. As long as the song is catchy and I find it entertaining, it normally stays on my computer’s hard drive.

But recently, I feel like I’ve been confronted head on by the fact that I really don’t know what these various artists are singing about. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been listening to a lot more J-Pop and so the fact that I don’t know the words is made much more obvious. I makes me a little sad that I can’t understand what HOME MADE Kazoku is talking about in their songs. After googling the lyrics some of their songs, I really want to be able to hear what they’re rapping about. Especially since they’re a hip-hop, funk, and popish trio, their songs are really lyric and beat based. I got the beat, but miss out on the lyrics, which I find great since I find them to be a little more poetic than some other stuff. I’ve been listening to “Take It Easy” from their “musication” album non-stop.

About a month or two ago, I got a copy of NEWS’s new album “pacific”. NEWS is a J-Pop group made up of six guys who sing, dance, act and do other boy band things they seem do so well. Track 8 on the album is entitled Chirarizumu (チラリズム) and composition wise, it’s a fun pop song, it’s catchy and sounds like classic bubble-gum pop to me. Since I don’t understand Japanese, I finally decided one day to google the lyrics and attempt to find out what in the world they’re actually singing about. HAHA. I was so shocked when I found out the song was about an adolescent (I hope…) boy’s desire to peek up girls’ skirts. WHAT?! Knowing that now, I can’t listen to the song in the same way. You can’t. There’s no way. There’s just something vaguely disturbing about guys (they’re all over the age of 20 now mind you, and this album was released November of last year, so they were definitely not adolescents when they sang this song) singing about their desire to perform lewd conduct over a super happy, super innocent and clean sounding track.

Lyrics wise, it really amazes me what you can get away with nowadays. Maybe I was just young and so wasn’t quick to pick up on hidden meanings and double entendres, but I feel like things have become much more explicit. I mean compare Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” to Akon’s “I Wanna F*ck You”. No clever and sometimes cliché analogies, Akon doesn’t really even attempt that but rather he gets straight to the point. I mean, you can’t really get anymore explicit than that.

I’ve been shocked by explicit lyrics more than once, but the most recent occurrence was once again located within the realm of J-Pop. I was listening to KAT-TUN’s “cartoon KAT-TUN II You” album and found that I really liked the back beats on one of the tracks. The singing, if you could call it that, was pretty bad, but I really liked the beat so it was a kind of perfect walking-to-class-while-listening-to-your-iPod kind of song. So when I had some free time, I figured that I would google the lyrics. I really don’t know what I was expecting. The track is called “Make U Wet” for goodness sakes, so I had to have guessed the content of the song. So I googled and surprise surprise, it was what I thought it was. But the thing is, the lyrics are so explicit that they’re just hilarious, like rolling-on-the-floor, good-thing-I-swallowed-my- orange-juice-already-or-else-my-macbook-would-be-orange, I-can’t-believe-they- convinced-him-to-perform-it funny. I can’t even convey how amusing they are; you would have to google them for yourself to really get the full effect. But besides it being really funny, I find it a little scary that adolescent girls in Japan, and in America apparently, listen to this stuff and just eat it up. They watch their concerts and scream in glee when their idols make a move to take off their clothes. It’s like softcore porn for adolescent girls. Scary. I wonder how the guys in the band feel. I’m sure it must feel great to be loved by fans and everything, but I wonder if they ever get tired of taking off their clothes to satisfy the desires of adolescent girls.

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…