Actually, It’s ALWAYS Been About The Music…
Sorry to take so long to answer this, but…
go-go*FIGHTEEN! had a blog entry last weekend where she basically tried to explain how Morning Musume’s music, however good, was secondary to their image.
Bullshit.
Fighteen’s post seemed to be basically directed at RadicalPatriot’s frequent praise of Hello! Project music, although I’m sure many of my often glowing reviews in the past haven’t helped as well. However, I can easily say – and I’m sure Rad is the same way – that we are not damning Morning Musume and company with faint praise. Even Fighteen admits that MoMusu’s music is “excellent” early on in the course of the post in question.
When I gave five-star reviews to Sexy 8 Beat and Mitsuboshi on MotokoAoyama.com v1.0, I was nothing but sincere in those reviews. I thought both albums were great, and a year of living with them has not altered my opinion on them adversely. I have a lot of favorite bands – Morning Musume included, of course – and if any of them did something less than par or if I like certain albums over others, I’d say so in a heartbeat. I love all of Morning Musume’s albums from No. 5 on – their first four studio albums are a little lower on my radar at the present time, but I should admit and point out for the sake of accuracy that I only recently (and finally) acquired them several months ago. I like King Crimson but I’ll admit in a heartbeat, even to Robert Fripp’s own face, that I think Islands sucks. I love Iggy Pop, with and without The Stooges, to death, but there’s a couple of solo works in his canon that aren’t on the level of greatness of, and that I may never listen to as often as, The Idiot, Lust For Life, Instinct, Blah-Blah-Blah and Skull Ring. I love Black Flag but I think In My Head, despite a lot of great songs, is their weakest album and that the production on their otherwise classic My War album is the worst-sounding recording in the Black Flag canon. You get the idea.
Yes, there is a lot of great eyecandy within Morning Musume. Always has been, of course. But that’s a bonus. Tsnuku started out Morning Musume as a vocal group first because he saw a lot of talent potential in those runners-up for the Sharan Q singing spot. As we all know, he not only underestimated them, but Morning Musume would proceed to eat Michiyo Heike, the eventual winner, for breakfast. Not every member of Morning Musume could win a vocal gymnastics battle with Kelly Clarkson or Cyndi Lauper, but can they sing? Yep. Everybody that’s ever been in the band has had a distinctive voice (some more than others to some people, I presume…). No over-saturating vocals with Auto-Tune a la the already infamous (and totally fucking annoying and appropriately named) T-Pain… not even on little Sayumi and her self-admitted weak voice. (And if they ever applied that effect to her vocals on a track, it would probably be more amusing and more listenable than anything T-Pain ever did. And if they do that, even a little bit, on the obligatory Rainbow-Pinku track on the ninth MoMusu studio album, all it will do is convince me that there are people at UFW reading American J-pop blogs!)
Maybe it’s partly because of my own musically experienced perspective – one that seems to parallel, if not totally share, with RadicalPatriot, and don’t even get me started on the generationally shared references and experiences I’ve discovered with myself and Ray Mescallado – but when I listen to music, even though I get in the mood for certain things from time to time (recently, I’ve been pulling out some old jazz, for example), everything is equal musically in my world. When I write a review of an album, I try to do comparative descriptions of the songs – especially for the J-Pop. Someone else that has only ever exposed to post-Nirvana rock and post-TLC Top 40 music could never do that.
If it wasn’t about the music, how come so many people I know that enjoy Morning Musume and Hello! Project are willing to talk about the music? One thing I have noticed is that a lot of the people who listen to MoMusu/H!P also listen to punk and alternative music and have a healthy dislike for most current American pop music. Thanks to my fiancee, I’ve heard enough subpar American pop over the past three years, much of it indistinguishable from each other, even within the same artist’s current catalog. The decline in urban-based pop/R&B music – often the brightest spots on the American pop radio dial between 1990 and 2003 – has not helped in what I have been calling the post-TLC era of urban music. For myself and many other music fanatics, J-Pop is filling the void that the likes of Rhianna and Carrie Underwood cannot.
So, it looks like it really is about the music after all. Sorry, Fighteen.
Speaking of Fighteen… her chosen blog entry title of “They’re Idols, Not Musical Legends” really rankled me, I must admit. Fighteen has apparently misread the Beatles references Rad had made in past pro-H!P-in-the-States posts and that’s what led to the title of her post. Anybody who knows anything about popular music knows the status – and the yardstick – that the back catalog of the Beatles holds in history. That’s indisputable. Rad is not trying to compare Morning Musume to the Beatles. What he is doing – and what I understood right away – is paralleling the Beatles’ breakthrough in America in 1964 with what he feels Morning Musume could conceivably do given the right situations. Back when the Beatles did their first singles and album releases in England in late 1962 and early 1963, EMI’s American subsidiary Capitol was given the mandatory first opportunity to release their early singles and their first album Please Please Me in America. They passed. The early recordings ended up being released by Vee-Jay, a small Chicago-based, black-owned independent label mostly known for black R&B and blues music, their only pop act at the time being The Four Seasons. Those initial American releases didn’t sell very well until Capitol decided to take a chance on “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and Ed Sullivan agreed to feature the group on his Sunday night variety show. Rad argues, and I agree, that the right circumstances and decisions could hold similar success for Morning Musume. That, however, is a matter for a different post… maybe a series of them.
January 12th, 2008 at 11:42 am
First of all, I have a name. Even Ray figured that out after a few months. I try to make it a little obvious, but I guess it still doesn’t get through to some people. :/
Moving on… Oh, please. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but America and Japan are different countries! That means that the music they tend to put out is also completely different. What a concept, right?! Throughout this entire post, you have never once compared Momusu to other Japanese artists, preferring to stay in your little comfort zone of rock. It is not convincing at all.
About the title: Rad is notoriously over-enthusiastic about friggin’ everything. He has, like, three J-pop groups that he knows more than just a little about, and each one is ZOMG THE BEST THING TO EVER COME OUT OF JAPAN IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE COUNTRY. You just can’t be like that, period.
Sorry it offended you, but at the same time? Nah, I don’t actually mean that.
January 13th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
[...] Actually, It’s ALWAYS Been About The Music… [...]
January 13th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Mmm, though I did find Vulpi’s post a good read that had its good points, I gotta say I agree with you here, CJ. Wanting to defend my stance on the subject, I actually started writing a post in reply too after reading Vulpi’s article, but abandoned the idea as I failed to really put my thoughts into words as intelligently as I’d liked and I would’ve only succeeded in looking like a fool. But yeah, what I’m trying to say is that for me, too, it is very much more about the music than anything else. Maybe I’m in the minority here, but I think when talking about recording artists or bands, no matter if they’re ugly old men with silly beards or pretty Japanese girls in their teens, the music is NEVER secondary to looks or anything else for that matter. I simply would not be a fan of Morning Musume or Hello! Project in general if I thought the music was poor, no matter how interesting the personalities or beautiful the girls were.
I thought this was a well-written post, very deserving of the “recommended reading” at Int’l Wota. Nicely done.
January 13th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
The music is number one to me as well, but I have a feeling that Vulpi was referring to how they are presented. No matter how good the music is, they are promoted mainly by their looks and images. That is the definition of an idol.
And I hate the generalization that all J-pop fans hate American pop. Anyone who knows me knows that I love Disney Channel, pretty much for the same reason I love H!P-I love cheesy pop music. Sure, a lot of really interesting, catchy music comes out of H!P, but at the end of the day, it’s a large group of Asian girls singing bubblegum pop. (Well, they stuff that sells really well is. I can’t really say that about Yuki Maeda or Yuko Nakazawa)
And I think comparing any new act becoming popular to the Beatles’ breakthrough is inaccurate. Nothing will ever be like that again. Not even BSB or *Nsync were like that, as they didn’t revolutionize popular music and change and insipre it for decades to come.
January 13th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Wow.. I usually ignore the videos and just get the albums and never buy into the “looks” of Morning Musume. I must not exist to Vulpi because Momusu is all about their image and never about their music, amirite?
January 13th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
@Henkka: Hear, hear. Feel free to do that post! I’d love to see your point-of-view on this.
@Hanachan: That’s very possible regarding what Vulpi was referring to. As for any “generalizations”, I didn’t say “all J-Pop fans hate American pop music”, so you’re safe there. Don’t even get me started on Hannah fucking Montana (or as I call her, the Anti-MoMusu) – that is yet another post entirely.
@Vulpi: No offense, but do you even comprehend the points I’m trying to make? From the looks of your response, it looks like you don’t. Also, don’t mistake my using more common musical examples to describe any song on a MoMusu or other J-Pop release when I write a review (and I don’t just write the reviews for a J-Pop audience, I write them for a more general audience – Stuck In A Pagoda is a music blog, not just a J-Pop blog) with seemingly idle comparisons between new and older artists.
January 13th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
@asforoneday: I guess you don’t exist to Vupli, LOL.
@Hanachan: P.S.: You’re right, no act could ever do what the Beatles did. Rad’s point, or at least my version of his point, is that MoMusu could latch on in at least a similar way in spite of things. Again, that’s another post entirely.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
As for any “generalizations”, I didn’t say “all J-Pop fans hate American pop music”, so you’re safe there.
I just re-read your point and I think I misunderstood it the first time. That generalization is all over the place, though, so I think I just saw that and thought “Oh, here goes another ‘Wota hate American pop!’ statement.”
Don’t even get me started on Hannah fucking Montana (or as I call her, the Anti-MoMusu) – that is yet another post entirely.
I’m actually planning on doing a post comparing Disney Channel and H!P and why they’re similar, so I don’t completely argee with you here. But I’ll wait to duke it out until I write that post.
P.S.: You’re right, no act could ever do what the Beatles did. Rad’s point, or at least my version of his point, is that MoMusu could latch on in at least a similar way in spite of things. Again, that’s another post entirely.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here with “could latch on in at least a similar way in spite of things.” You mean start a wave of Japanese imports? And “in spite of things” mean in spite of a language barrier?
I’d be really interested in reading Rad’s point of view on both yours and Vulpi’s post. I wonder why he hasn’t responded yet…
January 14th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
@Hanachan: I’m not quite sure what you mean here with “could latch on in at least a similar way in spite of things.” You mean start a wave of Japanese imports? And “in spite of things” mean in spite of a language barrier?
Again, that’s a story for another post (well, one of the ones I alluded to before) but you’re just starting to scratch the surface there.