Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

Well, folks, the reaction to the first Pagoda Podcast was pretty good and very encouraging, so that means I’ll be giving these a shot whenever I have a good idea for a track list or concept. I especially want to thank Vee for the support and Henkka for the shoutout he gave on his own fine debut podcast. It’s pretty cool to learn that my own work here in the J-Pop Blogosphere is having an influence on folks. I’m happy to officially announce that this here podcast can now be both subscribed to and searched out through iTunes – just type either “Pagoda Podcast” or “CJ Marsicano” to find it. Oh, also, apparently the host company for the podcast has changed its name since I uploaded the first podcast there. Instead of Podshow.com they are now Mevio.com so the new URL for the podcast is http://pagodapodcast.mevio.com. The other one still works but that shit threw me off a bit. That’s showbiz!

Direct DL | Show Page @ PagodaPodcast.Mevio.com

I admittedly wasn’t planning on doing a new Pagoda Podcast so soon but given what today is, I had to do a particularly special episode. Six years ago today I woke up to learn the horrible news that Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes from TLC had died in a car accident in the Honduras. I forget how the accident happened but I do remember hearing that she went through the windshield and died instantly, which was doubly creepy because D. Boon from the Minutemen had died in the same manner on 12.22.85. Vibe magazine would later compare TLC’s large shadow over R&B/urban music and the loss of Lisa Lopes with the impact the Beatles had on rock and roll and the death of John Lennon in 1980. I certainly do not disagree with that assessment one bit.

TLC were definitely unique amongst all of the other girl groups that came out in R&B and pop in the early 90’s. Instead of being wholly assembled by some svengali, they came together on their own. Instead of being told what to record, who to let produce them, and how to sing it, they were writing a lot of their own material, handpicking their producers and collaborators, and selecting whatever material they liked that they hadn’t written – all of which openly impressed LA Reid when he and Babyface first worked with them. Instead of trading on sex appeal from day one, they covered up in baggy clothes when their first album came out. They went through a lot of shit that would have killed most other girl groups – Lisa burning her abusive boyfriend’s house down, Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins having sickle cell anemia (which made their initial touring efforts very hard), Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas looking for her biological father (successfully – Sally Jesse Rafael even had an episode of her show devoted to it, and I have a copy of the video), then having a son with producer Dallas Austin in 1997, and most of all their legal battle with their original manager Perri “Pebbles” Reid, who actually held their original recording contract with LaFace, during which they had to declare bankruptcy and have both LA Reid and Clive Davis run some serious interference between them and Pebbles before they could sign directly with LaFace and go back in the studio.

From CrazySexyCool on, every album they put out would spawn a whole bunch of imitators biting their styles. Destiny’s Child did the most biting on their Survivor album, which was a rather blatant imitation of what TLC had done on Fan Mail the year before. For pop and R&B music in the 90’s, TLC were definitely the band to look to. Elvis Costello and Prince were both big fans of the band. A lot of peeps I knew back then who were more into alternative music had nothing but good things to say about TLC’s music – a familiar-sounding thing of late given the non-J-pop listening habits of many of my fellow Morning Musume fans. The affinity between TLC and alternative rock was furthered thanks to Tionne namechecking Nirvana and The Cranberries (amongst other bands; she’d even name her own music publishing company Grunge Girl Music) in interviews, and the Afghan Whigs covering “Creep” on a B-side in 1995.

Of course, since the death of Lisa Lopes and the release of 3D they’ve been a bit quiet. They did do a reality show on UPN where they held tryouts for a (temporary) third member, but I never got to my TV to watch that show. The single they put out afterward was cool and still had the TLC sound, but it wasn’t completely the same.

I don’t think American R&B music has been the same since TLC pretty much went on indefinite hiatus after putting 3D out. Most of it seems to have gone right down the shitter in the past five or six years. Chilli and T-Boz are both said to be working on solo albums; I’ve heard a couple of leaks from Chilli’s work in progress but they have not grabbed me at all. The vocals are great – the songs aren’t, which is probably why her album has yet to come out. T-Boz has done some good one-off solo tracks in the past, so I hope she can get some quality material for her own album.

This is probably the most TLC that I’ve listened to since 3D came out. All of their albums are on my iPod but have never been played in full and most of the time, they just came up in shuffle play. It still makes me angry that Lisa Lopes is now in another dimension somewhere hanging out with D. Boon, John Coltrane and Johnny Thunders.

Anyway, now that I’ve rambled I’m going to get to the show itself. After the introductory couplet of songs, The first half of the show is going to be all TLC, and to bring things back into the land of J-Pop that this podcast and its mothership blog cohabitates with the world of punk rock, I’ll play a few things from Hello! Project that I think owe a lot to TLC’s work. If that sounds a little far-fetched, it really isn’t – CrazySexyCool and Fan Mail were big hits in Japan. Think about it – where do you think Tsunku and 7AIR got the idea to have the two parts of that shuffle unit be “sexy” and “cool”, with the “sexy” half singing and the “cool” part rapping?

Here’s the show notes for all the songs. I already have a third episode in the works. The next episode will be a little more normal as I’ll have the new C-ute single in my hands to go along with the Miki Fujimoto and Viyuden ones that came in this past Tuesday, and I’ll also have something by Yuki Maeda of Whiteberry’s new band on the same episode, along with some other good shit. Enjoy the podcast.

“Resonant Blue” – Morning Musume – From here on out, every podcast is going to start with a song apiece from my two favorite bands in the world, Morning Musume and The Stooges. Granted, there may be some minor variations in that equation. I may play another Hello! Project act, and I may play something from one of Iggy Pop’s many solo albums, but that’s the basic lay of the land here at the Pagoda. Got me? Good! For this week’s opening MoMusu song, it has to be their new single. I cannot get over how great this song is. Hopefully all of you that listened to my last podcast know for sure after my playing Parliament-Funkadelic that this song, without a doubt, is the funk and nothing but the funk. Don’t make me play “One Nation Under A Groove” next week for a referesher course! If you haven’t bought the single yet, iTunes US has it available for three bucks, get to legal downloading! For those of you that already have the single, go ahead and bask in the greatness of Reina’s and Takitty’s lead vocals.

“I Wanna Be Your Dog” (live) – The Stooges – The best concert I have ever seen in my entire life was seeing the Stooges on 4.11.07 at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. I feel blessed to have witnessed the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band on that night. Most of you should know the original version of this song from their self-titled debut album, but this recording is from a session the Stooges – with new bassist Mike Watt holding down the bottom end – did for America Online’s Sessions@AOL series. iTunes had this song available for download but I think it recently disappeared from their archives. Oh well. 35 years after they first recorded this song, they rip it up even harder than the original. All of the Stooges’ studio albums are in print and easy to find on CD, vinyl, and legal download.

Now we get to the special TLC tribute segment of tonight’s episode. Notice that I deliberately avoided all of their major hit singles. Why? Because you already know them. Since this is my show, I thought I’d go with a few album tracks that you might not have known about unless you owned the albums. Many of you do – CrazySexyCool sold 11,000,000 copies, Fan Mail did at least six million – but these tracks are proof that TLC was not just a singles band. I would have also put something from Lisa Lopes’ solo album Supernova on here, but like an idiot I had taken the album off of my iPod months ago and haven’t recovered the sound files from one of the backup DVDs I usually do yet. Maybe someday soon.

“Get It Up” – I mentioned earlier in these notes that Prince was a big fan of TLC. This is one of two Prince covers that TLC recorded in their lifetime. They did “If I Was Your Girlfriend” on CrazySexyCool, and before that, they tackled and made their own this Prince-composed gem that The Time had originally recorded. This song is on the Poetic Justice soundtrack as well as their posthumous anthology Now And Forever.

“Silly Ho” – This was the first new music we heard from TLC after they wrestled free from the clutches of Perri Reid and bankruptcy protection and were ready to drop Fan Mail. This tune, with a great Asian-sounding riff from Dallas Austin, came out in October of 1998 and the album was originally going to drop at the end of November, but then opportunity knocked and TLC immediately answered the door, a decision that would, yeah, hold the album up a few months, but also take the album to a higher level. That decision would be…

“I’m Good At Being Bad” – …to get on a plane and head for the Twin Cities to work with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Come on, you know these guys – founding members of The Time, and longtime collaborators with Janet Jackson. The end result, a great, sexy – no, horny – number with a sample from War’s “Slippin’ Into Darkness” (the only sample on the entire album, by the way) as the song’s foundation. The version of the song here was only on the original pressing of Fan Mail. Tionne sings an excerpt from Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby” at the tail end of the choruses and while they had originally gotten Ms. Summer’s permission to incorporate that fragment into the song, after the album came out Donna Summer decided to be an arrogant asshole and withdraw her permission, forcing the band and LaFace to take the song back into the editing room and cut those parts out for future pressings. Methinks Ms. Summer didn’t like the fact that TLC said more about the virility of female sexuality in the five minutes of this song than Donna herself did in 20 minutes of “Love To Love You Baby”.

“Bad To Myself” – Going back to their first album Ooooooohhh… On The TLC Tip, this is one of my favorite tracks on the album. I don’t remember whether they wrote and recorded this with Dallas Austin or Jermaine Dupri without trying to dig for the CD. Doesn’t matter. It seems more like a Dallas Austin production to me as he used to take samples, make them barely audible, and then build original music over them. The sample on here is part of Public Enemy’s “Welcome To The Terrordome”.

“Damaged” – Closing out the TLC portion of today’s podcast is one of the songs from 3D. Sadly, this is one of the songs Tionne and Chilli recorded as a duo after Lisa died, but its still a great song. Tionne, continuing her affinity for alternative rock, co-wrote the song. It was cool to hear TLC stretch out and get into more rock-oriented music; I think that if they had continued, they would have done more stuff like this. Hopefully Tionne will explore her rock chick side alongside her R&B side on her solo album.

Now that the TLC side of this podcast is done, we move on to the Hello! Project units making songs TLC would have been proud to do segment of the show. When I first started buying Morning Musume/Hello! Project songs, a lot of the songs were reminding me of TLC and other mid-90’s R&B music, which was cool to me. Like I said before and will probably keep saying, American R&B and urban pop has gone downhill in recent years while Japanese artists are picking up the ball and running with it.

“FIRST KISS” – Aa! – Reina Tanaka was barely in Morning Musume when Tsunku decided to team her up with two Hello! Project Kids for this fine one-off single project. The two H!P Kids, as many of you J-Pop fanatics already know, were Airi Suzuki and Miyabi Natsuyaki, later of C-ute and Berryz Koubou respectively. Airi was only nine years old when this single was recorded, but what a voice! As we all know, Airi only got better with age as C-ute’s first single “Massara Blue Jeans”, proved. This is probably my favorite R&B-styled H!P single. Of course, Airi and Miyabi are now two-thirds of Buono! when they’re not busy with their own bands. The A-side is on Pucchi Best 4.

“SEXY NIGHT ~Wasurerarenai Kare~” – ROMANS – Another R&B-influenced one-off H!P band. Here the lineup is Mari Yaguchi and Rika Ishikawa from Morning Musume, Ayaka Kimura from Coconuts Musume, Mai Satoda from Country Musume, and Hitomi Saito from Melon Kinenbi. Mari, Rika and Mai do the singing parts while Ayaka and Hitomi are doing the rapping parts – the same formula as on the 7AIR track, only with two less people but no less good of a song. I would have definitely liked to have heard more from this project but everybody was busy at the time I guess. Now Mari and Ayaka aren’t busy as much – I don’t think they’ve seen the inside of a recording studio in years. TV and radio studios, yes, but…

“SHALL WE LOVE?” – Goumatto – Another H!P all-star one-off that should have done more with this lineup but didn’t. And what a lineup – Maki Goto, Aya Matsuura and Miki Fujimoto. Of course, the various members would collaborate again on other projects – Maki and Aya in Nochiura Natsumi, and Aya and Miki in GAM, but they never followed up on the promise of this single. Miki ended up in Morning Musume, Maki and Aya went back to their solo careers, and that was that.

“INDIGO BLUE LOVE” – Reina Tanaka, Eri Kamei and Risa Niigaki – This is a track from Morning Musume’s seventh album Rainbow 7, and on this album Tsunku decided to do little one-off fragmentations of various members for variety on the band’s studio albums. Out of all three of the fragment group tracks on the album, this is my favorite. Reina sounds great over R&B tracks; to me she sounds a lot like Chilli on this song. This could have been on FanMail!

“CRAZY ABOUT YOU” – MiniMoni – The second-generation lineup of MiniMoni with Ai Takahashi gave me a lot of TLC flashbacks, whether it was because of the outfits (especially the ones they wear on the cover of “Lucky ChaChaCha”) or because of the heavy R&B they did on the first half of MiniMoni Songs 2. And I do mean heavy R&B. When I play MiniMoni Songs 2 in my car, the bass frequencies make my car rumble, especially at the beginning of this song. There aren’t even R&B albums from this country that do that anymore lately!

“Kowarenai Ai ga Hoshii no” – 7AIR – I figured this would be a better way to end the podcast than the MiniMoni track since I mentioned it in the introduction and because its such a TLC-esque track. Takitty, Charmy and Risa from MoMusu, Masae from Melon Kinenbi, Mai from CoMusu, Mika Todd from Coconuts Musume, and Atsuko Inaba, ex of T&C Bomber. Of course, Takitty and Mika would recut this on the second MiniMoni album with Aibon and Nono, plus Atsuko helping out with backing vocals. A cool song no matter who sings it.

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