Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

Stumbled across this clip while doing a little research for the Vinyl Pagoda Project. Don’t know what the TV show was or when this clip aired, but here Ayumi Hamasaki teams up with old-school J-Pop legend Akina Nakamori for a rendition of the latter’s controversial 1978 single “Shojo A”.

Yes, we will be hearing from Naka-san in the process of the VPP. but probably not until I decide on a final blog redesign for here. (If you can help, please e-mail me.)

ETA: Kd, formerly of Iro Iro Aru Sa!, tells me that this clip is from Ayu’s television show AYU READY?. which aired on Fuji TV for about a year and a half, and live collaborations like this were a regular part of the show (see her comment below).

From what I have been able to gather - which unfortunately isn’t much - Tetsuya Ryu wrote the song “Okuhida Bakujyo” (”Longing For Okuhida”) on his own (lyrics and music) and found himself having what is apparently his only hit single, selling over 130,000 copies. In a culture (the Japanese pop world) where the stars are supposed to look as good as they sound, Tetsuya Ryu looks like the Japanese edition of Joe Average: the kind of person that works his butt off as a salaryman during the week and then goes out on the weekends to grab the mic at his favorite karaoke house and belt out a few tunes. In short, a seemingly unlikely pop star.

Both “Okuhida Bakujyo” and its B-side, “Su Su Ragi No Yado” (”Inn Of Babble”), are typical, pretty, male-led enka ballads, heavy on the emotional vocal. In 1980, the year this song came out, he was named Best New Artist on Besuto hitto kay?sai, earning him some Japanese TV appearances like this one:

The song seems to show up only on compilations, but of late there are three other CD singles that this gentleman has released in recent years on independent labels, including a remake of “Okuhida Bakujyo”. Apparently this remake appears on the soundtrack to the film The Cats Of Mirikitani, which aired recently on PBS.

While Ryu hasn’t been able to duplicate the success of his 28-year-old hit, it’s apparently still a karaoke favorite in Japan:

If anyone knows anything else about this guy, I’d like to know.

The scan of the picture sleeve is courtesy of Snow Records Japan..
Please read the disclaimer if downloading the mp3 files.

“There should only be one version of the National Anthem - Jimi Hendrix’s version from Woodstock.” - Henry Rollins

The Vinyl Pagoda Project will resume Sunday night or Monday morning (just in time for Tanbata) - I was going to post one of the installments late night but didn’t have the energy, and I’m going to be away with my fiancee most of today. Be safe out there, will ya?

Most of the stuff in the 50-single stack I acquired this week is enka or kayokyoku - styles I am most likely going to refer to for the purposes of this project as Traditional Japanese Pop (not to be confused with the modern J-Pop we all know, love, and follow). But a white label promo single that was amongst the stack caught my eye tonight because there was no artist, song, or label logo - just a catalog number and a mostly Japanese sentence which had the familiar letters EMI incorporated within.

A random Googling of the catalog number revealed that the single in question was by a band called Show-Ya. I Googled the group’s name and discovered that the group is an all-girl hair metal band - a Japanese equivalent of Vixen, if you will. Although I had a couple of early candidates for the first installment of this blog project that were more on the Traditional Japanese Pop side, this 45 was screaming to make a more left-field formal first offering.

The A-side is “Kodoku No Meiru (Rabirinsu)” (translation: “Maze of Isolation (Labyrinth)”), and its coupling track is “Uso Dado Iute Yo Moon Light” (very rough translation: “Saying That It’s A Lie In The Moon Light”). The Vixen reference is not an idle comparison either - they do remind me of the one-hit wonders that foisted “Edge Of A Broken Heart” on the American public in the second half of the 80’s, but both sides of the single give the appearance of a band that seemed a lot stronger musically than Vixen. Lead vocalist Keiko Terada in particular has a very strong voice compared to the likes of Vixen’s Janet Gardner and Lita Ford.

“Kodoku No Meiru” is an uptempo rocker that wouldn’t have sounded out of place amongst the Poisons and Cinderellas of the world, while “Uso Dado Iute Yo…” has a feel not unlike a slightly slower version of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Shot In The Dark”.

More web research reveals that the band, although forming in Japan, made their debut at the legendary British club Dingwall’s and made several sincere attempts to gain a worldwide audience during their career. When they attempted to break into the US in 1990, unfortunately for Show-Ya the musical climate was already starting to drift away from hair metal and even through they opened for a few notable names in the hair metal field in the US, they didn’t even make a dent. Grunge and alternative would eventually kill hair metal (or at least send the genre packing to the oldies circuit) for good months later, of course.

They made a few reunion attempts in the 90’s, and have apparently reformed (seemingly for good) for their 20th anniversary in 2005, but haven’t recorded new material yet. Much of their back catalog was reissued in Japan in 2005 and remains in print. Too bad I didn’t hear of Show-Ya back when they tried to crack the American market, but in 1990 I wasn’t too fond of most of the hair bands of the day. I think I would have liked these girls, though.

Please read the disclaimer if downloading the mp3 files.

If I have one bad habit as a writer – and in the interest of completely disclosing my own self-analysis, I have more than one – it’s having too many ideas. A published author that I met over this past weekend (Savannah Russe, author of the Darkwing Chronicles series) told me in conversation that there is nothing wrong with having too many ideas, and I have to agree. The only caveat is, there are unfortunately not enough hours in the day to actually put all those ideas to use.

At the time I am writing this, it is around 8:30 at night on June 24, 2008. I have a lot on my mind concerning things both at and away from my laptop. I have a novel manuscript I want to finish by the end of summer, a non-fiction book project whose outline and sample chapters were recently sent (with me hoping that they got there OK – electronic submissions are easy to accomplish but, unlike the world of snail mail with its delivery confirmation sheets and green return receipts for the mailman to send back, hard to trace the path of), two short story ideas that are screaming to be finished, and a shitload of other ideas sitting in various fragmented states on my hard drive – some of which were transferred to my present computer via a CD-R I had fortuitously burned as backup days before my beloved 2004 Apple PowerBook G4 achieved ex-parrot status this past St. Patrick’s Day. There’s a bunch of CD and single reviews I’ve been wanting to do for this blog for several weeks, and I intend to do at least a few of them at some point. (I’ll do one this week, I promise.)
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I just got a stack of 45s in the mail today.

Fifty of them.

All Japanese. and dating between 1968 and 1990.

I’ll explain quickly: A couple of weeks ago, I won an eBay auction for a lot of fifty Japanese 45s. The seller, very helpfully, provided post-it notes on each single with the artist and titles written in romaji, which is a big help to this gaijin who is practically illiterate in the language that fascinates him so. I spent the past 90 minutes or so cataloging all 50 of these singles into an Excel database file.

Now the real fun part begins.

As often as I can, I’m going to write about each of these 45s - both sides, what I think of the songs, and whatever I can find out about the artists. I’ll even share vinyl rips of these recordings. For anyone interested in earlier Japanese pop/enka/kayokyoku, this should be a treat. It sure is already one for me as a collector of records and a fan of Japanese music and culture.

Having already known of Li Chun’s keyboard talents when her and Qian Lin’s addition to Morning Musume was announced last year, I wondered if she’d ever display her instrumental skills in a public setting. Apparently she has already in this video from one of JunJun and LinLin’s first public appearances. (Does anyone know the name of the piece JunJun is performing in this clip?)

Of course, Sayumi tries to show off her (more rudimentary) keyboard skills afterward, only to get thwarted by two roadies (one of whom is wearing a commemorative Panda Musume T-shirt). Hey, at least Sayumi didn’t do a hamfisted version of “Home Sweet Home” or “Runaway”!

For those of you (like me) who are in the mood for a little more classical piano greatness, here’s an intimate performance (right out of his New York townhouse) from the Jimi Hendrix of classical piano:

A couple of weeks ago (the first week of June, to be exact - Hello! Online only posted the translation a few days ago), Morning Musume were asked this for their Pocket Morning Weekly Q&A:

If you were asked to release one Morning Musume song overseas, which song would it be?

(Presumably, this question is being asked of the band regarding the musical merits of their songs, perhaps also disregarding language issues under the admittedly utopian, but still refreshingly open-minded belief that no one really gives a shit what language a song is sung in. The language issue is another column entirely.)

Some of the ladies had their own answers. Eri Kamei suggested MoMusu’s ska-punk chestnut “Koko ni Iruzee!”, citing (for obvious reasons) the line “A song passing over borders” and adding the reason, “Because it’s a very powerful Morning Musume song.”

Sayumi Mishichige picked “Aruiteru”, a song she acknowledges as one of her personal favorites, also citing an appropriate line of lyric in what she refers to as “the second refrain” (actually, it’s the first prechorus) of the song: “We’re at the distance where the we can hear the songs of the whole world.”

Koharu Kusumi picked “Joshi Kashimashi Monogatari” for a more personal reason: “It’s the song where I introduce myself, so I want to introduce myself like: ‘This is me!’” (Presumably, she is referring to “Joshi Kashimashi Monogatari 3″, which closes out Rainbow 7.)

Li Chun went old-school, picking without explanation the MoMusu standard “Furusato”. (Is JunJun looking to cut a solo version of the song for the next Best Shot DVD?)

Reina Tanaka had two choices, both personal favorites. One was “Shadondama”, which she had already picked as her top favorite Morning Musume single in the 17th installment of her CDData column last October. The other choice was one she shared with the rest of the band: “Resonant Blue”.

Risa Niigaki and Qian Lin both cited a similar reason for picking “Resonant Blue”: The fact that (as of this writing), “Resonant Blue” is the band’s current single. Gaki-san wants overseas fans “to see the recent us” while LinLin “want(s) more and more people to hear (the song)”. Aika Mitsui picks the song as an example of what she calls “the cool Morning Musume”, while Ai Takahashi gives no reason whatsoever for picking out the song.

Admittedly, I’d pick out “Resonant Blue” as an introductory American single myself, simply because it’s such a solid song and performance. Longtime readers of this blog already know my affection for the song, so I won’t risk boring anyone with a recap.

According to iTunes, “Resonant Blue” is already the most downloaded Morning Musume song on the American iTunes service. The young ladies of Morning Musume just might have something there. It also makes me wonder, yet again, how aware Morning Musume and Up-Front Works are of the band’s non-Asian cult audience. That, of course, is another column entirely… maybe part of a certain ongoing series.

RI-SA.J
“Sexual Night, but…”
(Next Records)
Availability: CD single, iTunes Japan, HearJapan.com
Rating:

R&B music here in the United States has gone right down the commode since about 2002. I could easily say a specific date – say the day Lisa Lopes died in that car wreck – but I won’t. But I will say without a doubt that in the wake of TLC’s subsequent breakup that the quality of R&B/urban music in America has been lacking. Most songs in the genre are just plain monotonous, built along a lame hook, lame-ass “in da club” lyrics, and less than average vocals. I swear to god, if I ever hear Rhianna’s “Umbrella” song again, I’ll take that umbrella, shove it up her ass, and…

*IM beep*
reina_t_1111: Breathe, Ceej, breathe. Skip the details and get to the CD you’re reviewing.

Looks like my muse has spoken.

Anyway, some great urban contemporary-influenced sounds have been coming out of Japan over the past several years that I’ve been following that country’s output – Mai Kuraki’s first two albums, many of Hello! Project’s R&B experiments (see the tracks used on the second episode of The Pagoda Podcast as well as the show notes for good examples), and much of Koda Kumi’s output come to mind. So it’s probably no surprise that, thanks to the site HearJapan.com and a Japanese indie label called Next Records, I should stumble across a trio that makes the best modern R&B songs that I’ve heard in years.
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