Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

Came across this clip almost at random last night while doing a little YouTube surfing; a late 2004 TV appearance by Morning Musume and W. Outside of the presence of “Namida…” and “RoboKiss” in the set list, I can’t peg the clip by anything other than its approximate time of recording and broadcast. Man, how things changed so quickly for many of the participants in this clip:

Nozomi Tsuji became a Morning MILF last month. Kaori Iida will be the next Morning MILF next month. Ai Kago, depending on who you ask, is either exploring the Kama Sutra with that creepy old guy in New York, or planning a post-H!P comeback. Or both, for all we know. Mari Yaguchi left MoMusu a few months after this clip and is way fucking overdue for her solo debut album. Rika Ishikawa left MoMusu right before Mari did to be a full-time Viyuden. Makoto Ogawa went on an educational hiatus in late 2006. Asami Konno went to be a full-time student, but came back to H!P part-time as part of Ongaku Gatas. Hitomi Yoshizawa graduated from the band (and thankfully hasn’t been as musically idle as Marippe, thanks to Ongaku Gatas). Miki Fujimoto is laying low (and getting laid), holding up future GAM and solo releases in the process. Reina Tanaka, Sayumi Michishige, Eri Kamei, and Risa Niigaki all became legal.

It’s things like this that give me more grey hairs than I should have, even at my age. No real complaints though (except for what the fuck was up with those antennae Aibon and Nono were wearing?) - it was real cool to see this clip.

The mix CD that inspired the graphic of MotokoAoyama.com v2.0… or is it the other way around?

In actuality, I had the concept for the graphic first, but while I was thinking about it, I fooled around with a track listing in iTunes (one of the great things about iTunes and iPods – I can fool around with mix CD track listings before committing a final sequence to a CD-R) and this was the result, which probably spurred my making the final graphic for the site in the first place.

Doing mixes like this is second nature to me. There’s a Black Flag vs. TLC mix that I posted at ArtOfTheMix.org in 2002 (and was well received there, mostly for its sheer ballsyness), and back in the days of cassettes I used to put two albums that had nothing in common with each other outside of my liking them both on each side (Somewhere in my house there is a Maxell C-90 with Debbie Gibson’s first album on one side and Soul Asylum’s Hang Time on the other.)

Anyway, I might as well take everyone through this mix, track by track:
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