Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

Man, what took me so long to check out this PV? Actually, more like “watch it again and then write about it” would be the correct second part of that question…

I do admit, an H!P side project involving my favorite MoMusu is going to get my attention no matter what anyway, but I still have to withhold further comment until I’ve actually listened to the song a couple of times.

Well, the time for comment is now. I love the song. Yes, I’ve said this before when I did the Ri-Sa.J review this past weekend, and the TLC tribute episode of the Pagoda Podcast last month, and it bears repeating: Urban contemporary music in America has gone down the shitter. What was once the edgiest and best non-rock-based pop music on the American airwaves between 1991 and 2002 is now simply a repetitive and uninspired bastardization of both R&B and hip-hop with very little in the way of creativity or content either musically or lyrically. If I hear one more repetitive “hip-hop” song with lyrics about being “in tha club”, or about somebody’s clothes, or with some asinine deliberate mispronunciation of any word in the English language that makes Ebonics look like Shakespearian verse, I’m liable to call an air strike on the Island Def Jam offices or make Akon wish he really had gone to prison for car theft.

Hearing “C/C (Cinderella Complex)”, an R&B song which actually has defined verses and choruses (a rarity in current American urban pop), reminds me musically of a lot of some of the tracks on what I think is TLC’s finest studio album, Fan Mail. The musical arrangement of “C/C” reminds me a lot of the “grooving robotic” (my term) sound that Dallas Austin (the George Martin to TLC’s Beatles) concocted for many of Fan Mail’s pivotal tracks - so much so that it’s almost a shock that Reina Tanaka and Ai Takahashi aren’t singing “Silly Ho” or “I’m Good At Being Bad” instead, or that one of the H!P Kids joining the sempai Musume on this track aren’t making with a Left Eye-styled rap interlude.

The video’s pretty damn good for what is supposed to be a one-off side project tied into a MoMusu-involved stage play. My fellow Cancerian Vee lamented in her recent review that Reina could have worn a hairstyle other than her trademark tails in the PV, which may be true. But I think in Reina’s case, given that she’d worn different hairstyles in the “Mikan” and “Resonant Blue” PV’s and sported a transitional hairstyle during Morning Musume’s recent Taiwanese TV appearance, her wearing her everyday “Wonkytails” in a PV situation seems a shade redundant, but it doesn’t matter since, thinking back to the past couple of years of Morning Musume PVs, Reina doesn’t sport her trademark tails in any of those clips.

Takitty’s touching her face and fooling with her hat seem to get a little tedious as well, but probably only because she was doing something similar (sans hat) in the “Mikan” PV. The hat looks good on Takitty - it makes up for the fact that we don’t see much of her badonkadonk. (Vee is to blame for that word being in my vocabulary in relation to Ai Takahashi!) The three H!P Kids involved, Saki Shimuzu of Berryz Koubou, Maimi Yajima of C-ute, and H!P Egg Yukka Maeda, all do well in their slightly limited roles on the song as well.

The single comes out next week, and I’ve already had my pre-order in for weeks, but no doubt I’ll be checking the torrents this weekend for an advance tideover.

Since some of the descriptions of “Resonant Blue”’s music that I’ve seen on other blogs (Yes, Celestia and Yoshimi, I’m talking to both of you!) are inaccurately describing the musical style Morning Musume uses in their forthcoming single as “pop” or “hip-hop” (in both cases… WTF?), a little lesson in the funk is in order. And having grown up on R&B music, suffice it to say that I know my funk, OK. Let’s begin…

First, “Love Rollercoaster” by the Ohio Players. Where do you think the opening guitar lick in “Resonant Blue” comes from?

…Ai Takahashi must have farted.

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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