Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama just passed its 2nd Anniversary mark recently. I didn’t make a big deal about it for several reasons… For one, I didn’t make a big deal last year either, and second, the actual date of this blog’s debut has been lost in the ether thanks to the ineptitude of a hair-metal-oldies-band drummer and his not-so-wonderful web hosting staff. I’m guessing that it was April 8th, 2006 when I started this blog, while at the same time I am tempted to make the “official” date April 11th because last year on that day I got to see The Stooges.

Rather than go through some lengthy bullshit on the past, I thought I’d take a cure from the liner notes of Fatboy Slim’s recent greatest-hits anthology and list some of the things this blog and its author have gone through since I started this project:

Two webhosts (only one of which I recommend, Bluehost)
Three laptops (a 2004 Apple PowerBook G4 until 3.17.08, a Dell Inspiron borrowed from my mother, and my present Dell XPS M1530)
Two iPods
Seven Morning Musume singles (counting “Resonant Blue”)
Seven personnel changes in Morning Musume
Three and a half Morning Musume albums (the “half album” being the 7.5 Fuyu Fuyu EP)
Six Berryz Koubou singles
One and a half Berryz Koubou albums (the “half album” being their misnumbered (3) Natsu Natsu Mini Berryz)
Five C-ute singles (all of their major-label releases)
Two and a half C-ute albums
Six Stooges albums (two of those being the remastered editions of their Elektra albums, another being a 180-gram pressing of Raw Power)
Two Koharu Kusumi albums
Four New York Dolls albums (three of those being vinyl editions of all three studio albums)
Four Puffy AmiYumi albums
Four Mission of Burma albums (three of them being the new vinyl reissues on Matador)
Two Panic! At The Disco albums
Two copies of Flyleaf’s first album (one autographed)
Two autographed Sick Puppies CDs
One guitar autographed by Iggy Pop and the Asheton Brothers
Four books autographed by Henry Rollins
One book autographed by Sen. Arlen Specter
One e-mail from Henry Rollins
Two e-mails from Jello Biafra
Three day trips to New York where I spent over $700 combined in one store (Virgin Megastore) alone
Four visits to Apple Stores where I spent $0 (and wish I had been able to spend several times what I spent at Virgin)
Five day trips to Philadelphia
Two day trips to Syracuse, NY
One Stooges concert
One Bon Jovi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
Two Flyleaf concerts
Two Evanescence concerts
Two Sick Puppies concerts
One missed Puffy AmiYumi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
Two 100-count spindles of CD-R’s
Two Palm Treo 680 smartphones
Four SD cards
Two phonograph needles (accidentally broke the first one)
Three disbanded Hello! Project groups
Three new Hello! Project groups (not counting Kira Pika and Milky Way)
Two people parting company with Hello! Project altogether one way or another
One Hello! Project-related project getting released in the States (Yo-Yo Girl Cop)
Six Wordpress themes
Four domain names (three for the Pagoda alone, the other for the Reina blog)
Two different Reina Tanaka/Robert Fripp header graphics (Vee improved on the original)
Two years without Ai Kago
One W album that’s gone the way of the original version of SMiLE
One Guns N’ Roses album finally being finished and handed in (whether it gets released may be another story!)
Two knocked-up MoMusus
Two instances where I bitched about Nozomi Tsuji getting knocked up
Three instances where I remarked about what a lucky bastard Taiyo Sugiura is
Three snarky remarks made by me about Avril Lavgine
One snarky remark made by “Reina” about Jamie Lynn Spears
One snarky remark made by me to “Reina” about Beyonce Knowles
Countless snarky remarks about American Idle
Three American Idle contestants losing their recording contracts
Four Reina Tanaka photobooks
One tire
Two illnesses
Two back-to-back NaNoWriMo wins
Three book projects (two simultaneous, one on hold)
One published short story (”The Man In The Hummer” in Deliver Us From Evil, available from Jaded Silence Press)
All three versions of American Wota
One nomination at the IntlWota Awards
Two jokes stolen from Jeff Dunham
One joke stolen from Nothing Nice To Say
Reina Tanaka’s 18th birthday
My 40th birthday
Mike Watt’s 50th birthday
Iggy Pop’s 60th birthday
Several boxes of CD sleeves
Countless mouse and camera batteries
Countless VitaminWaters
Countless instances where I took to heart David Peel’s adage that “fuck” is not a dirty word
A year and a half of lost blog archives (Fuck you, “Vikki Stixx”!)
Not enough trips to Starbucks
More money spent at CDJapan than at Gallery of Sound
More money spent this year on vinyl than CDs
And one girlfriend, since upgraded to fiancée.

According to the fistful of links provided by Brother Ray at International Wota, Viyuden are going to call it a career (as a group anyway - they’ll all still be with H!P and Rika Ishikawa is already involved with Ongaku Gatas) this June.

It sucks - I enjoyed all of their singles and their Suiteroom Number 1 album - but in a way I should have seen it coming considering that their “second album” was really a collection of all of their A-sides (sequenced in reverse order of release. Hopefully we’ll get at least one last single from the trio before June.

The question remains, who’s going to keep up the sexy quotient in Hello! Project now? Besides Reina, that is.

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.

We interrupt my attempts to succeed at NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row to bring you a public service announcement…

Radicalpatriot’s recent blog postings on wanting to see Morning Musume and Hello! Project on United States soil resonated with rather loud familiarity. Last year around this time, I wrote a piece where I, at length, argued for the case of bringing MoMusu and H!P to America. Unfortunately, that article, which was posted on MotokoAoyama.com v1.0 and on a slightly modified form at Ikimasshoi! during my all-too-brief tenure there, no longer exists (Ikimasshoi! did another remodeling job and bounced every non-news poster in December of 2006, not long after I posted the article there; Loyal readers of this blog already know what an arrogant hair-metal drummer and sometime web service owner did to MotokoAoyama.com v1.0, while a link to that horror story lies elsewhere on this blog for you newcomers). My belief that Morning Musume and Hello! Project would make a considerable positive impression on mainstream America still does exist.

Let’s step away from the trees and look at the whole forest, shall we?
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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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Tsunku, the man behind the mixing desk and the pen for Morning Musume and Hello! Project, has been called a lot of things. One of the most complimentary was the word “genius” when ex-Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman mentioned him in a 2004 Guitar World piece. He’s produced every Morning Musume recording except their “demo” single “Ai No Tane”, and most of Hello! Project’s recordings over the past ten years, and I have no fault with his productions. However, I thought it would be interesting if Tsunku decided to take a temporary secondary role if the opportunity came for a superstar producer to sit behind the board for a Morning Musume session. He’d still be in the writing chair, but be more of a witness than a primary director to the session while someone with a long track record and a set of fresh ears worked with our heroines.

5. Howard Benson - For one of MoMusu’s modern guitar rock excursions, he’d be perfect. On one hand, he’s worked with Motorhead, Ice-T’s Body Count, Flyleaf, and Three Days Grace, On the other hand, he also worked with American Idle also-ran Daughtry. Umm, maybe we’d better rethink that one…

4. Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds – Responsible for some of TLC’s best tracks that didn’t have Dallas Austin’s name in the production credits. Given that he has “Red Light Special” amongst his credits, imagine what he could do with the increasingly sexual Viyuden.

3. Jeff Lynne – The man knows how to work with great vocalists, and multiple vocalists, and get great chorus vocal sounds. Anyone that could get such multiple personalities as Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison on the same track (not to mention get the surviving three Beatles to cooperate with each other for “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love”) could have a field day – hell, a virtual cakewalk – with our girls. Can anyone also say Tsunku/Jeff Lynne songwriting collaboration?

2. Rick Rubin – The man’s production credits (Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, LL Cool J, Slayer, Donovan, Linkin Park, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Neil Diamond, Dixie Chicks, The Cult, Mick Jagger, Danzig, Tom Petty, System Of A Down, Slipknot, Issac Hayes, U2, Weezer, Justin Timberlake, Bob Dylan, Shakira) and roster of his American Recordings label (most of the above plus Geto Boys, Flipper, Jesus And Mary Chain, Black Crowes, Frank Black, MC 900 Ft. Jesus, Julian Cope, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Wesley Willis) are just as wonderfully diverse musically as Morning Musume’s back catalog. They’d probably be a perfect fit. The only problem is, Rubin has been known to go in and out of many different sessions, leaving the artists and engineer to fend for themselves (a tendency that had Velvet Revolver dismiss Rubin from the helm of their second album, and had Weezer put a rather obvious co-production credit on their Rubin-helmed album), or tell artists to keep writing songs until Rubin felt they were ready (a tactic that did result in one of Neil Diamond’s better albums, 12 Songs). Methinks that neither MoMusu nor Tsunku would put up with that shit. I don’t even want to fathom the possibility of having Morning Musume live and record in same haunted Hollywood mansion that the Chili Peppers lived and recorded in for BloodSugarSexMagik…

1. Brian Eno – Some people might know the man for his ambient and instrumental albums like Music For Airports, Music For Films, and Discreet Music, his collaborations with Robert Fripp (No Pussyfooting, which was the first recorded instance of the “Frippertronics” tape-loop playback system) and David Byrne (My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, said to be the favorite album of Public Enemy’s right hand man Hank Shocklee), or just for being the weirdo that was in Roxy Music for their first two albums. But the man knows his way around the producer’s chair (Talking Heads’ Fear Of Music and Remain In Light, David Bowie’s ‘Berlin trilogy’, and U2’s The Joshua Tree, anyone?) and around pop songs (ever hear Eno’s 1979 album Before and After Science? “Backwater” and “King’s Lead Hat” will stick to your brain just as long as “Egao YES Nude” and “Kanahshimi Twilight”!). Besides, I’d like to see Eno hand Tsunku a deck of his Oblique Strategies cards just to see what kind of songs Tsunku comes up with for an Eno-helmed MoMusu album.