Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

Leave it to my favorite blogger in the IW blogosphere, Vee Hoffman, to give me the excuse to finally sit on my ass and do something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile. I have to apologize in advance for the slightly shitty microphone I used on this debut podcast, as I had plugged into my $1700 Windoze Blister laptop a $2 microphone I’d gotten on the spur of the moment via a “cheap deals” link Tara had hipped me to. This was slightly impromptu, but if the reaction is good to this experiment, I’ll try to outdo myself on Episode 2 (and get a better microphone). Enjoy!

Direct download:

ETA 4.20.08 6:02 PM. Apparently Odeo.com, which is hosting the stream and RSS feed of this podcast, has briefly gone kerplotz. My apologies, but that part of the equation is unfortunately out of my control. Good thing I put the direct DL up, huh?

ETA 4.21.08 10:48 AM. Since Odeo.com is proving rather unreliable, I’m hosting the show through Podshow.com now and have removed the Odeo.com flash stream. You can stream or download the show, or grab the RSS feed for this and future episodes through this URL:

I’ve also put this new location’s RSS feed through iTunes for those of you that like to download podcasts in that manner; I’ll let everyone know when it becomes available soon as I get an update from Apple.

ETA 4.22.08 8:29 PM. The Pagoda Podcast is now available through iTunes. Click here to subscribe!

Playlist:
“The American Invasion” (intro) / CJ Marsicano / WMX8 EP
“Pinch!” / Yui Horie / Ho?!
“SwEEt dREAM” / Tommy February6 / Tommy Airline
“Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)” / Parliament / Mothership Connection
“Hello Orange Sunshine” / Ai+BAND / Hello! We Are Ai+BAND!
“Yumi Wo Mimashita” / Yukki / Sotsugyou EP
“Mrs. Robinson” / Natsumi Abe & Yuko Nakazawa / FS5 Sotsugyou

PERFUME
GAME
(Tokuma Japan)
Availability: CD only
Rating:

Perfume, a three-piece J-pop girl group (the members - Nocchi, Kashiyuka, and A-chan - all use nicknames professionaly a-la TLC), on outward appearance do not seem to have much to distinguish themselves from other, similarly sized girl groups. Yet, with several singles to their name (all of which appeared on a compilation that preceded this album), this is only their first proper studio album. And it debuted at #1 on Oricion’s daily album chart this past Tuesday. What’s the deal?

Musically, Perfume are backed by arrangements heavy on all manner of analog synthesizers - often presenting harsher textures that recall early Polysics - and digital keyboards, married mostly to house and slower Eurobeat rhythms. That is the good part - all 12 of the songs on GAME are well written and well arranged, sometimes cleverly (the sequencers on “Bufferfly” easily evoke the winged creature of the same name) and its easy to see why songs like “Baby cruising Love” and “Polyrhythm” have made the pop charts in Japan. However, the instrumentation does not vary until the closing track, “Puppy Love”, comes in with a “Linus And Lucy” left-hand bass line and a choppy, artificial-sounding acoustic guitar.

Vocally, however, Perfurme are marred by heavy use of vocoders and other ProTools plug-ins. Used as a compositional device on the appropriate song (think Buono!’s “Internet Cupid”, Bob Mould’s “(Shine Your) Life Love Heart”, Panic! At The Disco’s “Nails For Breakfast, Tacks For Snacks”), or even in select places within a song (think Cher’s “Believe” and Snoop Dogg’s “Sensual Seduction”), it makes for variety within the confines of an album. Used heavily on every track without a break… well, think of current American R&B sensation of the moment, T-Pain, and his heavy reliance on vocoder-like vocal effects (a recent live TV performance that circulated on YouTube revealed how poor of a singer he is without the ProTools plug-ins).

The end result? An otherwise good album is marred by a production that casts doubts about the talent of its vocalists. They may have a number one album and a couple of hit singles to their credit, but on subsequent trips to the studio they’ll have to leave the vocal plug-ins deactivated in ProTools and use more varied musical arrangements if they even expect to see Morning Musume’s taillights from at least eight blocks away (by which time Morning Musume will have probably racked up another five or ten Top 10 hits). Like George Clinton sang on Parliament’s “Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk”, “Better luck next time.”

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.

An interesting question came up in the January 2008 issue of Down Beat magazine’s “The Question Is…” column, which takes a question involving America’s first true musical genre and poses it to several jazz musicians.

In the wake of such recent jazz releases as Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, his Grammy-winning [not just the jazz grammy either, but Record of the Year] collection of improvisations on the songs of Joni Mitchell, and pianist Cyrus Chestnut using Elvis Presley songs as the basis of jazz improvisations, the Down Beat column in question asked, “Are there limits to using pop repertoire for jazz interpretation?”

The columnist in question, Dan Ouellette, writes: “Boomer artists in recent years have found jazz inspiration in pop songs by Elton John, The Doors, and James Taylor…” After referencing the aforementioned Hancock and Chestnut releases, Ouellette asks, “Where will it end – would someone ever make a go at jazzing up the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s bubblegum hit ‘Yummy, Yummy, Yummy’? Simply speaking, what works and what doesn’t for jazz interpretations of familiar pop tunes? How far can a jazz musician delve into the pop world for ‘new standards’?”

Hancock had already been plumbing possibilities about a decade prior to River when, in one of his first albums for Verve in 1996, he recorded the album New Standard, in which he used the likes of Nirvana’s “All Apologies”, Prince’s “Thieves In The Temple”, Don Henley’s “New York Minute”, and songs by Peter Gabriel , Sade, and Stevie Wonder as the basis of improvisational workouts. Hancock, of course, apprenticed early in his career with one of the true masters of jazz, Miles Davis.

Miles Davis being Miles motherfuckin’ Davis, of course, didn’t care where a song originated – if he could improv over it or explore the melody of it with his horn, he was going to do it. Having covered (with considerable audacity at the time) several popular and Broadway songs – many of which are now considered jazz standards – during his days with his first great quartet (the one with John Coltrane on tenor sax) in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, his approach would rub off directly on Coltrane, who would have one of his first ‘hit’ recordings with his 15-minute modal workout based around The Sound of Music’s “My Favorite Things”.

Miles would retain that same don’t-give-a-fuck attitude in 1985 when he made new standards out of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” and Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” on his album You’re Under Arrest. A few of his band members at the time weren’t entirely sold on the idea – guitarist John Scolfield said that he hated playing the songs in a later interview – but Miles was more than satisfied with the results… as was Cyndi Lauper herself; in the wake of Miles’ original cover version, “Time After Time” has become one of the most performed and recorded songs in modern history. (No doubt, the songwriting and publishing royalties Cyndi Lauper has been collecting for the past twenty years on that song alone have made it more than possible for her to do whatever the hell she wants in the recording studio, as opposed to endlessly repeating her She’s So Unusual and True Colors triumphs.)
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I almost threw up in my mouth when I read this on Tokyograph via IntlWota this afternoon:

It was made known on Monday that Puffy’s new single, “All Because of You,” was written by Avril Lavigne and singer/songwriter Butch Walker, who has produced for both Puffy and Lavigne in the past.

I’d love to know how this happened. As stated in the news item, Butch Walker worked with Ami and Yumi on some of the tracks from Splurge (including “Call Me What You Like”/”Shall We Dance” and “Tokyo I’m On My Way”) and Honeycreeper. Sadly, some money from Clive “Old And In The Way” Davis also lured Walker into working on some of Avril’s last album - the one with leitmotifs and styles stolen lock stock and barrel from the Rubinoos, Toni Basil, Peaches, and lord knows who else (besides Puffy AmiYumi). Either Avril, the fake punk married to another fake punk (one of the members of Sum41), had some guilt trips over biting on Ami and Yumi’s past work and is desperately trying to kiss ass, or our punk-poppin’ heroines from Japan caught wind of this little queef’s activities and decided to try to put her to work. Like every other composition credited to Ms. Lavigne, no doubt Walker will be doing at least 90 to 95% of the actual songwriting while Avril forces her way into an unearned equal share of the credit and publishing on the BMI and US Copyright Office forms (a situation not much different from Col. Tom Parker forcibly attaching Elvis Presley’s name and his own publishing company to songs his client recorded).

It doesn’t matter… Avril may have (falsely) declared herself to be “the motherfuckin’ princess” on her last album, but working for two queens of rock should knock her down a few thousand pegs. Avril can always use her cut of the royalties towards her impending plagiarism settlement with the Rubinoos.

As I begin to type this entry out, I have my Numark TTUSB Turntable out and a 200-gram pressing by Classic Records of the enduring Miles Davis album Kind Of Blue – one of the greatest albums ever made in any genre – playing; specifically, side two in the middle of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley’s alto sax solo on “All Blues”. I seem to be playing this album in this particular format at least once a week – I have owned Kind Of Blue in a couple of its different CD issues (the early 80’s release with its unnecessary digital remix of the album’s tracks and a totally different cover photo, and the remastered edition released in 1997 that is the version readily available, the master of which the vinyl pressing I am presently playing is based on) and I must say, even through the Logitech iPod speakers that my turntable is presently plugged directly into, the record sounds absolutely incredible. Just mentioning this particular pressing of the album on my LiveJournal led my colleague Vee to remark, “Holy crap, CJ, I got chills just reading that sentence”’ – which makes me wonder how she would react if she had been in the room with me to hear the actual record.

Vinyl has been making a rather unique resurgence over the past few years, notable enough for Time magazine to recently write an article about the phenomenon. The format has never disappeared – punk rock, alternative/indie rock, hip-hop, and electronic dance music have all kept the format alive, but most chain music stores do not stock them (unless they’re as big as Virgin Megastore’s Times Square, New York location).

Ironically, one national chain that is carrying some vinyl is Hot Topic. Don’t laugh. It’s not a wide or even a large selection – the selection is limited to some punk, alternative and metal releases (not surprising given Hot Topic’s sales demographic), but if you wanted to grab Paramore’s Riot! or No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom on colored vinyl, or a picture disc of Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High or Slayer’s South Of Heaven (not Reign In Blood, American Recordings?), you’d be set.
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Imagine if you will… Lester Bangs, the legendary rock critic who championed The Stooges and their other proto-punk brethren in the likes of Creem and Rolling Stone, suddenly turning around and dissing those same bands in favor of championing the acoustic soft-rockers like James Taylor that he once loathed with a passion.

While the case I am about to discuss is not as extreme as that, it is a proper parallel to the situation at hand.

The pseudonymous blogger “Radicalpatriot”, who up until recently championed Morning Musume and Hello! Project just as much as this writer did, if not more, went from visiting rakuen to see our heroines and came back from the States having decided to no longer promote the matter of bringing Morning Musume and Hello! Project to a non-Japanese audience wider than their current (and growing) cult status.

He claims in a recent board posting at American Wota (some weird internet glitch at wherever he was posting from kept him from accessing his normal posting URLs) that the live MoMusu/H!P experience was more about the fans than the singers onstage, or in his words, “The crowd is the show”. What gave him this clue, or at least what led him to such a rather ridiculous conclusion, is unclear. “The crowd” is not and never will be the show. The crowd is not why MoMusu/H!P music is finding its way to American homes - it, contrary to Rad’s sudden claim is, is all about those young ladies and their music. That’s why that crowd is there in the first place.

I don’t know whether it was some weird culture shock, or Rad’s once-well-meaning habit of hyperbole and overanalysis going more overboard than sanity should allow, but his recent statement simply smacks of betrayal, period.

If Radicalpatriot (or more appropriately at this point, Radicalquisling) wants to deal with rebellious Morning Musume fans, he needs to look no further than his home country and see the growing legion of American music fans who have chosen the high quality songs, albums, recordings, and performances of Morning Musume and other J-pop acts (not just ones from Hello! Project) as an alternative to the old-guard music industry trying to forcefeed watered down and unmemorable pop acts like Hannah Montana and whatever else is clogging 90% of your average Top 40 radio hour at any time in any part of this country.

If he’s not willing to continue to champion the cause of bringing Morning Musume and other great J-Pop to the United States on a mainstream basis, I am. It was part of my game plan for this blog for 2008 long before he went to Japan, and I’m more than determined to fire up that campaign now.

It’s on, motherfuckers. Who’s with me?

After many a delay (engagement announcement preparations, day job bullshit, inability to keep my hands off of my new USB turntable, and finally, the goddamned flu), I’ve finally gotten around to doing my top albums of 2007 list. Since trying to do individual reviews for the ten albums is a bit out of the question of the moment (I’ll be starting anew this week with a couple of slightly overdue reviews), I’ll use this as an excuse to reignite the Pagoda Five feature for 2008 as well.

10. Desoto Jones - Aurora (Deep Elm) An up-and-coming post-emo group led by three brothers deals with tragedy in the form of having to bury their father during the time they were recording the album. One can only hear this and wonder what kind of an album Hawthorne Heights will deliver as the follow-up to If Only You Were Lonely once they kick Tony Brummel to the curb and finish mourning their fallen comrade Casey Calvert. (http://www.deepelm.com - available on limited edition CD and through iTunes and eMusic.)

9. Northern Liberties - Ghost Mind Electricity (Badmaster) Third album from the Philadelphia trio that discovered the fine line between Joy Division and the Misfits. Recorded at the legendary Inner Ear Studio in Virginia (home of 98% of the Dischord catalog) with its equally revered owner/engineer Don Zientara, its’ the trio’s most accomplished recording yet. (http://www.northernlibertiesband.com - available on CD)

8. Paramore - Riot! (Fueled By Ramen) The trolls at PunkNews.org that complain about this album not being punk enough or being terrible don’t know what they’re talking about. “Misery Business” and “crushcrushcrush” are only the tip of the iceberg on this group’s second album. (http://www.fueledbyramen.com, available on CD, limited edition vinyl and limited edition CD/MVI combo)

7. Koda Kumi - Black Cherry (Avex Trax). A concept album? Looks like one to me, even if that wasn’t Kumi’s intention. The only difference between this and Dark Side Of The Moon is that Ms. Koda didn’t have to fly to Pompeii to make the companion movie. (http://www.rhythmzone.net/koda, available on CD)

6. Tommy Heavenly6 - HeavyStarryHeavenly (DefSTAR). A stronger effort from Tomoko Kawase’s darker alter-ego than her eponymous 2006 release, and her best solo work since Tommy Airline. Earth calling Amy Lee: You’ve been out-gothed; turn in your piano and quit ripping off Tori Amos and your ex-bandmates. (http://www.sonymusic.co.jp/Tommy/)

The top five of this list in about an hour…