I saw Mr. Schickele when he was touring behind the 1712 Overture album in 1989, and this was one of the pieces he did that night, “The Farmer On The Dole” from the Four Folk Song Upsettings (which would end up on a later PDQ Bach album).

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).

There’s also going to be a couple of special changes coming to this blog this week.

That’s all for now. Sorry for being out of circulation the past week; hopefully everyone is still out there ’cause I’m still in here.

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?

Finally had a chance to see the new Berryz Koubou PV for the first time. I’d heard about the monkey suits from other entries in the IW neighborhood but decided to wait until I actually saw the video.

Musically, it sounds like the group is going to go into reggaeton territory until a typical Tsunkuian left turn happens and we get some heavily regional sounding J-Pop instead. The song in general is definitely the stranger/funnier side of Berryz - closer to the Berryz of “Piriri To Yokou!” than the Berryz of “Jiriri Kiteru” or “VERY BEAUTY”.

Those monkey suits, though… yikes. I’m sure it was inevitable given the song’s title and the banana motif (Sorry, I can’t resist this joke: Were there guards keeping JunJun away from the set?), but I hope that there’s a version of the dance shot PV coming where they’re in their more normal outfits.

All musical instruments are fragile, from the oldest Stradivarius violin to the newest off-the-rack Fender Stratocaster. But the human larynx is the most fragile instrument of them all. The best way to combat or prevent such abuse is to learn how to sing from the diaphragm (chest voice) rather than from the voice box itself (head voice). Sometimes vocal training can actually help a person who tried to sing untrained recover or even improve their vocal power: In her pre-She’s So Unusual days, Cyndi Lauper rehabilitated her singing voice, which had been shredded from multiple nights fronting cover bands, by studying for a couple of years with a vocal coach who specialized in teaching rock and pop singers opera techniques. I think Henry Rollins underwent some similar vocal training in the mid-90’s, judging from the change his singing voice went through between the Weight album sessions in late 1993 and the Come In And Burn sessions in 1996. In between those two sessions, Rollins did a guest vocal on Mike Watt’s first solo album, but his voice is a rather harsh, throaty rasp on that track; his vocals from Come In And Burn onward have shown Rollins to be in much more control of his singing voice. At least one of his Rollins Band albums, Hard Volume, was recorded while the singer was both under deadline and suffering from strep throat, and his Black Flag diary/memoirs Get In The Van recounts several instances when he either blew his voice out onstage or did several consecutive weeks of one-nighters while battling laryngitis.

Of course, bad habits can also lead to the detriment and even the loss of vocal power. Smoking (both tobacco and marijuana) and drinking alcoholic beverages are the most common enemies of the voice box. Many singers - and rightfully so - prohibit people from smoking around them, but others will claim that smoking doesn’t effect their voices. In moderation, those vices may actually enhance some voices - Bob Dylan’s trademark vocal tone was partly the product of smoking both tobacco and pot, while a short layoff from lighting up led to the sweeter voice he had on his Nashville Skyline album. On the electronic press kit reproduced as a bonus feature on their When London Burns DVD, Deicide’s Glen Benton candidly credits the deepening octaves of his vocals to “cigarettes, Jack Daniels and marijuana” (vices he would give up in late 2006 on the advice of a doctor).

In excess,such vices can be fatal to the larynx: legendary operatic tenor Enrico Caruso smoked cigars regularly and paid the price of an onstage throat hemmorage for it, while on the totally opposite end of the spectrum, punk rock performance artist GG Allin, who started out his recording career in the late 1970’s with a more melodic, Iggy Pop and Stiv Bators-influenced vocal and delivery, recorded his final studio album with a voice that was horrifically ravaged from years of unrepentant drug and alcohol abuse. Even the casual use of cigarettes and alcohol can have fans of an artist up in arms, as Ai Kago’s original stalkerazzi-outed underage smoking incident in 2006 proved.

Diet can also have an effect, desired or not, on the voice. Many experts advise singers against consuming any kind of dairy product before recording or performing, owing to the buildup of mucus caused by even one glass of milk or slice of cheese. Of course, consuming the odd dairy product could also assist in deilbrately making a voice sound less worked on, something David Lee Roth (according to his own memoirs) discovered during the sessions for Van Halen’s first album. According to Roth’s memoir Crazy From The Heat, when their producer Ted Templeman discovered that Diamond Dave had avoided cigarettes and dairy prior to recording the lead vocal for “Jamie’s Cryin’”, Templeman ordered the singer to go outside and smoke a joint, and sent a studio runner out to get Roth a cheeseburger. Roth went outside, ate the cheeseburger, smoked half of the joint, drained a can of Coke, and came back in to record the vocal for one of VH’s best loved early album cuts.

I don’t know what kind of vocal training Ayako Nakanomori had (if any), or if she had any habits that could have resulted in her vocal problems. By that, I do not mean to imply that she was a smoker, only that she could have done or gone through other things, like poor diet choices, a stressful situation, or some sort of bad cold, that could have made her voice susceptible to getting a cyst on her vocal chords in the first place. Hopefully, she’ll overcome her original setback, just as she’ll have to overcome the sudden breakup of her eponymous band when she resumes her music career.

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.

Right in-between the releases of their 17th single “Ike Ike Monkey Dance” on July 16th and their as yet untitled 5th LP on September 10th is a single involving a remix of their cover version of Dschinghis Khan’s eponymous single, which will have the collective release title Dschinghis Khan Onkochishin Remix. I do have to agree with those who think this particular release, on appearances, comes several months too late, given that the original Berryz single came out this past March. Remixes usually tend to come out within weeks of an original version’s release, rather than months, no?

Is Tsunku running out of ideas, as some of us have feared? No. Considering that a new, original, Berryz single is coming out the month before this remix EP, and an album of new material plus “Dschinghis Khan”, “Yuke Yuke Monkey Dance” and “Tsukiatteru no ni Katamoi” is coming out the month after, it’s not even a possibility. Since the EP is coming out on Piccolo Town, Tsunku’s only real role in the release in question is probably just approving the final master of the CD. So many Berryz Koubou releases coming out in a very short time period is nothing new either: Their first three singles came out in three consecutive months in the spring of 2004, and the band closed out 2005 by releasing in a five-week period the Dai 2 Seichouki LP, the “Gag 100kaibun Aishite Kudasai” single, and the Special! Best Mini ~2.5 Maime no Kare~ EP.

However, it should be pointed out that as of this writing, “Dschinghis Khan” is Berryz Koubou’s biggest selling single to date, having sold over 37,000 copies in outlets whose sales are counted by Oricon. It’s also the Berryz single that has had the most first week sales of any single in their career and the single that has had the longest stay on Oricon’s sales chart (eight weeks). The song apparently still has some wings over in Japan; although the single hasn’t been on the Oricon chart since May, the song is presumably still getting scattered airplay on Japanese radio, and given the song’s origins as a popular European and Asian disco hit in its original incarnation in 1979, it’s not unlikely to think that Berryz’ version is getting some club play as well, in spite of its radio-length brevity.

It’s also not unlikely to think that some enterprising bedroom remixer somewhere hasn’t done an unofficial remix that combines the Berryz version with the Dschinghis Khan original, or that some DJ in a dance club in Japan hasn’t already crossfaded between both versions in the course of a club set. Hence this impending release.

The Onkochishin Remix CD EP is set to include an official remix that blends both the original Dschinghis Khan recording and Berryz Koubou’s cover version, as well as the original versions of the recordings by both artists. While the inclusion of the original Berryz single mix may seem a bit redundant to the casual Berryz fan who already has a copy of the single (it’s only a slight exaggeration to suggest that a really hardcore Berryz fan would buy bootleg CD-R’s of the group eating burritos and farting if they were available), it should be pointed out that, given that the CD EP is being credited to both groups, the inclusion of the Berryz version is there as a benefit to those that may not have ever bought the original Berryz single, just as the original Dschinghis Khan recording is included for the benefit of Berryz fans who never heard the original recording. I purchased a Dschinghis Khan double-CD anthology early in 2008 partly out of curiosity and partly because talk of their infamous single “Moskau” at the American Wota board was such that I couldn’t get the damned song out of my head, but curiously, their eponymous theme song wasn’t included on the compilation, which I found odd.

As for why this EP is coming out months after the original, while I can’t say for sure, it’s likely that a few corporate and technical gremlins may have been to blame for any delay. Dschinghis Khan, the group, recorded for the Ariola label in Europe during their heyday, a label that is now part of the Sony-BMG empire everywhere but in Japan, where Sony and BMG remain two separate companies. Berryz Koubou, as we all know, record for the venerable Japanese major label King by way of the Up-Front Works-owned imprint Piccolo Town. As mentioned earlier, the EP is coming out on Piccolo Town, which means that UFW and King negotiated for a master-use license with BMG Japan. The licensing of masters from one label or production company to another is a frequently common and often painless procedure. The actual difficulty may have been technical.

Like most modern acts (any project involving Jack White, Jeff Tweedy, or Steve Albini are the only exceptions at this point in time), Berryz Koubou record to multi-track hard disk recording systems like ProTools, Logic, and Cakewalk, rather than the increasingly expensive and frequently unstable but age-old medium of analog tape. 16-track and 24-track analog reel-to-reel tape were the state of the art recording mediums in Dschinghis Khan’s day (digital tape was still in its infancy in the late 70’s, and only audiophile-minded classical labels like Deutsche Grammophon and Telarc were using such systems with any frequency). Although the likes of Jack White will praise analog tape to their dying day for what they feel is the medium’s relative warmth compared to digital recordings, analog tape itself is almost literally a dying medium. The last analog tape manufacturing facility in America, Quantegy, stopped making analog reel-to-reel tape last year, and the people in the reissue and remastering departments at the major labels have long discovered that the shelf-life of analog tape, especially tapes made starting in the late 70’s, is more notable for losing copious amounts of oxide off of the tape ribbon than for retaining the music once recorded to it. Such losses can be countered only by baking the tapes for several hours in a convection oven at a temperature between 120 and 140 degrees Farenheit, and then transferring the reel immediately to a hard-disk system.

Doing an official remix combining both group’s recordings would have to involve locating both the hard disk containing the multi-track recording of the Berryz version, which would be relatively easy to find, and the 16- or 24-track tape of the Dschinghis Khan version, which had to be a pain in the ass for UFW and BMG given that the multi-track tape was most likely still sitting in a studio or warehouse somewhere in what used to be West Germany. Throw in the possibility of the tape not being in as mint condition as it was when the box was unsealed in the studio at the start of the day, having to bake the reel in a studio in Germany (the tape probably would not have survived a FedEx or DHL shipment to Japan), and then transfer the tape to a hard-drive, and you’ve got a tedious situation on your hands. Locating the original Dschinghis Khan tapes, in short, was probably the most time-consuming part of the process – ask anyone who works in the archive department at a major label how hard it is to locate master tapes in their vault (Universal Music’s archives, derived from the combining of MCA, Motown, and Polydor/Mercury must be both a treasure trove AND a nightmare to go through for their employees!).

And that is before whoever was hired to do the official mash-up of the two versions by UFW had to sit down with two multi-track hard drives, sync them together, and keep doing remixes until he or she settled on the right amount of elements from both versions to make the final version for the EP. I say this not to pick on those who put together their own remixes on their home computers – I recorded an entire five-song techno EP myself in four consecutive nights in 2002 – but a more professional mash-up like the one commissioned by UFW for this project requires professional everything : professional-grade equipment, an experienced audio engineer, and considerable professional patience, especially when you’re dealing with two 24-track recordings recorded on different mediums in different decades.

The end result will speak for itself.

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.)

Then there’s the stuff I have to deal with when I’m not putting fingers to QWERTY keys. My current day job, which I am beyond anxious to leave behind permanently, continues to be a source of frustration, amplified by the constant ineptitude of an employer that I have been wanting to leave lying in a pool of his own blood for the past three years (if the job market in the area had been better, this wouldn’t even be an issue). My fiancée’s sister got married two weeks ago; two years and two days from when I write this, on June 26, 2010, I’ll be walking down the aisle with my own bride, and we’ve only just started to discuss the initial details about our own nuptials. (As a matter of fact, Tara called me when I was in the middle of this, wanting me to check out a Shania Twain song she thought should be our wedding song.) There’s the everyday household things that have to be done, and there’s sleep, which I would love to truly make “optional” (to quote the Descendants) in order to get more important things done. Like my writing.

There seem to be more days when I don’t post here or at So Hot She Shits Fire or Your Opinion Doesn’t Count than when I do, but with all of the writing projects I want to do, sometimes the blogging – the most public and immediate of my projects – gets shoved to the side. If my shitty day job was an option rather than a necessity – or better yet, if I was already depending on writing for my main source of income – this wouldn’t be an issue. Obviously, I should show up on here a lot more often than I do. One good habit I’ve gotten into as a writer is having other things to work on if I get stuck on one project. One of the reasons I started Stuck In A Pagoda in the first place was to keep my writing skills sharp. Considering that, for various reasons, I choose to spend my own money on server space and attempt to guide the hills and valleys of Wordpress installations and plug-ins, rather than depend on a “free” account from Wordpress or Blogger, that aspect alone – the investment of money (however small an amount) – forces me to take the blogging seriously. I don’t think I’d have devoted the time that I have over the past two years to Stuck In A Pagoda – not to mention be able to start So Hot She Shits Fire, my worship blog for my favorite J-Pop idol – if I had been using gratis web space. (I’d probably also be cursing out everyone remotely connected with Wordpress if I had been running this blog off of one of their accounts, only to discover my hard work being 86’ed over a zero-tolerance TOS violation.)

A colleague at IW told me today that there are over 200 J-music blogs out there being covered by the IW team alone. With our fearless leader presently on hiatus and the rest of IW’s staff having their own distractions outside of the blogosphere, obviously they can’t all be covered. Some of them weren’t around a year or even six months ago, and some, god forbid, may not be around six months or a year from now. The knowledge that there are so many out there, though, is pretty cool, though. The more, the merrier – I’ll still write about J-Pop on my blog whether there are 30, 300, or 1000 J-blogs out there. There’s probably a few that have been inspired by my own blogging work – Henkka is one guy who has said as much – just like I was inspired by Ray to take my music blogging to the level it was at and beyond after he started writing up what were simply some public posts on my LiveJournal. Hearing that my writing about both J-pop and punk rock on this blog inspired Henkka to do H!P Opinions Of A Metalhead drove home how much of a reach I have as a “citizen musicologist” (hey, if political bloggers can call themselves “citizen journalists”, I can call myself a citizen musicologist). It’s always good to know you’re not just quacking into a void.

And speaking of voids… Ray’s current hiatus has left one for now, which has led me to realize I’m not being fair to myself or the people who follow this blog and/or So Hot She Shits Fire (which seems to generate more click-thrus at IW than the Pagoda sometimes) if I keep leaving little voids of my own. I love to write, and when I can manage to keep my worst writing habits – everything from trying not to edit a piece before I can even finish the fucking thing (a habit that occurs more often with my book and short story manuscripts than anything else) to blowing off an article for this blog that I had been wanting to get out of my system in favor of writing something else that won’t be seen for several months after its finished, to just blowing off writing for the evening because I myself am blown out – in check, I can get a lot done. I keep telling myself that my writing is important, but I’ve come to realize that attitude, however positive, can become a bit hypocritical unless I give equal attention for both the now (my musicalogical writings via the blog) and the later (my novel-in-progress Here Is The Wonderland, the short stories, the non-fiction project, or just anything in general that will bring in either a paycheck, an all important story credit, or both).

George Carlin’s sudden passing on Sunday night at age 71 reemphasized one thing that we all know – and tend to forget: Time is not promised to everyone. Not everyone is going to reach their 80’s like Vladimir Horowitz did. Kurt Cobain didn’t make 30; Lisa Lopes wasn’t even halfway to 40 when she died. Frank Zappa didn’t make 55 – his old friend Captain Beefheart said Frank “died too goddamn young”, but the same thing could be said about Carlin or Horowitz, or even George Burns, who made 100.

To my fellow bloggers, both in and out of the J-Pop/Intl Wota community, let me give this advice for when you think that blogging is a waste of time. There have been times when I’ve been too damn tired to want to even answer an e-mail, let alone write a chapter for a novel or an article for a blog post. Once in a while, that’s fine – but as far as I’m concerned I’ve slacked off much too often the past few months. Time, I have always felt, is best spent when you’re accomplishing something meaningful. Most of us have heard the quote from This Is Spinal Tap: “Have a good time all of the time.” When you accomplish something constructive, that definitely counts as a good time. Like the old song says, let the good times roll.