Make Believe Mailer Vol. 57: Round And Round
This has been a great year for burrowing into the past. It has most recently been clearest in the videos for "1999" and "thank u, next," reference-a-thons built on memories that the primary audience (so, like, tweens and teens now) were not actually alive for. But that's nostalgia for you, falling somewhere between perfect-version of a place now lost (I was the same age as all the people in Mean Girls when it came out, those times were just as bad as now!) or a purely imagined representation of how people view yesteryear. It doesn't stop with those two -- TWICE's "What Is Love" pushes it even further by totally throwing coherent time to the side, Pulp Fiction rubbing up against La La Land. Then you have the whole "Plastic Love" phenomenon, wherein the past suddenly becomes relevant in the present, inspiring ~feels~ for a past nobody watching actually experienced.
One of the smaller and stranger examples of this comes from Yerin Baek's "La La La Love Song." She released this number five months ago, coupled with anime artwork and a request to "have a good drive with it." But I didn't encounter it via SoundCloud, but rather through the ol' YouTube recommendations. A clip uploaded by the account Mellowbeat Seeker set to a .gif of an anime woman popped up on my browser's right-hand side sometime this summer, and like just-under-two-million others, I listened to the song. And it's lovely, a wonderful midnight cruise overflowing with a melancholy that's hard to pin down, highlighted by those opening notes that pit Baek's voice against some keyboard twinkles. Some comments swoon about the '90s, other about city pop. It's a pretty perfect addition to the 2018 memory den.
What makes it even better is that it's a cover of a song* that can easily be read as functioning in the same way for a very different audience over 20 years ago. "La La La Love Song" originally came out in 1996 via
J-pop artist Toshinobu Kubota, a dude who started out in a post-city-pop world before establishing himself as an R&B force. But by the time "La La La Love Song" came out, his peak was over...but somehow, he ended up with one of the '90s weirdest hits, and what feels to me like a nod to the past.
(*aside: maybe not the same though? The SoundCloud tags for Baek's upload include "#citypop" "#cover" and "#OhashiTrio." That last one refers to the Japanese musician Ohashi Trio, the type of singer/songwriter you pass in the forest at Fuji Rock while you are walking to a better stage, who actually did his own cover of "La La La Love Song" in more recent memory. So, it feels safe to say that Baek is actually covering Ohashi's cover of the same song, but doing it in a style that actually takes it far closer to the original than the cover she's covering. Now that's what I call digital culture, baby!)
Kubota's early days hop-scotched between city-pop-adjacent experiments in maximalism and ballads. By the end of the decade, his albums and singles were Oricon gold, hitting the top spot or at least flaming out at like number two (such as peak jam "Dance If You Want It," complete with a video I think I could write a whole essay about on its own). HIs career only got stronger in the early '90s, during that weird period before Tetsuya Komuro's Euro-pop became the standard and the sound of J-pop was basically unchanged from the late '80s. But by the mid period of that decade, Kubota did something all stars aware it can't last did — he tried to mount a U.S. crossover. This involved relocating to New York City and putting out some of his singles to the American market. You can guess how this went.
But during that time in New York, he wrote his biggest hit ever. The actual weirdest detail of this song comes from the fact it is technically credited to "Toshinobu Kubota with Naomi Campbell." Yeah, that Naomi Campbell. Going off of what's available online about this, Kubota apparently lived next to Campbell in an apartment complex in the city and...well, he just recruited her to sing some backing vocals. But that's ultimately a strange but small detail in the "La La La Love Song" story. The song came out in '96, and quickly became his biggest hit, selling over a million copies. That was helped by the fact it served as the theme song for the crazy-popular drama Long Vacation, helping expose it to an even larger audience. But it's Kubota's signature hit, the song defining his career to many in Japan. In 2016, he went on a TV show and said that he felt guilt over the fact that the lyrics to this song are kind of garbage -- he wrote the melody first, but made it so that writing words was a challenge. So he settled with...la la la las.
From the vantage point of 2018, "La La La Love Song" is a weird hit. By 1996, the definition of J-pop was moving radically away from the sound Kubota was dabbling on here (something that is closer to the '80s than the '90s, specifically the post-excess pop of someone like Dreams Come True). This year starts with globe releasing their smash hit "Departures" (the second-best-selling single of the year, one ahead of "La La La Love Song") and by July Namie Amuro's debut album Sweet 19 Blues has come out, completely shifting the paradigm of what mainstream pop was. There's no turning back from that -- "La La La Love Song," released in May, feels like a throwback to a time that is about to be made irrelevant (at least until it become trendy again). Even during its heyday, it dropped at a time when everything was changing -- indirectly, it's playing out a similar nostalgia for a time that has passed, albeit actually far closer than future versions would imagine.
And it's that lurking melancholy that makes "La La La Love Song" such a persistent hit. Baek's version makes total sense in 2018 internet terms -- it's city pop as done in a very knowing city-pop way, which makes it totally unlike actual '80s city pop (but still plenty enjoyable) -- but this song has been covered by countless artists, from BoA to Akai Koen to BENI (with an English version kind of showing off how secondary the words were). It's timeless, because it's a song always tied to a period before it came out, which lends it a nostalgia that's hard to pin down. And reminds that this feeling isn't a new development, but something that has haunted pop for years. But whereas some songs force it in, "La La La Love Song" lets real timing take over.
News And Views
Matsushima Sou of Sexy Zone announced he'd be gong on hiatus from the group to treat his panic disorder.
Toshi of X JAPAN is not just a dessert YouTuber...he is also hanging out with chefs now. Even legends need new hustles, even tasty ones!
Year-end show season marches on! FNS possibly wanted Utada to perform on their show, but she's touring and also probably above that so...why not get Ayumi Hamasaki to come on and cover one of her songs? Hamasaki still going down the darkest timeline for her career.
DAM released the top karaoke songs of the Heisei Era, and man am I happy I never had to go out with co-workers in the '90s, owing to the fact I was 10.
Firmly in the "views" part of this section but...JP THE WAVY put out a new video, and let's not even talk about the forgettable music present here. In an effort to connect with English listeners, this comes with English lyrics on the screen that...kind of don't match with the Japanese ones? The main giveaway is when he raps about "Netflix and chill" (even though, uh, in the English context it implies he's just hanging out with friends?) despite the Japanese featuring no reference to said streaming service and only a slight reference to chilling. So...why just shoehorn that in? Will that little bit of 2015 slang be the thing that finally makes Japanese rap happen? Can you ever flex coolness when you've made a song with an EXILE bro?
Oricon Trail For The Week Of Nov. 19 2018 To Nov. 25 2018
A couple of throwbacks topping the charts this week! TVXQ go to the top on the singles side, while Nishino Kana's recent pair of best-of albums took the top slots on the long-player side. It's kind of weird seeing the latter, because it doesn't feel like that long ago that Kana re-invented herself as a Taylor-Swift-lite act that was dominating social media trends. But she never really capitalized on that success, and now she's putting out two best-ofs in an effort to boost her reputation. And it's working! Expect a pivot to being an Ariana Grande clone in like six months.
Perfume's GAME (33 1/3)
My entry in the 33 1/3 Japan series is out now! Get a copy at Bloomsbury or Amazon. Or at Kinokuniya bookstores in the US. I may or may not have interviewed Perfume this week. I also may or may not have met one of their pet dogs this week. Stay subscribed to find out if that's a truth or a lie!
Look At Me!
Reviewed Eiko Ishibashi's lovely new album for Pitchfork. This one caught me totally off guard!
Blog Highlights: Cairophenomenons, X-Files, Young Agings
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
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