Make Believe Mailer Vol. 8: Year End Special
Year-end list season has come to a close, for the most part, and naturally I've just started assembling my personal Japan-centric ones. Great timing! I'm on the fence about whether to rush them out next week (when my year-in-review piece runs in The Japan Times...I'm really happy with it!) or wait until, like, the first week of January, but I thought I'd share a few scattered year-end thoughts now, mostly things that don't fit elsewhere. Also we are throwing the usual categories to the side this week, sorry you can't read me on the new AKB48 (it's bad).
Best Japanese Music Videos
Sakanaction "Shin Takara Jima" (Showa-era throwbacks always make me smile, and when Sakanaction...a great band, but also secretly a really funny band...tackle it, the results are great.)
Namie Amuro "Golden Touch" (Sometimes the simplest ideas end up the best)
Especia "Aviator / Boogie Aroma" (Remember when Especia made amazing videos, but then started making really bad videos, and then with these two made good videos again?)
group_inou "Eye" (Double points for YouTube comments like "I'm from Texas, thanks for featuring our freeway!")
Cuushe "Tie" (Perfect mesh of sound and visual)
FAKY "Afterglow" (A nice counterpoint to the sea of "fandoms...good!" articles that popped up online this year. Sometimes, they most certainly aren't, though maybe you have to head into the trenches of a T-Ara vs. One Direction poll war to see it. Anyway, great video).
Young Juvenile Youth "Animation" (Unsettling stuff done very well)
Tofubeats "Stakeholder" (Four minutes of Tofubeats getting beat up like he lives in the Loony Tunes universe)
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu "Mondai Girl" (Kyary had a mostly forgettable 2015, but "Mondai Girl" is a sonic and visual highlight overshadowed by a lot of lesser stuff later on. The clip is a great summary of her post-fame life and her [now dissolved?] relationship with the guy from Sekai No Owari.)
Suiyoubi No Campanella "Diablo" (This is probably the video on the list I watched the most)
Japanese Album Art Of The Year
Kinoko Teikoku Neko To Allergy
Best Song Until The Chorus Comes And Ruins Everything
Hoshino Gen "Sun"
Best Random Encounter I Had At Tsukiji Fish Market In 2015
I went to Tsukiji Fish Market for the first time in November for this tour/cooking class, and one of the guys in the class knew who I was thanks to an article about Cool Japan I originally wrote for The Atlantic that appeared in a Japanese magazine. He actually had worked with Cool Japan directly...which would have been awkward had he not said that it was a total internal disaster and that my story was right on about it. Cool Japan -- complete disaster!
Best Illustration For Something I Wrote That I Had Zero Idea Existed
Best Meme
All "Dragon Night" memes about the goofy walkie talkie
Biggest Let-Down Album (And, Uhhh, Artist) Of 2015
Dempagumi.inc WWDD -- On a purely listening-experience level, WWDD was just bloated. It featured plenty of high points, capped off by one of the most joyful songs the manic idol group ever made. Yet it ultimately just had too much going, especially in the middle. And if I wanted to listen to a BiS song, I would seek out one of the half-dozen BiS spin off groups in existence.
This was, for me personally, the tipping point with idol music in 2015. After a boom period where groups seemed capable of sneaking interesting songs to the borders of J-pop...Dempa being one of the finest...this year saw everything stagnate, exciting sonic ideas swapped out for, well, a lot of groups trying to sound like Dempagumi.inc. Narrative has always been the most important element of idol pop, but groups such as Dempa were able to get the music on the same level as the story (plus, them and maybe Negicco were the two best groups during these fat years at feeling like real underdogs).
WWDD was the moment where everyone expected Dempagumi.inc to make the leap over to wider mainstream awareness, and they did just that, and now pop up in commercials and magazines regularly. That was probably inevitable considering the momentum the group had, but WWDD ultimately felt more like a product than something trying to be more than that. Probably a silly expectation from a corner of Japanese music that thrives on selling fantasy, but that's what always made Dempagumi.inc (and a lot of the other notable names from the idol boom) so intriguing -- yeah, they wanted you to spend $30 on an album, but the music was exhilarating and felt like it could fly off a cliff at any moment. In 2015, they settled into a new phase which they deserve, but just felt like a massive comedown.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
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Header by Alan Castree (AC Galaga)