Make Believe Melodies For April 19, 2021
Hot Mom
Mom — “Shukujitsu”
TikTok continues to move in mysterious ways. The latest out-of-the-digital-mist surprise on the platform is Mom, a longtime Make Believe Melodies favorite, whose “Akarui Mirai” from last year’s 21st Century Cultboi Ride a Sk8board (my pick for…the 22nd best Japanese album of the year!) is going bonkers with the short-video set, to the point of becoming the most viral song on Spotify in the country as I type this.
Take that, song from the anime where girls are actually horses, I think
Of course, nothing actually emerges from the online ether without reason. Mom has been slowly gaining cred since his Ano(t)raks days, and the fine folks at Apple featured “Akarui Mirai” in an ad from earlier this year (and, I can’t find it, but I swear he’s appeared in other Mac-related commercials too). That’s all the intro Mom needed, and from there the TikTok users made it their own. And that’s worthy of a hell yeah — glad to see a Saitama oddball who was making music five years ahead of its time in 2018 get some love.
I hope some of that sudden virality leads to content creators checking out “Shukujitsu,” a new Mom song that’s much more representative of his sound (and just…better) than his viral hit. It’s all of his jittery tendencies gathered into a pop bounce house, Mom deploying his diction (half the reason he’s a meme is because of how he says “ice cream” at the beginning of “Akarui Mirai,” and here he drops “plasma” so nonchalantly and delivers the Japanese for “brushing your teeth” with flair! Brushing your teeth!!!) over a constantly changing beat that can’t decide if it wants to be 2-step or like, stripped-down R&B. This is someone raised on the genreless possibilities of the internet delivering on just that, and pointing all of this restless energy towards a really catchy song with lyrics that really make the dictionary app on your smartphone work. Listen above.
Foodman — “Hoshikuzu Tenboudai”
Look, I just spent a bunch of paragraphs breathlessly celebrating an artist I’ll go into the ring for…do I have to repeat the cycle? Foodman is the best, talking to him was a blast, and I have no doubts his newest album (on Hyperdub!!!!) is going to be one of the year’s best. Go buy it now, make new Bandcamp accounts to get it multiple times!
KIRINJI — “Saikai”
Modern-day KIRINJI — very different than ‘90s / Aughts Kirinji — plays around with nostalgia way better than most groups in modern Japanese music. “Saikai” starts off as a sweet reunion song between people long separated, meeting in a physical space to catch up. Then after breezing through that first chorus…the band reveals this to be pandemic pop, flipping memories of yesteryear into, oh, 15 months ago. While KIRINJI gets a little sugary from there — coos of “I miss you” closing the song — placing retro disco funk as a backdrop for a reality where every interaction in person happens behind a plastic screen. Listen above.
LITTLE DEAD GIRL — Separate Life
Speaking of imagining life post-pandemic…LITTLE DEAD GIRL returns after a three year absence to share a three-song set of kinetic dance music begging to be played out of a Dogenzaka club. Better still, a sense of optimism surges through high-stepping cuts like “How I Live 2040,” imagining better days sometime down the line. Listen above.
Yunosuke Featuring WaMi — “Loop”
I worry I don’t check SoundCloud nearly enough anymore, and I’m missing out on dance-pop gems like this every day. Great vocal working in conjunction with an understated-enough beat. Listen above.
PEARL CENTER — “Alright”
It’s funny to think of Tatsuya Matsumoto breaking up Paellas as they were enjoying a major-label push so he could go and make…upbeat dance-pop that probably would have been more in line with Universal Japan’s gameplan than downer funk. Yet that’s the beauty of Pearl Center — as J-pop goes morose, Matsumoto goes off the rails by creating something like “Alright,” as positive and jubilant a pop song that has come out of Japan in 2021. Early contender for the “song of the summer if I could dictate what other people liked” award. Listen above.
Oricon Trail For The Week Of April 5, 2021 To April 11, 2021
Back in the day, the Oricon Music Charts were the go-to path to music stardom in Japan. Acts of all sorts traversed these lands, trying to sell as many CDs as possible in order to land a good ranking on a chart choosing to only count physical sales, even as the Internet came to be and the number of versions offered for sale got ridiculous. Today, with the country finally in on the digital, these roads are more barren and only looked at by the most fanatic of supporters needing something to celebrate. Yet every week, a new song sells enough plastic to take the top spot. So let’s take a drip down…the Oricon Trail.
NiziU — “Take a picture / Poppin’ Shakin’” (317,324 Copies Sold)
If the best-case scenario for the intersection of TikTok and music is someone like Mom suddenly being shot into the limelight, the worst-case scenario is watching major labels try to bait teenagers into dancing thanks to goofy audio cues. NiziU broke through in Japan thanks to “the jump rope dance,” and they’ve attached some sort of easy-to-do choreography to everything after. “Take a picture” goes one step further by coupling an easy-as-counting (really!) set of moves with camera clicks clearly serving as prompts for TikTokers, adding a garish major-label attempt at virality that distracts from an otherwise alright song. You want to be a hashtag, your work is going to suffer. Thank goodness for the other side.
“Poppin’ Shakin’” does away with fancy footwork in favor of pure pop fizz, down to a chorus made up of carbonated “la la las.” I think the key is the involvement of Ollipop, a K-pop go-to producer who has worked on numbers from Everglow, Twice and many more (including the last good Red Velvet single), who knows how to inject actual glee into this stuff. “Oh, just have fun!” and NiziU gets you don’t need forced dance to achieve that.
News And Views
I guess ONE OK ROCK worked on a song with Ed Sheeran? Uhhh, cool for them?
Fuji Rock is happening this year, with a bunch of new rules in place and a domestic-only lineup. I have a little opinion piece on this coming out later this week in The Japan Times so I won’t go too deep into it…but I hope Smash Japan takes this weird year as a chance to get really deep into what kind of Japanese music they showcase. The inclusion of 4s4ki alone has me thinking they will.
Aimyon now at the same level of Utada, based on a “power ranking” survey.
Staying off Twitter recently has revealed many positives (I’m getting more work done, I’ve exercised more, generally happier, turns out you don’t have to read the tweets of people you hate to “stay up to date” because most of it is useless) but one major negative…I couldn’t retweet this rappin’ British grandpa and say “Japan paved the way again!”
I talked to Rainych Ran for The Japan Times, both about her fascinating career as a YouTube cover artist largely tackling Japanese numbers and looking at how fans have become the engine for Japanese pop culture going abroad.
I also wrote about the newfound fandom around weather forecaster Saya Hiyama for my return to the Pulse column (this is the productivity I was talking about). Here’s the music connection for you, dear readers — I wisely cut out a long sidestep about how, really, internet fandom for people like this is just like what you see in the J-pop idol sphere. AKB48 paved the way, and all.
A lot of positive press has swirled around the idol industry lately thanks to more progressive developments, like idols being able to get married (shout out all of Negicco) or perform later in idol life (after the age of 25). Toyo Keizai has a great first-person essay from someone who didn’t stick on that path — Mai Endo, formerly of Idoling!!!, documents going from the entertainment industry to classic Japanese office work…and how bad the latter is.
Porter Robinson’s Secret Sky Festival happens this Saturday, and three Japanese acts appear! They are Serph, Masakatsu Takagi and…End Of The World, aka Sekai No Owari (though look at this rebranding!). That’s surprising, but also…they went and released their best album as a weird crossover attempt at the English market that will fail, but is actually better than 90 percent of efforts in this lane. “Rollerskates” has only gotten better for me, their talk-box masterpiece.
A former member of Especia presenting a future funk remix of their work??? Give me give me the weird intersection of trends!
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
