Make Believe Melodies For August 30, 2021
Fuji Rock Is The Superspreader Event Of Last Week, We Are On To Aichi
tofubeats — “CITY2CITY”
The best moment of tofubeat’s cyber-dread-filled album FANTASY CLUB comes in the form of the frantic and malfunctioning “THIS CITY.” After a set of songs largely finding him expressing exhaustion and confusion, the producer embraces propulsion towards release, albeit one that doesn’t offer clarity so much as a way to move forward. Out of near glitching electornics, tofubeats finds kinetic energy.
“CITY2CITY” builds on that song’s structure, opening with a slight sense of discombublation that soon focuses into something cruising along on momentum. That’s probably owing a bit to this also doubling as a commercial song for the people who operate Japan’s freeways. Yet tofubeats likes driving cars so it matches up, while the thematic thrust of “CITY2CITY” fits in well with where he’s been the last few years. It’s about necessary displacement (“I keep driving from city to city”) even if that cuts them off from those most important, but with a hint of optimism that “I’m sure one day / That I’ll see you again.” Like other recent works from internet-born projects such as Pasocom Music Club and Seiho, “CITY2CITY” captures a melancholy feeling of metropolitan life, in constant motion even when one wants to slow down. In the hands of someone like tofubeats though, that modern condition can at least be pushed forward. Listen above.
andrew, Saint Vega And Nakamura Minami — “3D”
A lot of disorientation going on with this one. Trekkie Trax core member andrew delivers a laid back and spacey beat over which the usually calm Saint Vega absolutely freaks out over, like he’s trying to scream himself out of sleep. Nakamura Minami, sometimes a little extra when it comes to embracing her hip-hop love, hits on just the right amount of energy and cool. Listen above, or get it here.
speedometer. — Unknown Dance
A history lesson courtesy of Jun Records — speedometer. is Osaka’s Jun Takayama, having previously released beat-centric music in the late ‘90s and early Aughts, including through Nujabes’ label. Unknwon Dance marks the first new music from this project in 17 years. As someone totally unaware of speedometer.’s existence before this alert hit my inbox, I won’t pretend to know how this signifies an evolution in their sound or how it ties to any greater Kansai dance scenes. I will say, though, that the songs here skitter ahead and refuse to ever turn static, while also using space to up the emotional payoff. Nearly two decades in the making, sure, but sounds fit for the moment too. Get it here, or listen above.
TUYU — “What If This Isn’t A Slave?”
With the end of the year coming into sight, all those “big picture” ideas start bubbling up in my brain, and when I think over 2021 — at least, you know, the 66 percent of it finished — the dominant storyline in music is “youth versus age,” and you can just scroll down to the news section this week to see one place that played out. Here’s a recent song underlining that message in Sharpie, to the point where the paper starts ripping. “The adults / they’re forcing it on us” and “all we do is get used to being sad” are just some of the downer lyrics throughout, and that’s not even getting into the puppet imagery of the video. If you need a refresher of where J-pop is at in 2021, here’s your Sparksnotes. Listen above.
RIA — 2021
Though you don’t have to just look at J-pop to find other examples of where Japanese youth seems to be this year. RIA’s 2021 came across my radar because the CVN remix of lead-off number “Confusion” landed on the Spotify HyperPop playlist (!?). Delightful on its own, but her album stands as a strong snapshot of blurred genres and bummer vibes running throughout a corner of Japan’s music community. Though she sure can tease bliss, as the beat on “Hyperreal” shows. Listen above.
Oricon Trail For The Week Of August 16, 2021 To August 22, 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 trip down…the Oricon Trail.
JO1 — STRANGER (REAL) (282,173 Copies Sold)
Given how the “idol reality” genre of televised competition has self-destructed in South Korea and China (with recent attempt to revive the genre Girls Planet 999 in the prior looking like a ratings slog in the home market not bolstering hopes), Japan must carry the organic-enough-showdown flag for East Asia. And they’ve done well with it. In a post Produce atmosphere, these sort of shows have become far more inward looking, the promises of “global pop groups” switched out for domestic-centric groups with a flashbang debut. NiziU, forming out of Hulu Japan and JYP’s Nizi Project, remains the standard, but Produce 101 Japan first season project JO1 isn’t far behind. Their latest bit of fizzy dance-pop — great vocal manipulation in the pre-chorus! — topped Oricon, and continues to underline them as a staying presence in the J-pop market space. Yet they aren’t alone.
Did you know SKY-HI, of AAA, had his own competition show called THE FIRST, aiming to create his own boy-centric pop outfit, that aired this year? I caught bits and pieces of it during whatever morning show aired highlight packages, but from a detached position it seemed like a cash-in attempt on Produce 101 Japan’s success. Well turns out enough people followed along to turn debuting group BE:FIRST’s, uh, first single “Shining One” into a digital hit according to Oricon’s all-accounted-for chart. What makes that impressive is it doesn’t exist in physical form, making the song’s third-place debut on the aforementioned all-media-equal-ish ranking — behind number one JO1 and the continued specter of “Butter” at two — extremely impressive. I like “REAL,” but for this round of fan-voted, TV-born pop groups, point goes to “Shining One,” thanks to zippy touches from Taku Takahashi and a chance for SKY-HI to revisit his internet music dalliances. No doubt he’s rushing out season two as I type this.
News And Views
Izumi Inamori, a huge chunk of SKE48 and WANIMA are among the latest Japanese entertainers to contract COVID-19. In one of those “coincidences that take me back (a year and a half),” news that someone with COVID-19 attended a WANIMA show in February 2020 marked one of the turning points in how the country viewed the outbreak, and was the first serious incident involving the nation’s music industry. I was sitting in Tokyo Dome, waiting for what would end up the last live music event I’ve seen in person, reading tweets about the news.
Get your Kenshi Yonezu gelato here, get your Kenshi Yonezu gelato well it lasts!
米津玄師のジェラートショップ「Pale Blue Melt」がオープン、通販と期間限定ショップで展開 natalie.mu/music/news/442… #米津玄師 #PaleBlue_Melt #PaleBlue
A week out from Fuji Rock 2021, and the bad vibes continue to flow. I tried to capture the experience of following along with all the online glowering for The Japan Times’ Pulse, though in the days after even more has popped up. Mainly, netizens became further incensed learning the government provided support money for Fuji Rock. I detailed how this happened a few months ago via Creativeman — for like a year, the government wasn’t providing anything and the fickle online masses largely called for them to get something! — so not a broadside at all, but I get why the optics would look terrible at the moment, with numbers still at record highs across the country. Check in a week from now to get a sense of actual infections from the Niigata event…
Yet Fuji Rock isn’t the only festival this month getting online hate! Electronic gathering Global Ark celebrated its 10th anniversary this weekend, albeit one shrouded in netizen hate after Nikkan Sports shared an article outlining posts online indicating that “non-woven face masks” weren’t allowed (dress code: fashionable, possibly not effective, face masks, because this is all outside) and while alcohol wouldn’t be sold on the grounds, visitors could bring in their own booze.
Leapfrogging over both Fuji Rock and Global Ark, though, is Namimonogatari, an annual hip-hop extravaganza (also featuring…FAKY?) in Aichi Prefecture that happened this past weekend as well. Though the rules for this event weren’t quite as relaxed as Global Ark, they also appeared to be far more lazily put into action than what Smash did at Fuji Rock. Looks pretty full, and not sure the recommendation to “avoid shouting” came through.
大声禁止 ソーシャルディスタンス を守るはずもない人たちと それを分かっていながら開催する人たち。。。 なお、今後より人気のアーティストが出てくるため、もっと人が増える模様。 #NAMIMONOGATARI #波物語 #緊急事態宣言 #コロナNamimonogatari morphed into the target of “shame, shame!” on Sunday as footage from the Nagoya-adjacent Aichi Sky Expo venue trickled online (probably obvious to with-it folks but new for my dad brain…the attendees, skewing young, shared their jubilance via Instagram posts and TikToks, which the Twitter masses then shared as a way to express anger at a time when numbers in Aichi are going up). And based on a bit of browsing…looks bad! This turned so bad that, by Monday afternoon, the governor of Aichi expressed anger at the hip-hop event and implied it won’t ever happen again even once COVID-19 fades away
I’m going to double down on what I wrote last week and say we’re about to see a big shift in how older netizens and the government look at live music in the age of COVID-19 and beyond, especially if clusters come out of any of the three fests mentioned here. Though even if they get by with relatively low infection rates, I still think festivals are heading towards a really tough road.Let us venture outside of Japan for a second to look at a development that will have implications for the entire Asian pop industry moving forward. The Chinese government unveiled a whole slew of new internet mandates, resulting in bands on…a lot of familiar elements of modern pop music in 2021, including attempts at curbing manipulative sales practice (it will destroy the youth! And hey, they might be right, just look at Twitter) and holding artists responsible for misbehaving fans (remember when Johnny & Associates tried something like this?). Big implications for entertainment agencies trying to break into the Chinese market which, despite all kinds of potential ethical and economic landmines, continues to attract all kinds of attention.
Nobody has a problem with the Negicco rice bundle, the purest bundle.
One of the worst Japanese YouTubers…is moving to America. I’m sure the purity and levelheadedness of top-level creators in the States will help him right the ship.
Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” and accompanying album Variety will get vinyl reissues in November.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies (though I’m currently “temporarily restricted” because the verification code they should send to my phone…will literally not send. Do you work at Twitter? Do you have sway over someone who does? I demand justice here! #freembmelodies