Make Believe Melodies For March 16, 2021
Get in the fucking newsletter, Shinji!
Hikaru Utada — “One Last Kiss”
Hikaru Utada wants to know if happiness can transcend pain. From her earliest hits, she was holding onto first love or letting time tell her how everything would play out or confronting the seemingly never-ending loop of joy and sadness. There’s something youthful about the perspective found in those songs though — of latching onto infatuation, and of elevating one’s own feelings into the spiritual. Most tellingly, there’s no end in sight — “now and forever you are the one,” simply seeing how things shake out. Time appears to stretch out endlessly early on — especially when you are a teenager thrust into the J-pop spotlight with the best-selling album in the country’s history — but that view closes in faster than you’ll ever expect.
This has been the thematic concern of Utada’s work since 2016, after a multi-year hiatus during which she experienced a barrage of what adulthood offers: the death of a parent, marriage, birth of a child and divorce. Her return album Fantôme found her facing all of this change, going from confidence about moving forward (“Michi,” above, complete with line about how sad songs will eventually become nostalgic ones) to reckoning with all this grief, betraying the upbeat bounce. That one of its highlights find Utada longing for just two hours…120 minutes!… to escape from everything captures the mood around it well. It’s among the more emotionally raw J-pop full-lengths of recent time. She polished these emotions for follow-up Hatsukoi, bringing her pop smarts to these messy feelings, but even when glossed up the tension remains (“what if we pretend…one of us will die tomorrow” is a choice to start a song).
I can’t speak to how the long-delayed theme to the pandemic-postponed final installment of the Rebuild Of Evangelion film series connects to the feature itself…a friend who did see it opening day says “not really at all”…but within the Utada-verse it’s a fitting conclusion to her 2010s body of work. It unfolds at the same gallop as most of her other uptempo songs from the last five years, while sliding out elements to create passages closer to her ballads, letting Utada’s voice take the spotlight before breaking into a sprint once again.
There's something foggy and fragile about “One Last Kiss” though, a feeling of memories already fading away. A.G. Cook co-produces, and in all honesty I kept forgetting this the first few days after the song came out because…it doesn’t really sound like any point in his career, lacking the synthesizer fizz of PC Music or the plastic sheen of Charli XCX. Rather, it’s understated and spacious, featuring digi ripples and bass rumbles along the border but rarely smudging Utada’s verses (see those pitched “ohs” in the hook for a great example of when that works, though).
She’s off playing with expectations, opening up with glowing words about a romantic partner — going as far as to brush off The Louvre — before revisiting those old worries. “The day I first laid eyes on you, wheels began to turn / an unstoppable premonition of loss,” before later offering a succinct summary of her work to date — “yearning for someone / came hand in hand with heartache.” Then there’s that piano melody drifting in and out of the song, adding an extra pang of melancholy.
There’s no pushing through with a grin or indulging of the sadness, though. Utada already synthesized that across her last two albums. She can find balance in this moment. “One Last Kiss” considers impermanence but keeps moving forward, the only way you really can when you fully understand everything dear to you…and everything, before and now and after…ends. That she can translate that feeling into springy pop capable of standing up to anything in her catalog and providing a sort of counterbalance to the state of contemporary J-pop…where younger creators offer gloomy forecasts of what the future holds…offering optimism but never concealing the ugly realities of what comes with it. She’s collected, but when she allows herself to let go late in the song — with all those electronics on the borders surging, condensing the rush of something like “Beautiful” into about ten seconds — it delivers a release that’s hard to forget. “One Last Kiss” isn’t emotional settling or resolution, but acceptance turned ecstatic.
Oricon Trail For The Week Of March. 1, 2021 To March. 7, 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 head down…the Oricon Trail.
BEYOOOOONDS — “Gekikara Love / Now Now Ningen / Kona Hazujanakatta!” (65,798 Copies Sold)
Just…bless BEYOOOOONDS for pushing idol-pop to its quirky extreme. I’ve already written about the meta-song that is the third inclusion here, though the other two tunes here pack their own punch. “Gekikara Love” (above) opens with a language lesson conducted via talk box, so yeah it’s a perfect song even before it enters the elite club of “J-pop songs mentioning social distancing.” Middle inclusion “Now Now Ningen” meanwhile…whoa.
You know how you can get a bucket of likes on Twitter by posting something like “after this is all over, we can’t go back to the way things were…it will be different?” That’s this done in an idol song, but with delirious goofiness taking the place of social media rot. They talk about people thinking the Earth was flat and wearing an onion around your neck to fight colds and how stupid everything was in the past but that it was actually fun but hey tomorrow is going to be even better and we can build the “new normal!” (Again with the pandemic references!) This is Japanese idol music at peak performance — unrelentingly positive to the point of calling out generational gloom, featuring a great chorus to boot.
News And Views
Tomonori Shiba wrote an in-depth feature for Gendai on The First Take, the YouTube series changing Japan’s relationship to subscription streaming and the world at large. It revolves around an interview with the creator behind it, and is loaded with nice little details for anyone who has followed this channel — the visual design was inspired in part by the movie Cube??? Two bigger takeaways from it — first, this underlines how the Japanese music industry has come to the internet at long last, with The First Take being this spider-web idea of connecting YouTube to streaming to beyond. Second, on the very last page, they talk about future goals, which include expanding to the rest of Asia and using the platform to score a global hit in Japanese. Ambitious…but not a bad way of thinking, really.
Put away the fax machine jokes and maybe simmer down on the CD trendpieces, because streaming is growing in Japan while physical is the one weighing the country down.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry shared some music stats, and several Japanese albums performed well.
The actual biggest music news of the week in Japan — warranting multiple “breaking news” alerts on messaging app LINE — was Johnny’s group V6 announcing plans to break up.
The benefits of trying to finish this late on Monday, choosing to sleep, and waiting a day to wrap it up…I can include the late-breaking news that ONE OK ROCK, along with actors Takeru Sato and Ryunosuke Kamiki, are leaving powerhouse talent agency Amuse to start their own independent endeavor, geared towards international markets. Amuse is investing in it so it isn’t quite as dramatic as SMAP breaking up and leaving Johnny’s, but still underlines the continued trend of big entertainers starting to go (more) independent rather than put all their trust into a traditional company.
IZ*ONE disbanding, and Miyawaki Sakura already signed with Big Hit Entertainment (or whatever they call themselves now).
Unionize and demand your own oshi leave of absence.
i-fls might be my favorite artist of the 2010s? Definitely up there, and here’s a lovely interview and intro to their work.
Wanted to write oodles of words on this viral tweet featuring YOASOBI and how it misidentifies it as an anime opening, what that means for the rising popularity (reaffirmation?) of Japanese pop culture, so on and so forth…but I’m drained from this massive project I have due Wednesday, just watch them dance.
Last week marked the 10th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. I wrote a piece looking at the pop cultural impact, and there’s all kinds of great work out there. One person not having a good week due to it? Producer syudou, who worked on Ado’s big hit currently enjoying a lot of media attention, tweeted out some poetry about how Kenshi Yonezu was born on March 10, between Hatsune Miku day and…March 11. What syudou was trying to say…how Kenshi Yonezu is the symbol of the Vocaloid community maturing into the mainstream and how the disaster changed the value set of younger people in Japan, who really like Kenshi Yonezu…is actually on point, albeit wrapped up in a pretty vague package. Problem is, by mentioning the worst disaster to hit Japan in the 21st century, they went and made everyone angry!
Remember…you don’t have to tweet. You can just, keep your thoughts to yourself. Think of it like a thought treasure just for you.Last, I wrote a feature about Miki Matsubara’s TikTok success, including an interview with the songwriter behind it, Tetsuji Hayashi, and some of the TikTok users who helped it pop. Really happy with it!
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies