Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

“There should only be one version of the National Anthem - Jimi Hendrix’s version from Woodstock.” - Henry Rollins

The Vinyl Pagoda Project will resume Sunday night or Monday morning (just in time for Tanbata) - I was going to post one of the installments late night but didn’t have the energy, and I’m going to be away with my fiancee most of today. Be safe out there, will ya?

Finally had a chance to see the new Berryz Koubou PV for the first time. I’d heard about the monkey suits from other entries in the IW neighborhood but decided to wait until I actually saw the video.

Musically, it sounds like the group is going to go into reggaeton territory until a typical Tsunkuian left turn happens and we get some heavily regional sounding J-Pop instead. The song in general is definitely the stranger/funnier side of Berryz - closer to the Berryz of “Piriri To Yokou!” than the Berryz of “Jiriri Kiteru” or “VERY BEAUTY”.

Those monkey suits, though… yikes. I’m sure it was inevitable given the song’s title and the banana motif (Sorry, I can’t resist this joke: Were there guards keeping JunJun away from the set?), but I hope that there’s a version of the dance shot PV coming where they’re in their more normal outfits.

Nakanomori BAND announced their breakup through their website on Sunday. News from Tokyograph here, and a reaction from pengie at unchained here. As a fan with all of their albums in my library, this is bad enough news to begin with. What makes this sadder is the breakup was precipitated by the forced layoff the band was under for the past couple of months because lead singer/guitarist Ayako Nakanomori at least a third of a way through a prescribed/predicted six-month recovery period following throat surgery; initially the other group members were going to tide themselves over with side projects until then, but now it seems that, unless that statement was a P.R. holding pattern, at least one person in the band changed their mind.

All musical instruments are fragile, from the oldest Stradivarius violin to the newest off-the-rack Fender Stratocaster. But the human larynx is the most fragile instrument of them all. The best way to combat or prevent such abuse is to learn how to sing from the diaphragm (chest voice) rather than from the voice box itself (head voice). Sometimes vocal training can actually help a person who tried to sing untrained recover or even improve their vocal power: In her pre-She’s So Unusual days, Cyndi Lauper rehabilitated her singing voice, which had been shredded from multiple nights fronting cover bands, by studying for a couple of years with a vocal coach who specialized in teaching rock and pop singers opera techniques. I think Henry Rollins underwent some similar vocal training in the mid-90’s, judging from the change his singing voice went through between the Weight album sessions in late 1993 and the Come In And Burn sessions in 1996. In between those two sessions, Rollins did a guest vocal on Mike Watt’s first solo album, but his voice is a rather harsh, throaty rasp on that track; his vocals from Come In And Burn onward have shown Rollins to be in much more control of his singing voice. At least one of his Rollins Band albums, Hard Volume, was recorded while the singer was both under deadline and suffering from strep throat, and his Black Flag diary/memoirs Get In The Van recounts several instances when he either blew his voice out onstage or did several consecutive weeks of one-nighters while battling laryngitis.

Of course, bad habits can also lead to the detriment and even the loss of vocal power. Smoking (both tobacco and marijuana) and drinking alcoholic beverages are the most common enemies of the voice box. Many singers - and rightfully so - prohibit people from smoking around them, but others will claim that smoking doesn’t effect their voices. In moderation, those vices may actually enhance some voices - Bob Dylan’s trademark vocal tone was partly the product of smoking both tobacco and pot, while a short layoff from lighting up led to the sweeter voice he had on his Nashville Skyline album. On the electronic press kit reproduced as a bonus feature on their When London Burns DVD, Deicide’s Glen Benton candidly credits the deepening octaves of his vocals to “cigarettes, Jack Daniels and marijuana” (vices he would give up in late 2006 on the advice of a doctor).

In excess,such vices can be fatal to the larynx: legendary operatic tenor Enrico Caruso smoked cigars regularly and paid the price of an onstage throat hemmorage for it, while on the totally opposite end of the spectrum, punk rock performance artist GG Allin, who started out his recording career in the late 1970’s with a more melodic, Iggy Pop and Stiv Bators-influenced vocal and delivery, recorded his final studio album with a voice that was horrifically ravaged from years of unrepentant drug and alcohol abuse. Even the casual use of cigarettes and alcohol can have fans of an artist up in arms, as Ai Kago’s original stalkerazzi-outed underage smoking incident in 2006 proved.

Diet can also have an effect, desired or not, on the voice. Many experts advise singers against consuming any kind of dairy product before recording or performing, owing to the buildup of mucus caused by even one glass of milk or slice of cheese. Of course, consuming the odd dairy product could also assist in deilbrately making a voice sound less worked on, something David Lee Roth (according to his own memoirs) discovered during the sessions for Van Halen’s first album. According to Roth’s memoir Crazy From The Heat, when their producer Ted Templeman discovered that Diamond Dave had avoided cigarettes and dairy prior to recording the lead vocal for “Jamie’s Cryin’”, Templeman ordered the singer to go outside and smoke a joint, and sent a studio runner out to get Roth a cheeseburger. Roth went outside, ate the cheeseburger, smoked half of the joint, drained a can of Coke, and came back in to record the vocal for one of VH’s best loved early album cuts.

I don’t know what kind of vocal training Ayako Nakanomori had (if any), or if she had any habits that could have resulted in her vocal problems. By that, I do not mean to imply that she was a smoker, only that she could have done or gone through other things, like poor diet choices, a stressful situation, or some sort of bad cold, that could have made her voice susceptible to getting a cyst on her vocal chords in the first place. Hopefully, she’ll overcome her original setback, just as she’ll have to overcome the sudden breakup of her eponymous band when she resumes her music career.

Most of the stuff in the 50-single stack I acquired this week is enya or kayokyoku - styles I am most likely going to refer to for the purposes of this project as Traditional Japanese Pop (not to be confused with the modern J-Pop we all know, love, and follow). But a white label promo single that was amongst the stack caught my eye tonight because there was no artist, song, or label logo - just a catalog number and a mostly Japanese sentence which had the familiar letters EMI incorporated within.

A random Googling of the catalog number revealed that the single in question was by a band called Show-Ya. I Googled the group’s name and discovered that the group is an all-girl hair metal band - a Japanese equivalent of Vixen, if you will. Although I had a couple of early candidates for the first installment of this blog project that were more on the Traditional Japanese Pop side, this 45 was screaming to make a more left-field formal first offering.

The A-side is “Kodoku No Meiru (Rabirinsu)” (translation: “Maze of Isolation (Labyrinth)”), and its coupling track is “Uso Dado Iute Yo Moon Light” (very rough translation: “Saying That It’s A Lie In The Moon Light”). The Vixen reference is not an idle comparison either - they do remind me of the one-hit wonders that foisted “Edge Of A Broken Heart” on the American public in the second half of the 80’s, but both sides of the single give the appearance of a band that seemed a lot stronger musically than Vixen. Lead vocalist Keiko Terada in particular has a very strong voice compared to the likes of Vixen’s Janet Gardner and Lita Ford.

“Kodoku No Meiru” is an uptempo rocker that wouldn’t have sounded out of place amongst the Poisons and Cinderellas of the world, while “Uso Dado Iute Yo…” has a feel not unlike a slightly slower version of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Shot In The Dark”.

More web research reveals that the band, although forming in Japan, made their debut at the legendary British club Dingwall’s and made several sincere attempts to gain a worldwide audience during their career. When they attempted to break into the US in 1990, unfortunately for Show-Ya the musical climate was already starting to drift away from hair metal and even through they opened for a few notable names in the hair metal field in the US, they didn’t even make a dent. Grunge and alternative would eventually kill hair metal (or at least send the genre packing to the oldies circuit) for good months later, of course.

They made a few reunion attempts in the 90’s, and have apparently reformed (seemingly for good) for their 20th anniversary in 2005, but haven’t recorded new material yet. Much of their back catalog was reissued in Japan in 2005 and remains in print. Too bad I didn’t hear of Show-Ya back when they tried to crack the American market, but in 1990 I wasn’t too fond of most of the hair bands of the day. I think I would have liked these girls, though.

Please read the disclaimer if downloading the mp3 files.

A new Berryz Koubou single is coming out on August 27th… if you can call it that.

Right in-between the releases of their 17th single “Ike Ike Monkey Dance” on July 16th and their as yet untitled 5th LP on September 10th is a single involving a remix of their cover version of Dschinghis Khan’s eponymous single, which will have the collective release title Dschinghis Khan Onkochishin Remix. I do have to agree with those who think this particular release, on appearances, comes several months too late, given that the original Berryz single came out this past March. Remixes usually tend to come out within weeks of an original version’s release, rather than months, no?

Is Tsunku running out of ideas, as some of us have feared? No. Considering that a new, original, Berryz single is coming out the month before this remix EP, and an album of new material plus “Dschinghis Khan”, “Yuke Yuke Monkey Dance” and “Tsukiatteru no ni Katamoi” is coming out the month after, it’s not even a possibility. Since the EP is coming out on Piccolo Town, Tsunku’s only real role in the release in question is probably just approving the final master of the CD. So many Berryz Koubou releases coming out in a very short time period is nothing new either: Their first three singles came out in three consecutive months in the spring of 2004, and the band closed out 2005 by releasing in a five-week period the Dai 2 Seichouki LP, the “Gag 100kaibun Aishite Kudasai” single, and the Special! Best Mini ~2.5 Maime no Kare~ EP.

However, it should be pointed out that as of this writing, “Dschinghis Khan” is Berryz Koubou’s biggest selling single to date, having sold over 37,000 copies in outlets whose sales are counted by Oricon. It’s also the Berryz single that has had the most first week sales of any single in their career and the single that has had the longest stay on Oricon’s sales chart (eight weeks). The song apparently still has some wings over in Japan; although the single hasn’t been on the Oricon chart since May, the song is presumably still getting scattered airplay on Japanese radio, and given the song’s origins as a popular European and Asian disco hit in its original incarnation in 1979, it’s not unlikely to think that Berryz’ version is getting some club play as well, in spite of its radio-length brevity.

It’s also not unlikely to think that some enterprising bedroom remixer somewhere hasn’t done an unofficial remix that combines the Berryz version with the Dschinghis Khan original, or that some DJ in a dance club in Japan hasn’t already crossfaded between both versions in the course of a club set. Hence this impending release.
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If I have one bad habit as a writer – and in the interest of completely disclosing my own self-analysis, I have more than one – it’s having too many ideas. A published author that I met over this past weekend (Savannah Russe, author of the Darkwing Chronicles series) told me in conversation that there is nothing wrong with having too many ideas, and I have to agree. The only caveat is, there are unfortunately not enough hours in the day to actually put all those ideas to use.

At the time I am writing this, it is around 8:30 at night on June 24, 2008. I have a lot on my mind concerning things both at and away from my laptop. I have a novel manuscript I want to finish by the end of summer, a non-fiction book project whose outline and sample chapters were recently sent (with me hoping that they got there OK – electronic submissions are easy to accomplish but, unlike the world of snail mail with its delivery confirmation sheets and green return receipts for the mailman to send back, hard to trace the path of), two short story ideas that are screaming to be finished, and a shitload of other ideas sitting in various fragmented states on my hard drive – some of which were transferred to my present computer via a CD-R I had fortuitously burned as backup days before my beloved 2004 Apple PowerBook G4 achieved ex-parrot status this past St. Patrick’s Day. There’s a bunch of CD and single reviews I’ve been wanting to do for this blog for several weeks, and I intend to do at least a few of them at some point. (I’ll do one this week, I promise.)
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I just got a stack of 45s in the mail today.

Fifty of them.

All Japanese. and dating between 1968 and 1990.

I’ll explain quickly: A couple of weeks ago, I won an eBay auction for a lot of fifty Japanese 45s. The seller, very helpfully, provided post-it notes on each single with the artist and titles written in romaji, which is a big help to this gaijin who is practically illiterate in the language that fascinates him so. I spent the past 90 minutes or so cataloging all 50 of these singles into an Excel database file.

Now the real fun part begins.

As often as I can, I’m going to write about each of these 45s - both sides, what I think of the songs, and whatever I can find out about the artists. I’ll even share vinyl rips of these recordings. For anyone interested in earlier Japanese pop/enka/kayokyoku, this should be a treat. It sure is already one for me as a collector of records and a fan of Japanese music and culture.

Memes by both Misa and pengie within the IW blogosphere have turned up. I’m doing Misa’s first since pengie’s seems to call for a more detailed explanation and my response won’t be ready to be posted on here until later this weekend.

1. What was the first Japanese song that you ever listened to?
“Kiss In The Dark” by Pink Lady. I still have the 45 somewhere in my house.

2. Did it inspire you to like that group/singer, or did it turn you away?
I liked them a lot. Never bought the full album though… I’m surprised that I haven’t rectified that by looking for the album on eBay, but I do have a double-CD anthology of Pink Lady now!

3. What is the one song that you have been listening to for the longest time?
Both of Whiteberry’s albums.

4. What group/singer have you liked the longest?
Group: Whiteberry. Singer: Yui Horie.

5. What is the song with the most plays on your iTunes/media player? As of today, Morning Musume’s “Egao YES Nude” with 140 plays.

6. Is that song your favorite?
Definitely one of my many favorites. “Resonant Blue” is right behind it with 136 plays.

7. If not, what is?
No answer.

8. Is there any one group that you can listen to all/most of the songs by? If so, who?
Morning Musume/Hello! Project.

9. What is your favorite agency?
Some might say Hello! Project/UFW but I don’t have a “favorite” agency.

10. What is your favorite group/singer?
It’s a tie between The Stooges and Morning Musume.

Having already known of Li Chun’s keyboard talents when her and Qian Lin’s addition to Morning Musume was announced last year, I wondered if she’d ever display her instrumental skills in a public setting. Apparently she has already in this video from one of JunJun and LinLin’s first public appearances. (Does anyone know the name of the piece JunJun is performing in this clip?)

Of course, Sayumi tries to show off her (more rudimentary) keyboard skills afterward, only to get thwarted by two roadies (one of whom is wearing a commemorative Panda Musume T-shirt). Hey, at least Sayumi didn’t do a hamfisted version of “Home Sweet Home” or “Runaway”!

For those of you (like me) who are in the mood for a little more classical piano greatness, here’s an intimate performance (right out of his New York townhouse) from the Jimi Hendrix of classical piano: