Wota Wonderings 002: All You Need Is Love
Welcome to TGML’s contribution to Wota Wonderings, a group of English-speaking Japanese music bloggers brought together once a month to answer questions posed by johpan. We strive to be creative and entertaining, and we may even shed a bit of new light on interesting musical and cultural topics. Any questions about how we work should be directed to johpan. Don’t forget to check out the other posts from this month at the bottom of this post. Enjoy!
Johan dropped quite a challenge on everyone this time around with his question of the month, which relates to what he referred to as “idol love”.
To be honest, about a year ago, inspired by similar pieces that Vee and Ray had done, I tried to write something about why Reina Tanaka happened to be “the idol that drives my wotahood”, to paraphrase Ray. I couldn’t come up with anything.
Which is OK. Being a fan of something doesn’t really need an explanation. Several years ago, I was discussing all things musical with my good friend, punk legend Mike Watt, on the phone, and amongst the constantly-changing topics, as they usually do in the course of a conversation with Watt, turned to punk rock itself. He related how, early into his immersion into punk rock, someone asked him what he liked about it. He replied, “I don’t know. I just do. And maybe I’ll figure out why later.”
That having been said, a love related to the topic at hand, is the love of music itself. If I didn’t love music, I wouldn’t be writing about it. Especially if I didn’t like punk rock and Japanese pop, the two things that drive this blog and its predecessor, Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama.
The other day, I stopped at the post office to pick up my advance-ordered CD of the new Buono! album Buono! 2. The clerk who waited on me, as he brought the package out, asked me flat out, “Why don’t you just download this stuff?” Mind you, he had no clue and probably didn’t care what was in the package, but he’s seen so many packages from CDJapan, Amazon, and various record labels over the years that he knows I’m buying music. He’d asked me this at least once before and it pissed me off. This time, around I said what I was merely thinking the first time around: “Why? Because you can’t be bothered to walk the single yard between your counter and the incoming air mail table?”
He started to mention something about a site he downloaded all of his music from. It wasn’t iTunes, eMusic, or any other legitimate service that I’d heard of, so I didn’t pay much attention to the name. I simply told him, “I’d rather pay for my music.”
“Nobody’s going to catch you,” he claimed. “I’ve got nothing but downloaded music on my computer and I haven’t gotten in trouble.”
“That doesn’t mean you won’t,” I replied, taking my package and leaving.
As far as I’m concerned, that clerk who downloads his music doesn’t love music. He probably doesn’t even like it. To him, it’s just an accessory. He has no respect for the process, the time the artists take to write and record it, or the monetary investment the record companies have to make behind it. And he’s probably amongst the first to complain that “music today sucks”.
I, on the other hand, love music. I grew up around it and can’t imagine my life without it. I pay my hard-earned money for it, whether its on CD, LP, or a legal download, because that sends a clear message to the record companies: “I want more of this.” (For a more detailed argument against illegal downloading, read the article “You Are NOT Entitled to Free Music!” elsewhere on this blog.)
Hm, does that make music itself my idol? Looks like it does – looks like I have my own definition of idol love after all!
Wota Wonderings 2… I luff youuuu~ (H!P Fangirling like Nobody’s Business)
Wota Wonderings 2 – All you need is love! (Solo Space)
Wota Wonderings 002 (Selective Hearing)
Wota Wonderings 002: All you need is love! (Merry Go Round)
Wota Wonderings 02 – The Idol Love Challenge (fields of maize and berryz)
Wota Wonderings: Idol Love. (boylikesmusic)
