Wota Wonderings 003: It’s All Yui Horie’s Fault (Somewhat)
Welcome to Wota Wonderings! We are 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!
The question this month:
The music industry has had many tie-ins with animes and doramas. Of those tie-ins, did one manage to capture your interest and get you hooked on their music? Or, did one manage to change your perspective of a musical act?
As a 2nd part, did you end up watching the anime or dorama in its entirety or give up once the musical act’s tie-in ceased?
And for you non-anime/dorama watchers, have there been any CM tie-ins that had a similar effect on you?
This is going to be somewhat brief compared to my usual ramblings. Years ago, I was regularly scouring the DVD bins for interesting anime titles, usually centering around ones that weren’t mecha-laden sci-fi. One of the titles that I got into heavily was Love Hina, based on Ken Akamatsu’s manga. Such was my interest that I started scouring the web for anything Love Hina that I could get my hands on, especially if it featured my favorite character from the series, Motoko Aoyama. Yeah, that’s where the title of my original music blog, Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama, came from.
The search inevitably led to me finding soundtrack CDs from the series (two albums of character songs sung by all the seiyuu on the series and two different soundtracks). I’d found one on eBay, and on a search for a more regular source, discovered CDJapan, ordered up the rest, and started searching out other recordings by the voice actresses on the show, particularly those by Yui Horie (whose singing career I’ve become a devoted fan of) and Yuu Asakawa (who, while putting out three fine mini-albums of music, hasn’t done any solo material since about 2003).
I lost track of what was going on in anime and manga after awhile (its only in the past couple of weeks that I’ve started to look through the latter’s racks again), but discovering CDJapan in my search for these CDs, and knowing in the process that I could find other Japanese CDs easier, led me to start using the site to fill gaps in my Whiteberry collection (specifically at the time, their first EP After School and their trilogy of cover-version singles). This in itself led to me doing a little networking through LiveJournal and elsewhere for more J-music to find, which of course led to my discovering Morning Musume and Hello! Project, and to my blogging adventures.
Funnily enough, I haven’t paid much attention to any acting or anime project involving MoMusu very much. I’ve downloaded the first couple of episodes of the current My Melody series because of Reina Tanaka’s involvement in the voice cast and my general interest in Sanrio characters (Hell, I visit the Sanrio store in Times Square and buy something every time I visit New York City – last time it was a little Kuromi beanbag stuffie and pen). On the opposite hand, even though I have all of Koharu Kusumi’s Kirarin Revolution-related solo albums and think they’re fucking brilliant, I’ve never seen a single episode of the series, although I’ve heard that it may be coming out on DVD in the States at some point. My fingers are crossed…
Wota Wonderings 003 – The Ties That Bind (Selective Hearing)
Wota Wonderings 3 – Tie-Ins (Solo Space)
Wota Wonderings: Mendol – where the guys are girls and the girls are hot. (boylikesmusic)
Wota Wonderings 003: It’s All Yui Horie’s Fault (Somewhat) (The Groove Music Life)
Wota Wonderings 03 – Anime, Dorama, Video Game Tie-Ins (fields of maize and berryz)
Wota Wonderings 003: Kirarin Revolution and Hot Guys (Merry Go Round)
