I don’t think I could add any more insight to what has already come out from Hello! Blog and Selective Hearing in the wake of much of Anime Expo’s staff getting up and leaving in what is apparently justifiable disgust. I will say this, however:

Although others in the blogosphere have said that the most likely place for popular Japanese acts to bond with their Western cult audience is at conventions like Anime Expo, this is an aspect that I have disagreed with for years. The incidents referred to in that ‘silenced staff members’ post really disgusted me – how the hell did that douchebag think he could get away with disrespecting Morning Musume like he did? I came away from reading that more convinced that Japanese music acts should not rely on the conventions for their American performance venues.

Instead of dealing with anime con organizers, Up-Front Works and other agencies should hook up with established booking agencies outside of Japan and start organizing tours for their acts, much like they should avoid the quick-hit-oriented, throw-against-the-wall approach of most major labels when looking for Western labels for their recorded product in favor of a big independent label like Matador or Merge, or an independent-minded major-label imprint like Warner Bros.’ Nonesuch or A&M’s Octone.

Dir en grey, Puffy AmiYumi, and the many acts that have participated in the yearly Japan Nite package tours certainly don’t need the anime conventions – and wisely bypassed them entirely in favor of performing in more music-centric venues. Neither do Morning Musume or any other J-pop act that we all love. Given that MoMusu drew 7,500 last summer for their sole US show to date, it’s a no-brainer that American J-pop fans would go see their idols at a venue closer to home.
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On a vaguely related note (well, related to MoMusu, anyway) – the MoMusu/AKB48 singles “comparison” will resume shortly, and I’ll explain briefly in the next installment why the series has been taking longer that I would have wished to come to further fruition.

LIL WAYNE
Rebirth
(Cash Money/Universal Motown)
Rating:

When I first heard that Lil Wayne wanted to do a rock record, my immediate reaction was, I wanted to hear the end result just so I could bear witness to a train wreck of epic proportions. Considering that around the time news of this project broke, Chris Cornell had just released a pop record produced by Timbaland, one had to wonder what kind of Bizarro world they had walked into. “The tattooed guy that used to run with Juvenile and B.G. making a rock record? Why the fuck are you doing this, you asshole?” Surely all of the badly typed/written/spelled ‘reviews’ posted on iTunes since the “Prom Queen” single dropped can’t be wrong?

Here’s the kicker: He got away with it.

It’s not entirely a “rock” record in the purist sense – “On Fire” sounds more like pre-Purple Rain Prince than rock, “I’ll Die For You” (one of two bonus tracks on the deluxe edition of the album) is more of a pop/rock song than the more hard rock-oriented material on the album, and there is at least one track in Wayne’s old style (“Drop the World”, performed with Eminem). But Wayne’s vision/version of rock as at least guitar-oriented music with sung rather than rapped vocal parts is there, and it is obvious through his performances that he is enjoying what he is doing and putting his heart into it.

A producer whose name I’ve forgotten at the moment commented that plug-ins like AutoTune are meant to make a 98% perfect, rather than a 20% perfect, performance sound 100%. In other words, the idea of a computer program making anyone off the street sound like Robert Plant or Kelly Clarkson is ludicrous. Yes, Wayne’s vocals are being very noticeably run through AutoTune. But, it becomes even more obvious as one listens to the album that he using the technology not to cover up his (self-admitted) shortcomings as a traditional singer but to make his voice sound weird. On a couple of the tracks, the AutoTune is not as immediately evident, making one wonder how his vocals would have sounded had they not been deliberately enhanced. (There are a few instances in his rap back catalog of him singing his own hooks – “Get Off the Corner” from The Block Is Hot comes to mind.) Rock is full of great vocalists who couldn’t outsing a Robert Plant or an Ian Gillian, but could at least sing in tune and/or put a song over from the heart, so in that sense Wayne’s rock vocals aren’t much different from what, for example, Lou Reed, Handsome Dick Manitoba, and Henry Rollins have done in the past.

If anything, Rebirth proves to be a successful experiment for Lil Wayne. It’s not perfect – His attempt at punk, “The Price Is Wrong”, is a shade weak (and not because it’s one of the few songs where his vocals aren’t enhanced) but still fun to listen to. And his working habit of not literally writing his lyrics and vocal parts down on paper sometimes has his shortcomings (Refining his ad-libbed lyrics on paper and then finalizing the results on the finished master couldn’t hurt). However, if he alternated between his more traditional rap recordings like The Carter and albums like Rebirth, I don’t think anyone would have many complaints, save for the OMGWTFBBQ “armchair critics” who hang out on iTunes’ comment boards.

4 stars out of 5.