Morning Musume Are Still My Favorite Band But Wait A Minute…
Apparently, whilst I was sleeping in (i have today and tomorrow off thanks to Rosh Hashanah… and I’m not even Jewish! [I'm actually a Buddhist]) and gearing up to get the last details of my Kickstarter campaign prepared, Tsunku made his decision and picked out four new members to make up Morning Musume’s tenth generation.
Now, you’d think that after following this band since 2003, I’d be used to things like this: the changes, learning the new members’ names, and so forth. But to be honest, the past year of Morning Musume has been a little hard to keep up with. Not in the musical sense –The quality of their musical input is still very consistently top notch; the new single “Kono Chikyuu no Heiwa o Honki de Negatterun da yo!”/”Kare to Issho ni Omise ga Shitai” is one of the best things they’ve done in recent months (and definitely the best double A-side single since Hüsker Dü’s “Makes No Sense At All”/”Love Is All Around”). So what’s the problem?
For me, the only problem is that there’s too many changes going on in too short a time period. I came into Morning Musume fandom at a time when now-veteran members Reina Tanaka and Sayumi Michishige had only recently joined the band along with Eri Kamei and Miki Fujimoto as the band’s sixth generation. During that next full year of fandom, three more members would leave the band and two others were getting ready to leave in the first half of 2005. After the sudden departure of Mari Yaguchi and equally surprise addition of Koharu Kusumi to the lineup, things started to stabilize within the group. There were still additions, but they were small ones. Hell, the eighth generation came in two parts back in late 2006 and early 2007 when Tsunku added first Aika Mitsui and then Li Chun and Qian Lin to the lineup.
And then things really stabilized. For a good three year period, with Ai Takahashi front and center, we got three albums and only one major lineup change when Koharu left in late 2009 from the band. The music was great (still is), and I could identify everyone in the band by memory.
And that’s really the only problem I have with Morning Musume right now. I still love them. They’re still my favorite band after all this time. But I couldn’t name the members of the current lineup without having to look on Wikipedia or J-Ongaku to rattle off the ninth gen members (I certainly can’t identify them without a scorecard – err, the insert in the regular version of the new single), and now I have to double my workload as a MoMusu fan and learn four new names, and match their faces and voices to them?
With a shrug of the shoulders, I have to admit that I’m probably not going through anything radically different than what fans went through in the band’s early years. That’s fine. Maybe it’s only gotten a little harder for me personally because of how much my life changed between the release of the band’s last two albums 10 My Me and Fantasy 11 (a little thing called marriage tends to do that).
But, jumping Jesus in a mosh pit at a Deicide concert… Tsunku-sempai? As a songwriter and producer, you’re a fucking genius. But seriously, sir: lay off with the lineup changes for a couple of years. Concentrate on something else to make the next couple of years of Morning Musume interesting to the general public… like getting them signed to an American record deal, for starters.
Aibon, You Need To Change A Few Things…
Waking up to see any bad news is never what one wants to see first thing in the morning, especially on a weekend morning after sleeping in. But that’s precisely what happened when I picked up my Blackberry and read International Wota’s headline about her suicide attempt.
Putting the last two words of that last sentence in a paragraph with any entertainer is a sad thing to begin with, but when that name is attached to a Japanese singer associated with happier-sounding works, it’s even sadder.
Like everybody else that is processing this news and blogging or tweeting about it, I am wishing Aibon the best. Given that she was in Morning Musume when I first started to get into the band and also became a XXL fan of the side groups she was in at the time – hell, my Gmail address has been minimoniotaku since 2004! – this is only natural. Shit, she even inspired one of the characters in my almost-complete novel project (although I have no intention of giving her literary doppelgänger such a tragic ending)!
With reference to one of the first posts IW linked to, I don’t believe Aibon needs a permanent break from the entertainment industry. What she needs a permanent break from is the guy she’s been living with for the past couple of years. From what I can tell, he hasn’t been much of a help or a positive influence on her, and his much-reported associations with organized crime certainly don’t help.
Aibon, have a safe recovery, get the fuck away from that guy you’ve been involved with, get in touch with some friends (we all know you’ve been in contact with fellow ex-MiniMoni Mika Todd through Twitter), and by this time next year you should be ending the year on a high note, not a low one.
Happy Birthday!
…to Miyabi Natsuyaki of Berryz Koubou and Buono!, who turns 19 today (and who’s shirt on the “Yuki Yuki Monkey Dance” single inspired this blog’s name)…
…to Elvis Costello, who turns 57…
…and a special Happy 60th Birthday to the Metal God, Rob Halford of Judas Priest, seen here with the Metal Son of God, aka The Man Who Should Be Idol (that’s right, I’m still not letting that one go, folks…):
A Hot Mix and a Cool Beverage
Summer is my favorite season of the year, and a lot of things remind me of that season: Nice hot weather (which has made me a bit of a masochist in the past decade and a half, because of how easily I get heat prostration as I get older), air conditioning (which I used to leave on 24/7 all summer when I lived at home; now my wife draws the line at that), ice cream (which doesn’t agree with me anymore – I’m seriously lactose intolerant to the point where I should just say fuck it and turn vegan)… and maybe I should stop there because this is starting to sound like a rant on how much it sucks to get older, except I left out one favorite thing about summer… mixtapes! (I know, another remark where I reveal that I’m twenty years younger than Iggy Pop. Sorry!)
OK, I know that nobody outside of the hip-hop world calls them mixtapes anymore considering that the primary sound carriers of these things are either CD-Rs or iTunes/iPod playlists, but the concept is still the same. You make a mix that you’ll be playing on the regular when you’re driving to the beach, lying on the beach, driving home from the beach, going on vacation… you get idea. The kind of tape where, if immaculately mixed and sequenced, will stay in your car all summer – maybe even during the fall and winter, too – until it either gets lost, borrowed, or left on the dashboard absentmindedly (where it’ll get fried by the sun).
And there is an art to making good mixes. You don’t just throw together eighty minutes worth of songs and call it a mix. You make the sequence as perfect as possible. You try not to be clever by putting ten-minute track from your brother’s favorite Yes album, or hip by slipping some American pop tartlet like Katy Perry inbetween tracks by Anthrax and Bright Eyes.
It’s been said by some aficionados of mixtape culture that mixtapes are going the way of the Edsel, thanks to the presence of iPods. Given that there are still plenty of participants on sites like Zen Running Order and Art of the Mix, that isn’t true. In my case, iPod/iTunes playlists have served to be the perfect test lab for making mixes. Ever since I first started using the program in 2004, I’ve used iTunes to do multiple drafts of mixes, playing the sequences on either my iPod or right on my laptop, fine-tuning the tracks until I have a sequence that a) flows well, and b) fits within the limitations of an 80-minute CD-R. That last parameter is of utmost importance – I’ve lost track of how many cassette mixes I’ve done back in the day where the tape ran out just as my carefully-chosen closing track was prematurely ended by the sudden appearance of the cassette’s plastic leader. Of course, if one could still find blank cassettes and the machines to record and playback with, one could pre-master their sequences on CD-R’s and then transfer those to cassettes – but unless one was being a retro hipster, why would you? (Hmmm… maybe I should do an eBay search for a good stereo reel-to-reel recorder and some blank reels… that would really be retro!)
Anyway, since this is the IntlWota Summer Refreshment Program we’re dealing with here, I’m contractually obligated to display both the refreshment that this program funded for me (in this case, a can from case of Arizona Green Tea – about the only goddamn thing I drink regularly thanks to being both straight-edge and lactose intolerant) and the tools that helped put this article together – my loyal laptop and one of my two iPods. Wait a minute, you’re asking: Two iPods? Yeah. They’d both be in the shot, but I had to use the other one just to take the picture.
I should explain about the two iPods – the one in the picture is a 160GB iPod Classic; a 64GB iPod Touch that is basically used like a miniature iPad/phoneless iPhone is what I took the picture with, and it’s been a rather handy device. I was on a first-anniversary weekend trip with my wonderful wife Tara and was using the hotel’s free WiFi to catch up on e-mail with the iPod Touch, when I got the go-ahead from International Wota to do this. I immediately started putting together the initial sequence right in the iPad Touch, sequenced it, and even gave it an initial spin via a very useful and very fun DJ app – wherein I discovered that my original track sequence was over 90 minutes long. Barely OK for a cassette mix – but we’re dealing with CD limits, so at least ten minutes of music had to eventually be chopped.
Summer, itself, was the basis for picking out the tracks. If it came out in summer, had a summer memory attached to it, or just reminded me of or even sounded like summer in some way to me, it went in. And, befitting this blog’s general ethos – that ethos basically being putting J-Pop and Western music on equal footing – I didn’t restrict my choices to just J-Pop material.
Once I was back home, I got myself the aforementioned fresh case of tea (I’m already halfway through it as I write this – it’s been one of those fucking hot weeks up here in Pennsylvania), sat down with the laptop, and got to editing and resequencing. Below is the final result: My soundtrack for the rest of the Summer of 2011.
1. WHITEBERRY “Natsu Matsuri” – A no-brainer of a logical choice to kick off this mix. When I started to get more seriously into Japanese music, it was Whiteberry that led me on my current path. I owe them a great deal of gratitude for that. I’ve long since heard the Jitterin’ Jinn original and I must say, Whiteberry’s version has the upper hand. Yuki Madea’s voice reminds me of J Mascis as far as her somewhat raw delivery goes; her post-Whiteberry recordings, first with the band Yukki and currently with The Husky have seen her get better with age.
2. REINA TANAKA “Manatsu No Kousen” – Yep, the idol who drives my wotahood (to paraphrase something Ray said at American Wota a few years back). It’s probably no surprise that all of her recently released solo singles are on my hard drive (thank you, US iTunes!) – the surprise is how well she pulls off her solo rendition of the early MoMusu summer classic.
3. HUSKER DU “Celebrated Summer” – Another no-brainer of a selection and the first representation of Western music in general and classic punk/indie in particular on this track list. It was probably my reading Bob Mould’s recent autobiography See A Little Light as well as a book about the Huskers from earlier this year that spurred me to include this choice a lot quicker than I otherwise would have. But then again, I miss the Huskers big time and wish they’d never split up in 1988.
4. BUZZCOCKS “What Do I Get?” – Yes, this is one of those tracks that reminds me of summer – specifically, one time back in the summer of 1994 when I found a copy of their box set in a used CD store in Bloomsburg, bought it on sight, and listened to it in the car on the way home. Plus, I’m starting to make some serious plans for getting a new band together – first time for me since 1997, first time back on guitar since my first band split up in 1984, and first time ever singing lead vocals full-time – and this is one of a long list of candidates that are going to be on the prospective band’s set list.
5. MORNING MUSUME “Souda! We’re Alive!” – Throwing one of my favorite songs by my favorite band of all time into the mix, specifically one from a classic lineup of the group. Gotta love those big powerchords in the intro/chorus/outro.
6. ROKY ERICKSON “Bermuda” – I threw this classic in – specifically this superior version from the Don’t Slander Me album – to add a bit of travel-related paranoia to the proceedings. Yes, this is another selection from my soon-to-be band’s list, too.
7. SAN NIN MATSURI “Chu! Natsu Party” – I had to throw in at least one of the Hello! Project Shuffle Units, and this classic collaboration between Ai Kago, Rika Ishikawa and Aya Matsuura was begging to be heard.
8. BORIS “Hope” – Attention Please and Heavy Rocks 2011 – both reviewed a month or so ago here at TGML – came out just as summer was unofficially starting. With lead guitarist Wata singing in a fragile manner over her own driving Jesus And Mary Chain guitar riffing, the song is a perfect fit.
9. SCANDAL “Koi Moyo” – That opening chord sequence sounds very summery, even beachy. I find myself playing it on guitar a lot when I’m warming up.
10. 11WATER “BE ALL RIGHT!” – the second representation of the H!P Shuffle Groups in this mix. Eleven H!P members take on some Bosstones-esque ska punk. Love this one even though I’m a little more used to MiniMoni’s version from their second album.
11. THE BEATLES “All You Need Is Love” – This one is here for a very personal reason: The day Capitol Records put this 45 out on the racks is also the day I was born.
12. THE MINUTEMEN “Search” – When I got into my first semi-pro band after graduating high school – this was the Summer of 1985 – one of the tapes I frequently carried was the My First Bells compilation tape of all of the Minutemen’s releases prior to Double Nickels on the Dime. I find myself associating that tape with summer weather and car travel a lot.
13. SCANDAL “Secret Base” – The Osaka Four covering the Zone classic. Sometimes I think the basic story line as seen in the Zone PV reminds me of a summer romance that never got off the ground any more come September. The keyboards, however – no matter whether it’s the original or SCANDAL’s retake – remind me of early King Crimson. And I got my first King Crimson records in the summer of ’81, too, if that counts for extra credit…
14. JUNIOR MURVIN “Police and Thieves”
15. MAX ROMEO – “War in a Babylon”
I’ve been in a serious reggae mood lately – the recent Peter Tosh reissues are partly to blame – and so, rather than slip 7nin Matsuri’s “Summer Reggae Rainbow” into the set list, which would have been a little too obvious, and even though I love the song, I opted for putting some more authentic classic reggae in instead. And one can’t get more authentic and classic with reggae without gravitating towards the Bob Marley canon, than by culling from the work of the great Lee “Scratch” Perry. Both tracks sourced from the great box set Arkology – do yourself a favor and find a copy.
16. AKB48 “Heavy Rotation” - One of the best things AKB48 did last summer, if not, all of last year.
17. BUONO “My Boy” - This single might have come out a month early for the Summer of 2009, but by the time the last weekend of May rolled around, it was a perfect fit and stayed that way for the whole season and then some, making it one of Buono’s best ever singles to date.
18. BERRYZ KOUBOU “Waracchaou yo BOYFRIEND” – Likewise, this came out while there was still one month of summer left in 2006, but the 50’s style musical arrangement never fails to evoke summer nights, car hops, crusing, and the like… even if, at the time the song was recorded, most of the girls weren’t even old enough to get learner’s permits.
19. THE SEX PISTOLS “God Save The Queen” – Another deliberately personal summer memory creeping in here, this time of more recent vintage: When Tara and I were finalizing our first-dance and bridal-party song selections with the DJ we hired for our wedding reception last year, he told us to feel free to e-mail him if there were any specific songs we wanted him to play that night. Tara didn’t think of anything, but I asked for this song – admittedly, my favorite song of all time, period point blank – and got it, and got Tara to dance with me to it near the end of the night. Afterwards, our wedding photographer came up to us and said, “I never thought I’d ever hear the Sex Pistols at a wedding reception – that was fucking awesome!!”
20. THE BEACH BOYS “All Summer Long” – Yes, picking a Beach Boys track is pretty obvious for a summer mix, but I needed a good closer, and since this track closes out the American Graffiti soundtrack double-album (a favorite album since I was 7!) it was the perfect track to use. Also, there’s another summer memory attached to this song and the entire soundtrack album – the movie was available on an early pay-per-view hotel system when my family and I stayed at the Inn On The Park hotel in Toronto in 1974 (Around the same time Glenn Gould was using one of the other rooms in the building as a makeshift tape-editing studio for his recordings, I later found out), which is when I first saw the movie and heard most of the music from it. Ironically, while the movie takes place in 1962, this song didn’t come out until two years later. Go figure.
Have a good summer, everyone!
BONUS: Here’s a streaming version of the mix as I originally did it with the dJay app on my iPod Touch, before I discovered that I had to chop at least ten minutes off of the track sequence. Can you pick out the songs that didn’t make the final cut?
IW Summer Refreshment Test Mix 1 by TGML/IW Summer Refeshment
…And Gomaki’s Career Takes Another Odd Turn…
Maki Goto’s singing career has been on rather uneven footing since she abruptly announced her then-impending departure from her original agency Up-Front Works and the label that released her solo albums, Piccolo Town/King on the closing night of her tour behind her fourth solo album How To Use Sexy.
After a short period of inactivity, Maki reopened her blog and revealed that she was in Los Angeles, undergoing vocal and dance training. The mere fact that she was in L.A. had myself and others wondering how on the money I was about predicting that she had left UFW because she wanted to break out of just being a Japanese pop singer and go for an international market.
Six months after that, she signed to Avex Trax, and in her initial promo shots released in the wake of her signing announcement, it appeared that she would be sharing a music path (and a stylist) not dissimilar to Kumi Koda’s. A year later we finally got the first new music from Maki since her signing, the urban-oriented Sweet Black with Maki Goto mini-album. Her two EPs that I’ve heard since then, ONE and Gloria (she’s released a third, LOVE, very recently but I haven’t heard it yet) had her changing styles with every release. (And the way she was dressed and made up on the ONE cover? Don’t even get me started on how much she looked like an aging call girl…).
Now, this morning, Maki released a handwritten statement (translated here) announcing that she was taking a hiatus starting in January of next year. The whole statement seems somewhat vague – she does make a reference to her mother’s sudden death, which police have yet to publicly rule whether it was accidental or not. Is she just taking a hiatus, or is she quitting the business entirely?
Or… is she considering leaving Avex after finishing her current contractual obligations? She does mention a single coming out in July and a full-length album coming out later in the year. And in an interview to promote her current EP, she did mention that she had nothing but good things to say about her time with Up-Front Works, centering especially on working with Tsunku. I hate to speculate, but I’m sure I’m not the only one in the blogosphere thinking the same thing.
GROOVE MUSIC LIFE VIDEO: MORNING MUSUME “Only You”
Straight from the band’s own YouTube channel, the new PV for their forthcoming single, and in beautiful HD, too. The anticipation continues…
NEW MUSIC: MORNING MUSUME “Only You”
A full HQ copy of Morning Musume’s forthcoming single “Only You” (out 6/15) has already surfaced. The band is back to the mature sound of “Nanchatte Renai”, “Naichao Kamo” and “Onna ga Medatte Naze Ikenai” after kicking off 2011 and their 9th-generation period with this past spring’s much needed dose of sunshine known as “Maji Desu Ka Ska”. And Takitty and Reina, the two best vocalists in the band, are right up front as they very well should be. Loving it already… how could I not? How could you not? Summer’s already starting to sound good and it’s not even Memorial Day yet…
ETA 5.20.11: Sorry – I wasn’t aware that the original stream had been removed – here’s a replacement.
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After “Ice Cream for Crow”, a Nice Little Snack.
Gary Lucas, manager and sometime guitarist for the late great Captain Beefheart during his final trilogy of albums, shared on his Soundcloud page this rare post-Ice Cream for Crow demo, recorded at Lucas’s flat in 1983 when the Captain was in New York to do his second Late Night for David Letterman appearance. Beefheart often said that after finishing Ice Cream for Crow he had said everything he wanted to say in music, but this was most likely one of his infrequent afterwords. Enjoy:
Pork Chop Blue Around the Rind–Don Van Vliet NYC 7/83 by garylucas
REVIEW: MORNING MUSUME “Maji Desu Ka Ska!”
MORNING MUSUME
Maji Desu Ka Ska!
(Zetima)
Available on CD, CD/DVD and on iTunes
Rating: 
Thanks to Mother Nature’s most recent (and worst) menstrual period in recent memory, it took a little longer for this long-awaited single to hit people’s stereos and iPods. With all of the previews going around, I already had a good idea of what I thought of the single before the release date; As is my standard operating procedure, I prefer to wait until I have a high-quality sound file or the CD itself – whichever I can get my hands on first – before I commit my thoughts to word-processor file.
The ska in “Maji Desu Ka Ska!” is indeed ska, lying somewhere between the 2-Tone [Specials, Selecter, Madness, (English) Beat] and Third Wave [Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Less Than Jake, Toasters] eras. (I mention this because it would have been disappointing if Tsunku had put the word in the title and didn’t tip his hat musically to that style.) Having the four newest members of the group, whose names I still haven’t matched to their faces yet (the lack of personnel turnover between 2007 and last winter, plus the less populated additions to the group in the two years beforehand, appear to have spoiled me), start off the song was a calculated risk, but so far it works – for the next singles, they’ll have to keep topping themselves. Then again, Reina Tanaka was prominent on her first single with the band, and now she’s considered one of the best vocalists in the band, so that may be a good sign for our newcomers. If there’s a flaw in the song, it’s because the prominence of the Ninth Gen makes the song threaten to come off like an early Berryz Koubou or C-ute track at times – and the last thing Morning Musume should be sounding like is any of their Hello! Project stablemates. Fortunately, once the more experienced members of the group take over the song, that fear is subsided.
On the B-side, “Motto Aishite Hoshii no”, the veteran members dominate more, and the musical style returns to an uptempo version of what was employed on the last three MoMusu albums and their related singles – upbeat pop combined with more serious vocals. It’s definitely one of the better Morning Musume B-sides in recent memory, which is saying something.
Combined, both tracks look back at Morning Musume’s recent past while looking ahead to the future. And that’s what the first Morning Musume single of the new year should do.
Four and a half out of five stars.
NEW MUSIC: DREAM MORNING MUSUME “SEXY BOY ?Soyokaze ni Yorisotte?”
Aaannnddd… we have a leak from the forthcoming Dream Morning Musume album Dorimusu 1 (dropping April 20th – no 4:20 jokes, or references to that Six Feet Under song, please!). It’s been awhile since most of these O.G. MoMusu participants (save primarily Hitomi Yoshizawa and Rika Ishikawa, who have kept busy with Hangry & Angry) were heard from in the studio, but they still have the skills that made them MoMusus in the first place. Definitely makes me look forward even more to Dorimusu 1, even if it is dominated by retakes of MoMusu classics.
Stream: Dream Morning Musume “SEXY BOY ?Soyokaze ni Yorisotte?”
