REVIEW: GIRLS’ GENERATION “The Boys” single
GIRLS GENERATION (SNSD)
“The Boys” single
(SM Entertainment/Interscope)
Available on iTunes
Rating: 
Let’s be honest and brief: I am a big Girls Generation/SNSD fan. I’m glad they signed a major label deal with Interscope/Universal. But this first single under their new deal is a disappointment.
The English-language vocals are fine, save for the unnecessary rap-style vocal breaks – the girls handled themselves admirably here. But musically, this single is just not on the level of “Gee”, “Genie”, or “Hoot”. It is a shade better than much of what is overpopulating Top 40 radio currently and lately, but knowing what I know of what they’re capable of, this was a poor choice for a first American single. I would have much preferred that they cut an English language version of “Genie” or “Hoot”, which would have smoked the likes of Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus into either retirement or suicide.
Even sadder was the choice of producer Teddy Riley to handle this. What was wrong with SM’s own stable of producers and songwriters? Teddy Riley has some classics under his arm but he hasn’t had a hit single as either a producer or songwriter since Bill Clinton was president. At least it wasn’t some low-talent, overpriced, overrated chump like Timbaland that can only write one riff at a time, talk annoyingly in the background behind the featured vocalist, and call it a complete song.
The only silver lining to this is that those that hear this, if they choose to dig further, will get to hear what the band is capable of. But even that’s not a given. I hope the new album is a lot better than this!
3 out of 5 stars. Sorry, ladies.
ALBUM REVIEW: MORNING MUSUME “12, Smart”
MORNING MUSUME
12, Smart
(Zetima)
Available on CD, CD/DVD combo, and on iTunes US and Japan
Rating: 
It took a couple of days longer than I expected, but I wasn’t about to not review a Morning Musume album for the second time in a row. (At least in the instance of Fantasy 11, I could blame the Christmas holidays.) Let’s do the math quick: This is Morning Musume’s third album in nineteen months (I can’t help but recall back when Husker Du dropped New Day Rising, Flip Your Wig, and Candy Apple Grey – solid albums, all – within a similar time frame back in the mid-80′s). And it’s the soonest they’ve followed up a studio album since the three-and-a-half month gap between Cover You and Platinum 9 Disc. (The second shortest gap was between Second Morning and 3rd Love Paradise). And this album is coming out on the heels of Ai Takahashi’s graduation from the band and the addition of four new members that have yet to see the inside of a recording studio, and that’s on the heels of four more members being added at the beginning of this year. Things are getting way busy over in MoMusu land, and that’s a good thing. They’re also changing a mite too fast, but thankfully, the new album is giving veteran MoMusu fans like myself a chance to catch up.
I do have to admit that I was a little wary of how the songwriting quality of the album was going to be considering the tough double act 12, Smart has to follow with the two solid albums that bookended 2010, the semi-experimental 10 My Me and the more group-centric Fantasy 11. [Which I still wish I had written a review of last December; If you haven't bought that album yet, go get it now 'cause it still holds up.] I also wondered how the 9th Generation members were going to mesh in an album setting, considering there were basically thrown front and center their first single in, before being reined in by Tsunku afterward (and quite wisely) on the two singles that followed.
Tsunku has had a pretty good game plan as far as sequencing the opening tracks of the past several Morning Musume studio albums – new studio track followed by one of the recent singles – and he adheres pretty much to that same operating procedure. “Give Me Ai” (sung as “Give me love” in the lyrics itself, if you didn’t know what the word “Ai” meant in Japanese) recalls both Platinum 9 Disc‘s “SONGS” and Fantasy 11‘s “Onna to Otoko no Lullaby Game”, with an arrangement that mixes some of the best elements of both tracks.
“Only You”, one of the current lineup’s best single A-sides, follows “Give Me Ai” out of the starting gate. Tsunku’s songwriting for Morning Musume singles has been displaying a determination to have more than two strains of music (in other words, not just a verse and a chorus ad infinitum) in a pop song if he can get away with it. Here, he gets away with it in spades. Ai Takahashi, Reina Tanaka and Risa Niigaki are in excellent voice (even if some of Gaki-san’s vocals are deliberately effected with AutoTune in the song’s prechoruses).
One of the unique things about the last Morning Musume album, Fantasy 11, was that the album was dominated by group performances, with only Ai Takahashi and Reina Tanaka getting solo cuts and no subgroup features to speak of. This time around, the band gets splintered around for four of the album’s twelve tracks. On “Silver no Udedokei” Reina is paired with Riho Sayaski (the only member of the 9th gen to get any solo lines on “Only You”) for a classic H!P urban R&B workout a-la the ROMANS one-off “Sexy Night”, with Risa and Aika Mitsui brought in to contribute rap-style vocals here and there. Although Morning Musume can pull off pretty much any style they are confronted with, modern R&B is one of their strongest suits.
Sayumi Michishige and newcomer Mizuki Fukimura take their turn at a subgroup cut next with “Suki da na Kimi ga”. Apparently Mizuki is cut from similar cloth vocally to Sayumi, and they get a heavily electronic track to play with.
“Kaiketsu Positive A” starts with traffic sound effects before a soul horn section (albeit a synthetic one) kicks in, bringing the entire group along for the ride. Here some of the ninth gen members hold their own very well alongside the veteran members, both with solo lines and harmonies.
Six tracks in and we get our first non-uptempo cut of the album, “Kono Ai wo Kasanete”, a sort of torch-passing duet between Takahashi and Niigaki. Given that the release date of this album was – somewhat stupidly – done a couple of weeks after Takahashi graduated from the band, its fortunate that then-leader and then-subleader were given a chance at a subgroup cut.
The one/two punch of the band’s current double-A-side single “Kono Chikyuu no Heiwa o Honki de Nagatterun da yo!”/”Kare to Issho no Omise ga Shitai!” follows. I’m glad the band and Tsunku retained the crossfade between both songs from the single version for the album. In my mind, this is the best double-A-side single since Husker Du’s “Makes No Sense At All”/”Love Is All Around”.
“My Way ~Joshikou Hanamichi~” combines rock guitar riffing and drum-and-bass percussion loops. That combination shouldn’t work, but here it does. The band members engage in some top-notch harmonizing over the somewhat frantic musical arrangement.
“Otome no Timing” starts with a Motown-esque double-time rhythm on the intro (and choruses) before giving in to a brighter pop arrangement on the verses. Back when Sexy 8 Beat was released, an 60′s-influenced musical bed allowed then-newcomer Aika Mitsui to have some solo space with veteran Eri Kamei. Now, Aika is in the veteran’s spot with a similar song and she has her hands full with newcomers Erina Ikuta and Kanon Suzuki, whose vocals are already starting to remind me of Ai Kago & Nozomi Tsuji circa 2000-2001.
“OK YEAH!” starts off somewhat weak then almost threatens to drown out the band members with its happy-hardcore sound (so much so that one would not be blamed to double check to make sure Anabolic Frolic’s name isn’t in the credits). Fortunately, saner heads prevailed at the mixing desk and the MoMusus are front and center.
“Maji Ka Desu Ska!”, the first single by the new lineup (review from when the single was first released here), closes out the album – not only a further reiteration of standard Tsunku operating procedure for sequencing a Morning Musume studio album of late, but a reminder of how the year started for the band in the first place.
If there are any weak spots on the album, they are when the newest, youngest members of the band are featured so prominently. Perhaps it is because we now have a MoMusu lineup that has members younger than the members of Berryz Koubou and C-ute. Fortunately, the songwriting and the vocal performances of the veteran members are still top notch and sustain the album. Hopefully the newer members will develop more vocal personality by the time the next band’s album drops.
4 and a half out of 5 stars.
Thanks, Steve.
While I’m catching up on things, and on a less snarkier note…
I would be beyond remiss if I let the day pass without giving infinite props to Apple founder Steve Jobs, who lost his battle with cancer last night.
Without Steve Jobs, much of what I do would not be possible. My blogging activities started on a PowerBook G4. I listen to music on an iPod when I’m writing. The main character in Resonant Blue was “born” on the PowerBook G4, as was the world of Here Is The Wonderland. I use an iPad to help stave off my Mac jones (my PowerBook died in 2007 and I’ve been dealing with Windows machines since then, albeit reluctantly), and I was already planning to switch to an iPhone upon their next upgrade (the iPhone 4S, revealed this past Tuesday and going on pre-orders tomorrow) after several months of battling a BlackBerry.
Most of us owe Steve Jobs a world of thanks, especially if my (and your) Twitter and Facebook feeds are any indication. I don’t think there’s a single reader out there who doesn’t use an Apple product of some sort, even if it isn’t one of his computers. My own Apple experiences go back to the Apple IIc back in my high school days (Reina Tanaka’s parents probably hadn’t even met, let alone had sex, back then – we’re talking 1984-85, here, folks) – and all the better for it. They got me interested more sincerely in computers, which got me started on writing more seriously long before there was an Internet, and I used to go for the Apple computers in Penn State Hazleton’s computer lab when my friend and I used to visit there on occasion before we got our own PCs and Internet accounts. Simply put, without this man’s vision and testicular fortitude, very little of what we all do would be possible.
Thanks for everything, Steve.
Macs at half-mast.
All His Rowdy Friends Are Probably Just As Uninformed And Ignorant As He Is
Quite honestly, I’ve tried to hold my tongue as long as possible on the whole Hank Williams Jr./ESPN brouhaha. I was ready to let it pass without much comment beyond the occasional smartass remark on Twitter and Facebook, but now that his firstborn son has spoken up and that ESPN made the only move they could make, I’m going to comment.
Over the weekend, by coincidence, I happened to read the book Family Tradition: Three Generations of Hank Williams by Susan Marino (Backbeat, 2011). Quite honestly, I was never as much of a fan of Hank Jr.’s music as I am of his father’s and son’s, and I’ve always seen him as someone who, initially by his mother’s heavy hand, made a lifetime career out of riding his esteemed father’s reputation. I did gain a small bit of respect for him thanks to one incident in his story about how he was genuinely upset with some of his backing musicians who had openly cheered the news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. That bit of respect went down the shitter after news of his remarks (on Fox News, of course) comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler went viral.
One has to wonder how much undetected brain damage Hank Jr. suffered in his near-fatal fall of that mountain in Montana, just as he was starting to reinvent himself as a country-rocker, or how lingering or long-term the effects of his multiple injuries have been since then. I ask that not as a mockery or as an insult, but as a sincere inquiry as to whether or not those injuries may have impacted Randall Hank Williams’s judgement and common sense in the long run.
Since the remark occurred the day of a Monday Night Football broadcast, ESPN wisely pulled that night’s opening intro tape (which for years has consisted of Hank Jr.’s regular rewritings of “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” for every Monday night football game). Hank Jr., at first, gave what was pretty much a non-apology apology on his website and Facebook where he spent more time boasting that he didn’t have a press agent writing the statement for him than he did apologizing or explaining himself (or double-checking his typed statement for randomly capitalized words).
Lest anyone was left wonder what Hank 3 felt about the whole thing, he was pretty blunt… albeit with more intelligence than his estranged father showed in the first place, stating that his father shouldn’t talk about politics, period, and that the only musician that was qualified to discuss politics, in his opinion, was Jello Biafra.
Jello Biafra and Hank Williams III after one of III's recent West Coast shows.
This morning, ESPN chose to pull the plug on Bocephus for good, issuing a professional statement this morning to confirm as such. Not surprisingly, Hank Jr. chose to take the typical road of the right-wing liar, falsely claiming that he chose to leave and that, trying to further make himself look like the hero and ESPN the villains, falsely claimed that “stepped on the toes of the First Amendment” and that “me, my song, and my rowdy friends are out of here.”
What’s that old expression about not letting the door hit you in the ass on the way out, again?
His son’s more educated opinion not withstanding, Hank Jr. is rumored to still be looking into running for U.S. Senate in his native Tennessee as a Republican. So much for his talk a couple of years ago that he was going to put out records on his own after following his son out of Curb Records’s front door (especially since last month, Hank 3 has run circles around his father in that aspect, putting out three albums simultaneously on his own label). None of that should be any surprise, though – Hank III has been outpacing his father in a lot of aspects to the point where I’ve always wondered if the musical talent in the Hank Williams family skipped Hank Jr. and went right from Hank Sr. to Hank III.
Whether that’s possible or not, one thing is for sure – Hank Williams Jr. is not even a fraction of the man that either his father or his firstborn son is.
My own impression of Hank Williams Sr., especially after reading Family Tradition, is that he was a gentle and generous man despite his substance abuse problems. If Hank Williams Sr. – who was taught how to play guitar by a black blues musician, by the way – were alive to see what an embarrassment his son has become, he’d probably sober up and smack the shit out of him. And I wouldn’t blame him.
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.
RESONANT BLUE: The campaign pre-show
The following is a message I sent to a select bunch of friends through Facebook. I am reproducing it here for a special reason that will become almost immediately clear:
Hello, everyone,
I normally don’t go sending mass messages through Facebook, but I wanted to get your attention because I have a special project about to launch that I want all of you to be aware of and hopefully participate in.
As many of you – perhaps all of you – know, I have been working on a couple of different novel projects for some time, and this summer I started looking into getting one of them printed with help from a crowdfunding site. The novel in question is called RESONANT BLUE and as of this writing I already have a Facebook page and an official website running for the project, and this afternoon I sent my pitch to the people at Kickstarter and should be hearing from them in a day or two.
Why am I doing this? Very simple – I want to get my name out there as a writer and I think this will be a unique way of doing it. I am not looking to get an outrageous number of books printed and I am not about to go through some fly-by-night vanity press that will expect me to shell out a ridiculous amount of money to get a book printed (I’ve seen too many people in my hometown go through PublishAmerica to get a book done and from what I understand, they had to pay out the ass to do it and they’ve got a bunch of unsold books gathering dust in their house). My intentions for this project are simple – to raise enough money (close to $2,000) to get a minimum of fifty limited first edition hardcover books printed through Lulu.com. The minimum pledge amount will be enough for that person to get a signed hardcover copy of the book. I’ll only have to print enough books to meet the demand and then that’s it.
Obviously, I want you people, my friends, to join in on this. That is why I am coming to you first. The only other thing I want from you is that I want you to tell any and all of your friends that this project is going on. You all have friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus that you can reach that I can’t. There’s no doubt that some of them are into reading.
Right now I have a Facebook page and a website for this project. The FB page is linked below and the website is obviously resonantblue.com. I’ll be sending one final message when the OK comes in from Kickstarter and I get that ball rolling, and then after that it’s all giving updates on the FB page and through my FB, Twitter and G+ accounts for the rest of the campaign.
That’s it for now, and thanks for reading this. I hope with your help that this project can become a reality.
Your friend,
CJ
Again, the website is http://www.resonantblue.com and the FB page is http://www.facebook.com/resonantblue. Also, expect a few new posts here at TGML this week. Sorry for being out of the loop for awhile.
Can You Do Some Artwork? (Open Call!)
I normally don’t do personal posts here at TGML, preferring to save those statements for either my Twitter or my personal blog. However: While I claw my way through a few things that need to be finished in both my personal and creative lives (including a few posts for both this blog and what I have been referring to as The Secret Project), I would like to make an open plea/request/call of sorts.
Within a few weeks, I will be launching a crowdfunding campaign for a book project. This book project, for the record is neither Here Is The Wonderland (which will be serviced to agents upon its final completion) nor Play It All Night Long (which has been long abandoned and only exists as possible starter source material for future projects). It does take place a couple of decades earlier in the same universe as Here Is The Wonderland and has been inspired in general by much of the same kind of music that I cover here at TGML, but that’s all I am completely at liberty to say except for that this book is a completed manuscript (as far as writing the main story) going through the usual revisions, touchups, and repairs before I parcel it out to a few first readers. That is where you, the gentle readers out there in the general public, come in.
For this book project, tentatively titled Resonant Blue, I will need one important thing: Cover artwork. I have a general basic idea in mind for the cover but I need someone much more skilled in the art department (especially with either photography or Photoshop or both) to help bring it to life. If you can help in any way – be it to help put together and conceive the artwork, or to steer someone that can do so, please e-mail me at minimoniotaku@gmail.com (the subject line in your e-mail should read “Resonant Blue cover art”). I carry a smartphone and sometimes an iPad with me to most places I go, so you should get a reply pretty much within an hour, tops, barring such interruptions as a decent’s night’s sleep. There will be payment, but not immediately – a small part of the money raised from the crowdsourcing, if successful, would cover that.
Again, those are all the details I can give right now, so if you can help in any way, get in touch with me. In the meantime, I have a few blog posts to finish up in the next few days…
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.
NEW MUSIC: INSANE CLOWN POSSE/JACK WHITE/JEFF THE BROTHERHOOD “Leck Mich Im Arsch”
The look on Jack White
From the You Couldn’t Make This Shit Up If You Smoked Enough Weed To Make Cypress Hill Look Straight-Edge Department:
This just in: Jack White and The Insane Clown Posse have something else in common besides being from Detroit and running unpredictable independent record labels.
Both Third Man Records (White’s label) and Psychopathic Records (ICP’s label) just released news of this otherwise unlikely collaboration that gets even more unlikely given the musical content of the A-side. Thus sayeth the press release:
In the grand tradition of peanut butter meeting Iggy’s chest or Bing Crosby getting down with David Bowie, Third Man Records is ecstatic to present the latest in a long-line of unexpected musical pairings…Insane Clown Posse and Mozart.
Back in ’82, ahem, 1782, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote a piece that’s been left out of the spotlight ever since. The title of the piece is “Leck Mich Im Arsch” or literally translated to English as “Lick me in the arse.” Understandably this piece has figuratively been swept under the rug. So who better to give this piece it’s due respect than the wildly successful, much misunderstood, and divisive Southwest Detroit rappers Insane Clown Posse?
With fellow Southwest Detroit-born Jack White at the production helm and musical backing by Nashville’s very own Jeff the Brotherhood, this 2011 version of “Leck Mich Im Arsch” marries Mozart’s melody (and lyrics sung in operatic German) with ICP’s poignant lyrical addition in English and Jeff the B’s monster-riffs, letting the whole thing tie together in the most beautiful of ways.
(The full press release can be read at either label’s websites.)
I’m a big fan of whatever Jack White does to begin with, and while I would never use the title of “Juggalo” or “ninja” (endearments more suited to more devoted fans of the self-proclaimed Wicked Clowns) I am an ICP fan as well. Even if I could have seen such a collaboration coming, I wouldn’t have thought that they’d base said collaboration on something from one of the most revered classical composers in history. And I’ve loved classical music since my grandfather introduced it to me as a young boy, which makes this even more appealing to me – and also adds another notch to the “Things I Thought Only The Contents Of My Record and CD Collection Had In Common” column in my book. Leave it to Jack White to dig up one of the bawdy party songs that Mozart was known to have written for his own and his friends’s amusement and give it such a hilarious and eminently listenable interpretation. The question here is not, “What the fuck is Jack White thinking?” (as said almost ad infinitum in indie rock circles mere minutes removed from the announcement) but “How the fuck did he come up with such a hilariously crazy idea?”. Trust me, it’s not meant to be taken seriously, but that’s most likely the idea here:
Insane Clown Posse – Leck Mich Im Arsch by Third Man Records
Even the trailer Third Man released in advance of the single is fucking hilarious:
The single – part of Third Man’s ongoing “Blue Series” of one-off singles – comes out in limited edition vinyl through Third Man’s website on September 13th, with iTunes being the hook-up for the turntable-challenged. No advance orders being taken yet as of this writing, but keep checking both places.
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…):
