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…):
Yes, Indeed.
More videos of this type here.
Stop! Kyary Time!
I’ve been rather ambivalent about Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and her seemingly overnight success with her first single, the admittedly infectious “PONPONPON”, but I won’t lie: both of her singles, the aforementioned piece of ear candy and the recent follow-up “Jelly” are on my iPod and have been getting regular spins of late. And I’m looking forward to my digital pre-order from iTunes landing on my hard drive and in my iPad later tonight as I write this. Even more so when I discovered the following news item from last week, via the social music chart site Last.fm:
At #1 it’s J-Pop phenomenon (Kyary Pamyu Pamyu). The teenage singer has seen her audience climb by 1,127% in the last week, fueled by the success of single “PONPONPON”, as she gears up for the release of debut ‘mini’ album Moshi Moshi Harajuku later this month.
Now, I’m a twinge edgy about this because I have strongly believed for years that J-Pop has more than a good chance to be more than a cult favorite genre here in the Western world, and like a lot of my fellow serious fans of Japanese pop and rock music, I don’t want the mainstream media to lump the likes of Morning Musume, Dir en grey, SCANDAL, AKB48, etc. under the “LOL Japan” category after seeing someone like Kyary. That ad campaign involving a virtual idol digitally created from bits of various popular AKB48 members probably didn’t help matters. But the more I listen to Kyary’s two singles of late, the more I feel that even though artistically I can’t take her as completely seriously as I do Morning Musume or any other J-Pop artist that I’ve reviewed here at TGML, or at this blog’s predecessor, I can still concede that even Kyary, despite the too-obvious presence of AutoTune vocoder effects on her vocals (hey, it fits the arrangement of the songs, so why complain?), could eat someone of lesser-to-no-talent like Katy Perry alive and shit out Rebecca Black.
Since Kyary’s been gaining a good amount of worldwide visibility through a combination of both word of mouth and Warner Japan’s being foresighted enough to make her easily available to anyone in the world with an iTunes account, I can’t help but parallel her current visibility with that of pop-rap icons of the early 90′s like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Both artists left behind a couple of indelible marks on pop charts with a couple of ridiculously popular singles before basically becoming near-laughing-stock pop culture survivors of a sort that you still can’t help but tap your toes to, but in the process they made mainstream TV and radio, and the people who get most of their culture from those outlets, more open to the rest (and best) of what hip-hop had to offer. Despite the fact that both Hammer and Vanilla Ice are easy targets to anyone who takes their rap music seriously, everyone from N.W.A. to Wu-Tang Clan to Lil Wayne to Odd Future owes at least some thanks to Hammer and Vanilla Ice for kicking those doors down in the first place. By that same token, even though Kyary can be an easy target for mainstream media at their laziest (see “silly” Japanese phenomenom, do thirty-second fill-in piece with “LOL Japan” angle at tail-end of news broadcast), there’s still those that will get a good ear-whiff of “POMPOMPOM”, “Jelly”, or whatever else she drops, get hooked, and start to dig further on the premise of, “OK, this is cool… but I’m sure there’s even better stuff coming out of Japan that most people might not have heard of, and I’m going to look for it!” And if her success means that American record labels (for the most part, preferably the independent ones that prefer to work with career artists – I still don’t trust the major labels and their throw-it-against-the-wall mentality with what Japan has to offer) are going to take a chance on a Koda Kumi or a MoMusu, so be it.
If the end result of that means that a year from now, I can go buy Morning Musume’s and SCANDAL’s 2012 album releases in my local indy record store or at Best Buy, rather than having to just pre-order them from CDJapan, then I’m all for it.
REVIEW: SHONEN KNIFE “Osaka Ramones”
SHONEN KNIFE
Osaka Ramones: Tribute to The Ramones
(Good Charamel)
Available on CD, iTunes, AmazonMP3 and eMusic
Rating: 
[AUTHOR'S NOTE: This review was originally intended for what I have referred to at TGML's Facebook page as "The Secret Project", but since there's going to be an unavoidable delay in that project's debut, I've moved it here because I didn't want it to sit any longer. Shonen Knife deserves it.]
Naoko Yamano, Shonen Knife’s front woman, guitarist, chief songwriter, and only consistent member of the veteran Japanese trio (as well as a MILF to both the punk rock and J-pop fan bases), learned how to play guitar by listening to the Ramones. In that aspect, she already has one thing in common with millions of people around the world, this writer included. On top of the obvious Ramones influences that have been part and parcel of Shonen Knife’s music from the beginning of their storied career, the band has also been known to encore with Ramones songs and even do occasional gigs consisting of all Ramones covers under an assumed name, and their 2008 album Fun Fun Fun also contains a tribute song, “Ramones Forever”, that includes autobiographic details on how Naoko first heard the band and how Shonen Knife got to open for the Ramones on their last tour of Japan.
With their own 30th anniversary occurring this year, Naoko and her bandmates decided commemorate the occasion by cutting a full album of Ramones covers, using the name of their occasional Ramones tribute act side project, Osaka Ramones, as the album’s title. About half the album was recorded in their hometown, while the other half was recorded in America with Good Charamel founder (and GooGoo Dolls member) Robby Takac co-producing.
Outside of transposing the key signatures of some of the songs to make them more friendly to their normal female vocal ranges, Shonen Knife remained otherwise faithful to the original recordings, even trying to reproduce as accurately as possible the production styles of the original Ramones recordings (save for “Blitzkrieg Bop”, where the band and Takac wisely avoid emulating the extreme Meet the Beatles-style panning of the guitar and bass tracks in favor of a more contemporary mix). Also remaining unchanged are the gender viewpoints of the original songs, giving some of the covers an unintended faux-lesbian subtext.
The song selection isn’t as completely predictable. A few obvious choices – “Rock n’ Roll High School”, the aforementioned “Blitzkrieg Bop”, “Sheenah Is a Punk Rocker”, “Psycho Therapy” (thankfully, no “I Wanna Be Sedated”, which every bar band in America tends to play very badly) also share space with a couple of not-so-obvious choices, particularly “Scattergun” from the final Ramones studio album Adios Amigos! and “Chinese Rock” from End of the Century.
Given that Shonen Knife’s original songs often cover more kawaii (Japanese for “cute”) topics – food (“BBQ Party”, “I Wanna Eat Chocobars”, “Ice Cream City”), animals (“I Am A Cat”, “Deer Biscuits”), rock and roll (“Golden Years of Rock n’ Roll”, “Rock Society”, “Your Guitar”), campy sci-fi (“Riding on the Rocket”, “Giant Kitty”), with the rare weighty topic (“S*P*A*M”, “Economic Crisis”) – it is quite the shock to hear Naoko and the others (bassist Ritsuko Taneda and new drummer Emi Morimoto sing one song apiece) take on some of the Ramones’s darker lyrical moments, particularly with “Chinese Rocks”, “We’re A Happy Family”, and “Psychotherapy”. This doesn’t distract from or lower the quality of the album, just makes it stand out from the rest of the Shonen Knife catalog.
Beyond that, Osaka Ramones does exactly what Shonen Knife intended the album to do – pay tribute to their heroes and commemorate their own milestone anniversary, one made possible one way or another by the Ramones themselves. Fans of both the Ramones and Shonen Knife will love this, and if one is a fan of one band but not the other, hopefully the album will inspire explorations into the other’s back catalog.
YouTube Crosses The Line
The news is already spreading about how Lady Gaga’s official YouTube account was suspended after a media watchdog group in Japan representing Fuji TV filed a copyright complaint against the provocative singer/songwriter. Gaga and her team had uploaded her appearance on SNAP’s variety show SMAP x SMAP, something that would have been of great interest to fans of both artists outside of Japan.
The frequent scissoring of copyrights from YouTube has been quite ridiculous to begin with, but when the official YouTube account of the biggest pop artist on the planet is getting suspended for posting a clip featuring herself on her own official account, which has gotten over 950 million views, something is wrong.
Musical artists have every right to monitor use of their content on YouTube, but more than that, they have the right to post any clips they themselves appear in. There is a clause in the USA’s copyright law that covers fair use of anything, and Gaga’s posting of her own TV appearance is indeed fair use. The song performed in the clip was hers. There is the likelihood that Gaga had obtained permission from the show’s producers to post the clip, something that the media watchdog that called foul to YouTube/Google about may not have been aware of. In that case, it would have been one of the biggest instances of one hand not telling the other what it was doing in human history.
My hope is that this causes enough of a furor that it brings about a quick and painless end to knee-jerk alleged copyright violation complaints at the world’s largest video streaming site. YouTube is pretty much an endless historical library of any video clip you could imagine, and there isn’t any entity that doesn’t benefit from that – to argue that uses of material in the manner in which Lady Gaga used one of her own Japanese TV appearances is a detriment is to waste one’s breath.
We Have A Confirmation!
For a couple of years, I had openly wondered if Lady Gaga had been influenced in any way, or been a closet fan of, Koda Kumi, especially after recognizing bits of Kuuchin’s past PVs – or at least heavy influences from them – in some of Gaga’s work.
Well…
From the looks of the above picture, it appears that Gaga was just as excited to meet Kumi as the other way around!
