Perfume Doesn’t Like You, Get Over It!
This is something I originally let pass without comment, but since it cropped up to the top of my Flipboard and on my Twitter feed almost out of the blue today after two months, the situation is getting even more annoying and pathetic and thus, I’m going to speak up.
Most of us in the J-Pop Blogosphere know the story of an old, rather creepy fan of the trio Perfume, screennamed Perfume444, who used to post video blogs on YouTube, spurred on by his love of the group. I hadn’t heard of the guy until this article was posted on International Wota, so he was nowhere on my radar until that particular post, and only for a few minutes. He openly declared, according to IW, that since the objects of his, um, interest, basically blew him off after a token few minutes at the Cars 2 premiere in L.A., he was done doing videos.
That was two months ago. Since he saw fit to comment almost randomly on the IW post again, he’s apparently not done whining.
What is especially disturbing is one of his claims as to why he did the video blogs in the first place – to get more attention for his favorite group. It disturbs me because one of the reasons I do this music blog is to do the same for Morning Musume and other Japanese bands.
The difference is plain: I go about the goal by writing about the music, and writing about it on the same level playing field as any other music I write about. What this Frank dude does… yeesh! It definitely doesn’t have anything to do with the music, far as I can tell. The fact that he has bitched about the lack of attention Perfume and their management gave him says volumes.
Perfume444′s goals, then and now, are selfish. He wants the focus to be around him, not his favorite band, even though he claims otherwise. Perfume and their management apparently know this and, without a doubt, their private policy is described as succinctly as, “Forget that loser.”
I want to see Morning Musume and other groups get a better profile in the States and elsewhere. That’s a rather generous intention. Would I love to meet them? Of course, but I’m not going to go about it the wrong way and it’s not my primary motivation for supporting them and groups like them in this blog – meeting them would be a bonus.
Did Someone Say “Cake”? (Happy 4th Cake Day, International Wota!)
In Honor of International Wota’s FOURTH (holy crap!) anniversary… otherwise known as Cake Day 2011… a little revisit of the first time I commemorated Cake Day at Stuck In A Pagoda in 2008…
“Okashi Tsukutte Okasui” by MiniMoni – their harmonies on this song slay me everytime.
And in the interest of equal time, we also have pie:
And because I’m going to the special hell: I’m sure that in the four years since the first Cake Day, some lucky bastards have been getting a different kind of pie from all four ex-MiniMoni’s – not just Aibon and Nono in the months leading up to the first ever Cake Day! >:)
I Heard You Missed Me, I’m Back…
Those of you on my Twitter account or Facebook page may recall that I announced that I would be resuming posting on here on a more regular basis.
There have been two reasons why things got a bit slow over the past few months. One I am sure you all know of by now: I got married back in June. As a result of that, my first few weeks as a newlywed were spent getting used to living with someone else in a new place – and that was after a week of honeymooning to boot.
The other development kinda goes with the above territory, but is also a reason for the slowness of posts since the beginning of the year. I have been working whenever I can on my novel manuscript for Here Is The Wonderland and whenever I have sat down with this computer I have often tried to devote as much creative energy to that project, at the expense of this blog.
Simply put, what is going to be going on from here on out is this: When I moved my blogging activities I stated that I wanted to expand the musical reach of my blogging and I don’t fully believe I have accomplished that yet. In stating that, I also want to emphasize that I have no intention of forsaking my devotion to covering punk rock and Japanese pop on here – that will never falter, ever.
That having been said, there’s at least one other post I want to make this week or so that I was meaning to make for a couple of weeks. You’ll most likely know which one it is when it comes up. There may be a couple of catch-up review posts like I did before my wedding, but I’m not completely sure yet. I do know that I want to keep things a bit more current that I have been in the past.
I may also break rank with the main intention of this site – discussing music – when it comes to my writing career, especially as my writing projects hit the completion and submission stages.
Other than that, expect things here to get busier than they ever have been. Thanks for reading this.
And now, a quick update from yours truly…
As some of you may know, I’m getting married on Saturday. A lot of the prep for the ceremony and everything related to it has either been taking my time, energy, or both, and what’s been unintentionally getting kicked to the curb? This blog.And to be honest, much of what energy I have had has been devoted to ongoing work on Here Is The Wonderland and other writing projects.
However, I am not closing TGML or any of its related sites, or letting them stay static.
This week, I’ll be making a few special posts, and then when I get back from my honeymoon next week, I’ll be back at a more active schedule.
Thanks for your patience!
- CJ Marsicano
Happy 4th!
Fourth Blogging Anniversary, that is…
I almost forgot to post something today, but I have a good excuse: Today was also my fiancee’s bridal shower, and guess who had to schlep gifts back and forth in his car? Yep…
I should note that for the past few weeks I’ve been – on top of planning towards the wedding and subsequent move into mine and my wife-to-be’s new apartment – finishing up the novel (yeah, still… but then again if I didn’t have to hold a day job it would have been finished already), working on a screenplay for Script Frenzy, working on a couple of reviews for this blog (they’ll be up this week), and working on my guitar.
And last night, boy, did I work on my guitar… I got this thing (Epiphone Les Paul) a few months ago, but I never changed the strings until last night. Such was my Saturday night:
And to keep things J-pop related, here’s another part of what helped keep me sane, especially today:
Besides, I couldn’t figure how to equal or better the live MoMusu and Stooges clips from last year! But what I can do is (even though I didn’t get this finished until after midnight when the 11th became the 12th) update a list I posted two years ago on my second blogging anniversary at MotokoAoyama.com, which would make this “A List That Took Four Years To Make”:
Continue reading
ON BLOGGING: A Quick Update…
I almost did something here on TGML that I haven’t done since I launched this site, and that’s almost allowed a calendar month to pass without posting something here.
Sorry about that.
My fingers and brain haven’t been idle, and I haven’t not been paying attention to what this blog normally covers. But life has gotten a bit goofy of late – I’ve been trying to get my novel manuscript finished, another old hobby of mine has been adding some inspiration to my life, and as of this writing, my wedding date is less than seven months away. I also had to change computers yet again since I posted last here, which sucks, but I have a better machine at my disposal so I really have no other excuse to not pursue all the projects I need to do, this blog included.
It’s also been a while since I contributed an installment of “Diggin’ in the Crates” to YODC, but I’ll make up for that as well. I’ve only just scratched the surface when it comes to that project.
I have been plotting two little series for this blog and I’ll be attacking both of those throughout December. Stay tuned here and at my Facebook and Twitter pages. Thanks for your patience.
Happy 3rd Blogging Anniversary!
Yeah, I know, some of you are saying, “say what”? Didn’t TGML start up back in August of last year? What’s this “third anniversary” shit?
Well, three years ago, I started blogging seriously at the first version of MotokoAoyama.com in April of 2006. However, the exact start date is lost to the ages thanks to the business ineptitude of a webhost owned by a part-time hair metal oldies band drummer. For whatever reason, I didn’t commemorate the first anniversary of Stuck In A Pagoda, but decided last year to make April 11th the official anniversary to coincide with the day my fiancee and I witnessed seeing Iggy Pop & The Stooges at the Electric Factory on 4.11.07. The clip of the Stooges doing “TV Eye” below was shot two days beforehand in New York City.
And to cover the other half of this blog’s usual musical equation and remain with the live concert theme, a live version of one of the best singles Morning Musume has done (to date) in that same three-year time period. No slouch to the rest of the top notch material the band has done in that time period (“Eago YES Nude”, “Mikan”, “Kanashimi Twilight”, etc.), but the choice was easy because it happens to be the most played Morning Musume song on my iTunes:
I’m going to have to update that list I did last year for a later post.
Dawning Of A New Era
So, what exactly led to me starting over after two and a quarter years at Stuck In A Pagoda?
Well, one of the biggest reasons is the name itself. Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama is a cool title. I used it for a mix CD of traditional Japanese music that I posted at Art of the Mix several years ago, it was the title I semi-facetiously gave my LiveJournal when I started to use it regularly, and it was, for me anyway, a combination of my two biggest musical loves – punk rock and Japanese pop. (The old blog’s title is a parody of a Dickies song from their second LP, replacing the original’s titular heroine [a real-life Los Angeles newscaster] with my favorite Love Hina character.)
But the title has really restricted me of late. There is a lot more music that I want to comment on, and while I have done so in the past (an account of a Bon Jovi stadium concert I was dragged to in 2006 comes to mind), writing about other mainstream music didn’t completely jibe with my loving scrawls about the latest Morning Musume single, my anticipation for the Stooges’ first American tour since 1974, or anything else I normally covered at Stuck In A Pagoda.
In short, I needed to do my usual insanity and then some under a less restrictive name – but for weeks, couldn’t think of any.
And that is when my pre-ordered copy of Berryz Koubou’s Yuke Yuke Monkey Dance arrived and I saw what was written on Miyabi Natsuyaki’s T-shirt. I ran to GoDaddy.com and registered thegroovemusiclife.com before someone else beat me to it. That took five minutes.
Deciding on a design for the blog took longer. It wasn’t until the other day that I found a theme that I liked – so much so that I may be using the design for another new blog that I will debut next week (one even more specific than So Hot She Shits Fire, which will never change as in that case, you can’t really mess with perfection) as well as for the static version of Stuck In A Pagoda sometime later.
So, here’s the basic mission behind The Groove Music Life:
- I’m still going to write about Japanese pop.
- I’m still going to write about punk and alternative rock.
But I’m also going to:
- Write about any other pop or rock music that I choose.
- Continue my exploration of older Japanese musics. (Simply put, The Vinyl Pagoda Project is going to continue, name and all – I’m even going to port the older entries from Stuck In A Pagoda, dates and all, when the next installment goes up late Thursday or early Friday.)
Some other changes:
- Pagoda Video and The Pagoda Five will become Groove Music Video and The Groove Music Five
- No more picking on the Spice Girls and/or Miley Cyrus. I’ve already proved my point.
- There will be more reviews. As a matter of fact, I want to have at least three up before the end of next week.
Some things that will continue on from Stuck In A Pagoda:
- The Morning Musume/J-Pop In America series. I have been plotting further installments in this series since March; other writing activities, including the completion of Here Is The Wonderland, have been taking precedence (and that novel is still a top priority, as is making writing my sole source of income.)
- The LolIdols series, I Can Has J-Pop? (And I welcome ideas for that as well from readers).
…and one thing that might not continue.
- The Pagoda Podcast.
Obviously, the name won’t fit in with this new blog’s expanded vision. But the other, more important reason is, I don’t have the time right now. Putting a podcast together is a pain in the fucking ass, and even though I have a talent for audio editing, I’d rather be using that time to write. I also got no feedback from that second episode, and even though I started to put playlists for two more episodes together, I decided to put the idea of a podcast on hold. Maybe someday I’ll do a new podcast, but as of this writing I don’t see it happening.
So, in short, this little black duck needed a reboot, and this is it.
Now let’s have some fun – I sure intend to.
