I mentioned before that I’m not much of a link collector. That has turned out to be untrue.
Thing is? Unless you follow me on teh Facebookz, you won’t see any of these links, and they all aren’t focused on music.
I’ve expounded elsewhere on why I prefer to share links in a closed system like Facebook than on a public blog like this one — factor: convenience — but in an effort to pad this final stretch of Holidailies entries, I’ll offer some of the links that caught my eye in the last few weeks.
The Decade in Music Genre Hype The Internet really is eroding a sense of mass culture. In order for popular music to be "popular", it needs to grow out of an underground culture before it crosses over, or so my pop studies professor posited back in college. The fact none of these mini-genres coalesced into a mass movement indicates how much the audience is splintering.
40 Years Old, a Musical House Without Walls ECM has always struck me as a label I could get into, but so far, the only ECM album I own is Meredith Monk’s Book of Days. And this label first released music by Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt.
Classical music bucks the trend Could the classical recording industry be the indicator of what will happen to the popular music industry? Smaller labels and artist-run ventures pick up where the major labels have abandoned. This reality is already in place in classical music but still only theorized in popular music.
What’s Your Workout with Nathan Gunn It’s a Flash feature, so deep linking is not possible. (Suck.) The bottom navigation should have a link to Gunn’s profile. Needs more half nekkid pictures.
Rufus picks his gay icons As commented by AfterElton.com, the picks themselves are unsurprising, but their descriptions are hilarious.
The story of the release of Duran Duran’s Rio in the United States is circuitous. If you were a preteen in 1983 — like myself — this story would not reveal itself till the advent of the compact disc.
When I cross-graded my copy of Rio from vinyl (and cassette) to CD in 1992, I was shocked and dismayed by the music that came out of the speakers. It was not the one I spent my junior high school years spinning endlessly.
The arrangements of the side one tracks were thinner, and many of them were shorter. Surely, this mistake was made at the pressing plant? Actually, it wasn’t. (Ed note: And don’t call me Shirley.)
Capitol Records told Duran Duran the album had to be remixed to make it marketable to American audiences. For the CD reissue, the band opted to use the original UK mix instead. Over time, I would get accustomed to the original mixes, but they didn’t hold a candle to the album I studied at great length.
Today, I’m old enough to be a sucker for the reissue market, and yet again, I repurchased Rio, this time with the remixes I know and love.
After years of working in the tech industry, I finally broke down and read that most fashionable of time management tomes, Getting Things Done by David Allen. Spend any amount of time around tech types, and they’ll mention some tool or other used to track their various GTD lists.
I don’t lead as cluttered a life as it seems most of my friends do, so I’ve never felt the compulsion to read Allen’s book. I get things done, and I don’t feel too stressed about it. I’ve read about and heard of GTD so much, I didn’t really learn anything new by the time I did read the book.
Still, I didn’t want to dismiss the concept out of hand. It seems to have a lot of practitioners, and it seems to work. So why not try it out?
As it turns out, GTD has finally gotten me listening to stuff I’ve had on a back-burner for too long a time.
I warned you all at the start of the Holidailies endeavor that I would be writing a bunch of filler entries, if the Japan entries weren’t proof enough. (Although given the focus of the site, those entries weren’t exactly off-topic.)
I usually fill out the following meme every two years, but now that we’re in the final stretch of Holidailies, I figure I may as well get lazy.
Yes, I have a whole bunch of stuff I could be reviewing, but I need a break too, you know?
We’ll get back to the regularly scheduled punditry tomorrow. Perhaps.
Do As Infinity, like many bands, is greater than the sum of its parts. When the duo announced it would break up in 2005, it seemed Do As Infinity had run its course. At the same, it was difficult to picture Van Tomiko and Owatari Ryo in another context.
Owatari’s band, MISSILE INNOVATION, didn’t have much innovation, and Van? Her solo career looks like a lot of bad planning.
First, she springs a solo album, Farewell, in 2006 with no singles to precede it — an odd course of action for a pop star in Japan. Then she releases a series of promising singles that … don’t lead to an album. Rather, she spends two years releasing covers before those singles are collected onto an album.
And the resulting work sounds like … Do As Infinity.
LEO Imai’s major label debut in 2008, FIX NEON, held a lot of promise. Capturing the feel of New Wave without ripping it off wholesale, the album demonstrated Imai’s keen ability to synthesize the essence, not the sound, of a style.
He just sang too many "Oh oh oh"s while doing so.
He’s mitigated the wordless vocalizing on his second major label album, LASER RAIN, while also performing a major upgrade to the music. The music goes deeper into the dance roots of his refracted ’80s sound, dipping into some of the ’70s better moments, while maintaining a foothold in rock.
The opening single, "Synchronize", gets excessive with the Autotune, but with the spare disco bass and the space age effects, he’s more Sam Sparro than Duran Duran.
It’s odd I would actually break this news on Keikaku’s message boards before I would post it here. The reaction is pretty much the same as mine.
The line-up for Japan Nite 2010 has been announced, and it looks like it’s been downsized to one night, from the traditional two. Guess everyone is hurting in this economy.
The headlining act is Chatmonchy, a band of whom I’m not entirely curious. The remaining bands on the line-up represent a cross-section of Japanese rock styles, including one visual act. It’s actually pretty familiar stuff — a garage act, a girl-punk act, a crazy creative act, a best-selling act. It’s actually a bit too familiar.
LEO Imai and MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS aren’t interested?
Slightly tangentially related, but last year’s SXSW favorite, FLiP, is now signed to Sony Music Entertainment and will release its debut single, "Dear Girls", on Feb. 3
I saw this report on Christmas Day, but I’m only getting around to posting it here.
Fuji Fabric lead singer Shimura Masahiko died from yet-unknown illness on Christmas Eve, Bounce.com reports. He was 29 years old. Shimura was the last remaining original member of the band, and he was responsible for all the songwriting. An announcement on the band’s web site states Fuji Fabric’s remaining members will announce later if they will continue. The band’s upcoming performances at RADIO CRAZY and COUNT DOWN JAPAN 09/10 have been canceled.
I’ve been meaning to get Fuji Fabric’s previous album, TEENAGER, and I forgot to pick it up while I was in Japan. Haven’t yet heard CHRONICLE. I’m not the biggest Fuji Fabric fan in the world, but I did like Shimura’s voice. It reminded me of a less-polished, more-charming Kishida Shigeru. He’ll be missed.
One of the best singles Shiina Ringo ever recorded was not recorded by Shiina Ringo.
"Shoujo Robot" was the last single Tomosaka Rie would release before concentrating her attention on acting, leaving her abbreviated music career behind. Despite Tomosaka’s starring role, the three-track release was pure Shiina — part mechanical, part noir, all sophistication and all rock.
Compared to the pop confections of Tomosaka’s preceding albums, "Shoujo Robot" was the protein anomaly, a substantive ear meal.
That was in 2000, when Shiina was still a fairly new but rising commodity and Tomosaka was a burgeoning actress. Nine years have passed, and Shiina has become rock royalty. Back then, Tomosaka was boosting Shiina’s career. This time, it’s the other way around.
For Toridori., Tomosaka’s first album in almost a decade, she’s hooked up with Shiina and her Tokyo Jihen crew, plus members of Clammbon and Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. The difference from her early work is stark.
Utada Hikaru’s 2004 English-language debut, Exodus, came at a transitional time for the singer creatively.
The reliable template she forged in Japan over the course of three albums showed signs of wear, and what works at home risks getting lost in translation abroad. (Although for the multi-national Utada, where is home? And where is abroad?)
So she underwent a drastic sonic makeover, creating a heavy-handed work that bent too far backward to distance itself from what had gone before. Beneath all the sonic sizzle of Exodus was a songwriter reaching the end point of a style.