The Doug behind the blog. American expat living in Belgium. Semi-retired librarian. Loves horror, cats, tea. Probably not in that order.
I apparently skipped the 700 Day mark so the previous 600 Day post would be my last check in. I feel like the subsequent 200 days have involved a lot more books than the previous 100 days.
I feel well-read for 2026 at this point.
Summer heat this past month has slowed me down a fair bit but the itch to ramp back up has been brewing again.
Tonight, though, I am going to watching horror movies and then read some more of the Tales from the Gas Station series.
It is dumb hot in Belgium today and I’m ready to sit down with an iced tea in front of a fan and watch TV with Kaz so I’ll keep this pretty quick. The final entry in the Brandy Senki week of MVP is “No More!“:
I’ve been pretty sure I was going to end with this one from the beginning but as I went through each of the other posts I realized it was increasingly fitting. We’ve seen the heartbreak of goodbye with “Last Live,” the fear of growing up with “Coming of Age Story,” and multiple takes on toxic love but “No More!” stands out as a video where the band says, well, no more.
Now, how well the “won’t look back” of the lyrics will actually stick…
…we’ll see whenever they get around to writing a second album or new EP but for now I want to choose to believe it.
For at least this moment, Brandy Senki is taking full control of their destiny and hopefully are having fun doing it.
You also get an entire Instagram Reel of photos flashing by a light speed. You can slow it down if you want to see them but sometimes its fun to just let your brain pick things out over a few watches.
Next week will be another Band Week and yes I know which one, but let’s see which one it is next Monday.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
It was a pretty tight toss-up between this one and “The End of the F***ing World” but ultimately the penultimate video for this week is Brandy Senki’s “27:00”:
Fun fact, this might have been the first video of theirs I put into any sort of playlist. It’s the only one in the “old” music playlist, I think, before sorting it out this year to be more like an archive with an more active “current music video playlist” on top.
Moving on, this one beat out “End of F***ing World” — which is good, too — because the “ooo ee oo oo aa ee aa aa” hook is damned infectious and because it has a bat puppet and bat puppets always win.
While both videos are snippets from dark urban tales (one retro to the early 90s/00s, the other more the diner era), both songs talk about relationships as a kind of nightmare. Not necessarily one from which you want to escape, but ones that definitely haunt you. On good days, in good ways. On others, maybe most days, maybe not so much.
In both, there is a fragility in strength in the central voice. She declares she will be strong enough to withstand a terrible relationship and perhaps strong enough to leave.
As an older man from a part of the world where terrible relationships are the norm, I vote leave.
Funnily enough, there is another song, “Nightmare-ish“, which by title and by lyrics fits right along with the vibe of these two. In fact, the lyrics more directly reference horror themes. The video, however, is absolutely chill.
One more video. Three (maybe four) strong candidates. Which one will make it to round out Brandy Senki week? Which band is next!?
TUNE IN!
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
I’m already on day 3 (of 5, no way I’ll wrap this up sooner for this band) and could almost stretch this out for every video in their catalog but will lock down just a bit. So, for today, let’s do “Box of Stockholm“:
For a couple of reasons. 1: It is perhaps the most aesthetically different of their videos. 2: It comes pretty close to telling a cohesive story. The video and the song.
You do get a bit of storytelling with “Tears Falling into Red Wine” but knowing as I do what the final pick will be, this one hits a little more roughly and shows just a bit of immaturity in the structure in which I mean as a compliment. Some songs are better when they stray.
With lyrics like… (translated)
He gives me bread
I confirm his love
Hostage negotiator
Don’t interfere now
…the mind starts to wonder if this is just a playful punk song about being held hostage and undergoing Stockholm Syndrome? Or is it about a relationship in general?
Or, with lines like…
Let me play the victim
Sincerity is an impurity
The tragic heroine in a novel
I’m sure she’s pretty
I want to die for art
…is it maybe a tongue in cheek discussion of being a tragic artist in general, starving for your art?
It’s fun, depressing, and slightly frayed. With what I think is the only shootout in a Brandy Senki video.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
Have you ever been bothered by something which might not exist but also probably does? Something that is out there, perhaps intangibly, but its inchoate presence is felt like a fear more than actually touched?
An asteroid drifting through space an AU away. Undoubtedly there, but maybe just never here?
I have a similar feel to the collective responses and comments across online forums, social media, and more or less any place with open comments.
This post is directly in response to a couple of crowdfunding campaigns I backed early last year which have this year run into delays largely due to variances in the whole global shipping market (especially for smaller creators). A fair percentage of the comments are relatively positive or positively constructive, maybe asking for a refund due to the delay.
Just, there are a lot that are oddly…passionate. I’m talking about, “This is your last warning, you will SEND ME MY BOOKS!,” type stuff. Sometimes across multiple paragraphs. This is the stuff publicly posted so I can only imagine the personal emails and such are worse. Saw a couple of exchanges where people went back a bit later to apologize for some of the things they said, but then there were newer comments where these delayed shippings were deeply emotional troubling to the commenter.
I get it, I really do, but delayed shipping due to 2025/2026 is not exactly a personal attack. Few things are. If there is one thing I need you to take away from this post, it is this:
The content creator most likely does not know you and despite the constant drive to content consumers towards parasocial relationships1, virtually (even absolutely) nothing the creators do is aimed at YOU personally. Fact is, one step towards happiness is realizing how few people actually even know you exist. Start with those people.
It is also just a broad response to why I can’t quite stand getting back into any social circle on the internet as a whole for long.
This is not a new phenomenon. “Don’t read the comments!,” has been internet wisdom longer than many current internet users have been alive. Back 10-20 years ago I had multiple scripts and style overrides in place to essentially hide every comment section on every site I regularly visited.
It just also feels worse. There’s a flavor there that I cannot fully place or identify. But it bothers me.
Years ago, maybe decades ago now, there was a comment/forum section for AL.com2 where posts were strangely deranged and strangely off-topic. A collection of ego-centric diatribes in which virtually any topic was an assault on their particular self and way of life. Museum having a new exhibition? Dozens of rants about how art erodes the community while eating up valuable taxpayer dollars and also their nephew saw a painting of a fish that was aesthetically unpleasing. Which might turn into a debate about best fishing spots and how BamaKid033 is mentally broken if he likes fishing on X River. New fried chicken restaurant? THEY are destroying property values in good Christian neighborhoods. Space and Rocket Museum getting a grant to help preserve some of their exhibits? I kid you not, the end of all goodness as we know it. This last one happened a few times.
It has been some time since those were in existence so I am just taking some broad swipes but, Space Pilgrims, I need you to understand they are only gently broad. I just dialed them up a tiny bit for effect (and also dialed down for palatability).3 These were regular commenters. Racist. Deeply political (especially, on AL.com, to the right-wing side). Paranoid. Snarky. You can tell they thought they were funny when posting it. Starting from an immediate stance of aggression and personal attacks. Simultaneously painting the commenter as both the victim and also the powerhouse of the known universe. “You will listen to me! I am tired of being used!”
Maybe now that I’m largely off social media and largely in my own sphere doing IRL projects it feels worse than it is, but it feels to me like the AL.com comment section has taken over the internet.
OR, to use a different but similarly timed example, remember how Rebecca Black and her mom paid money to make a fun video where it was just a bunch of kids having a blast being in a music video? And the internet decided that because they could see it that the video was somehow forced on them and people, including somewhat reputable musical journalists, felt the stupid need to comment on it? To attack children for a video that should have been seen by a few dozen people and be a fun, core memory?
The hatred towards Rebecca Black’s “Friday” should be studied as one of the dumbest moments in internet history and a lesson we absolutely did not learn.
I really don’t think the human race has caught up to the fact that the internet is by and large voluntary. I’m not sure, at this point, if we ever will.
I saw a video this past week where a person who posts regular videos-of-the-day to talk about fun topics — in other words, using Youtube kind of like it was first and for a long time used — just was discussing an odd thing he read on Reddit and there were multiple comments where people were angry about the existence of the video. It felt like the presence of that video in their subscription feed was an affront to them.
Find any article that is slightly negative — about veganism, Doctor Who, whatever, pick a topic — and then people coming out to comment in a kind of hateful, snarky tone is not precisely unexpected. Studies have shown how people are drawn to negativity in social media and online discourse. It is just the vibe feels… well, it’s a vibe.
Paranoid. Self-obsessed. Angry. Lacking thoughtfulness. Lacking respect. Personally wronged. Gleefully antagonistic. Raging against the dying of the light (which might not ever have existed, another fake fall from Eden). Victim and aggressor. And, perhaps most annoyingly, utterly convinced that a slightly humorous, snarky tone is the exact way to make them sound sane. Why is it always posted in a faux-humorous tone? Did Vine and X break us? That short form commentary must be cute and funny? Hell if I know.
To put it in another way, it is like we have regressed as a digital society. Because we are on our phones on our own couch, maybe we think the internet has come to our living rooms rather than us going to it? A generation of people being fed by food delivery drivers complaining about the decor of restaurants. A generation waiting for the AI bubble to pop and spending hours each day creating AI art to pass the time out of fear of boredom.
“We drove to the gym…” only it’s everything, everywhere. All at once, even.
You blend this with rampant positivity on the “other side” and it is maddening. Of course both being couched in various oft-repeated phrases that have been The Algorithm™ approved. Generally without personality.
Four blue hearts in a line or death threats with nothing in between. Where “mid” and “average” are active insults.
“Ahh gurl energy got me feeling some way…,” fucking indeed.
THEN, Space Pilgrims, then we add in the bots…
The second entry in my MVP Brandy Senki week is probably the song I think of the most if I just think of the band.
It’s called “Coming of Age Story”:
That musical shift right past the 1 minute mark is like…love poetry for the ears and brain. Thank you for writing those notes in that order.
The Nathalie Scarlette directed music video is a perfect exemplar of that not precisely uncommon trope: the imperfect memory of youth’s faux perfections. A nostalgia bait video about the kind of day that some people might have had but in general never fits into our actual experiences. A glory just out of reach. A self-lie.
This childlike need to return to an Eden from which we never fell informs so much of our literature and music that we barely noticed that a multi-billion dollar algorithmic industry grew out of the desire to profit off our false impressions of loss.
There is a stage in our life when we look back upon our youth and we judge our present on our past and it is not uncommon for us to realize we had been holding on to something not only not there but also somewhat never was.
Which is not to say they do not have some grains of truth. Stupid days with friends were magical. It is simply that the magic covers up all the flaws and downtimes and stupid fights and the rest.
The lyrics encapsulate this mood shift (note: English language taken from the Youtube video)…
This is the worst
I’m not good at coming-of-age story
Even though I’m still here in this story
I felt the agony of teenagers that’s left behind
Can’t be hasty
Can’t be hasty
The pain I was exposed to
is ignored and just turned into sound
I think it’s my last chance
I just want to see something beautiful
Please
drift into later on…
It just ends while I’m still sitting down
This day
Gradually these feelings turns to lies
Can’t understand each other anymore
Are you angry?
Before she repeats that just wants to see something beautiful.
I think a lot of us feel those moments. In some ways, social media and the way it traps us in our old pictures and old videos and old posts make it worse. We lose that bit of ourself that was right there in that “coming of age story” and see it replaced with the social-version that was never us. More “perfect” and more “planned” but absolutely never quite as beautiful.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
Now that I’ve done sort of an introductory week and then a week-of-premieres, I figure it might be best to take a few weeks (with some “interruptions”) and just spend 3-5 days each week showcasing certain core bands via a few music videos that I think exemplify them. By the nature of the beast, this does not necessarily translate to “their best songs ever” since good music and good music videos sometimes part, but we’ll make do…
Here is one of my favorite bands of the past decade and what I think is the first song I ever heard by them, Brandy Senki’s “Last Live”:
It is a delightful song and the video features beautiful young people having lots of fun and that is a really great way to make a music video. It is a whole mood.
There’s also a fun Behind the Scenes//Making of… that shows off more of it and has some nice clips with Nathalie Scarlette (who has now directed at least a small handful of their videos).
I’m not 100% sure the lyrics make any sense [they have English subtitles among others] but like, just enjoy the nose dimples, rainbow motifs, and hair flips.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
Before we get into it, today’s musical mood is wowdow.
That out of the way, in my latest MVP post, I talked about how transformative it can be to have lyrics to song readily available. Not just in songs not in your native language (or at least not in a language you know by heart) but also in music where you know what is being said.
That connection to how the tongue and lungs combines with string and drum, eh?
In that light, I have begun a rather LONG project where I will take a large number of songs in my library and get lyrics for them so that my phone which is ever digital device in the world besides a device I use to call people can add “karaoke machine” to its resume.
My tool of choice (and also my tool of choice to play music on my PC) is foobar2000 with the OpenLyrics component installed (and set up as a panel). Note: in my settings I set it to prioritize getting lyrics from LibLRC and NetEase with Genius being the main back-up. Others might get better results from others.
With that in place, around half of my lyric containing music — probably half the music in my collection doesn’t actually contain lyrics, at least not significant lyrics, I have a lot of ambient, drone, soundtrack, and experimental music — is simple as selecting a bunch of songs → right click → OpenLyrics → Search for Lyrics → wait. Then, going back and making sure it’s a) the right song and b) actually synced.
Working on Durry’s catalog, yesterday, I ended up having to sync maybe four of their songs. With Paloma Murphy, it was around half her album (and syncing somewhat fast moving Spanish did take a couple of goes).
And this is assuming I ever want the lyrics for the songs. There are a good number of albums where I would consider having lyrics to be relatively trivial. Stuff that I like to have in “Doug Core” type mega-playlists but where I might never again play the song in a way where I am actively wanting to glance at the lyrics on a screen. What percentage that is? I don’t know.
However, there are some albums and songs where it is not that easy. And how not-easy it is can be variable.
I would say most tend to be around fourth or fifth bullet point.
But let’s take a look at an easier one. mM7th’s “Growth” is a good example that shows one of the other “micro-problems.” For getting quite a bit of Japanese (etc) music, you are going to need to know the non-International release name (i.e., you need to know what the song is called in its home country). “Growth” = 「踵」. Sometimes this is easy to find. Sometimes shockingly not where even local shops — those with an online presence, anyhow — will have international titles.
Once you have the lyrics, you have something that looks like this
[00:12.80]心ということを持って生まれた
[00:20.03]事のほか冷たい春であった
[00:26.55]教えておくれよ、パスカル
[00:33.59]よくを覚えた私のごうを
[00:40.14]さらばの声で夜を超えて
[00:46.37]みょうね、私は言葉を話せぬのに
[00:54.41]まだここで息をしてるの
[01:00.88]みちくさよ かぜのねよ 目をあけて見て
And, in this song’s case, the band has provided an English translation:
I was born with something called a heart
It was exceptionally cold spring
Tell me, Pascal
about the badness in me, now that I’ve learned to want things
Past the night saying goodbye
How funny, I can’t even speak with words
yet I’m still breathing here
little weeds, little sound of the wind,
open your eyes and look at me
The first three lines match up but then the next four lines of Japanese are written out as five in English. In cases like this, it can be helpful to let Google Translate butcher it…
[00:12.80] I was born with a heart
[00:20.03] It was an unusually cold spring
[00:26.55] Tell me, Pascal
[00:33.59] My voice that I have learned to love
[00:40.14] I cross the night with a voice of farewell
[00:46.37] It's strange, I can't speak
[00:54.41] But I'm still breathing here
[01:00.88] Take a detour, let the wind sleep, open your eyes and look
The first three are really close. Lines #5-#7 match up well. Lines #4 & #8 are at definite odds, with #3 being the most egregious.
Because of that, I never lose the original language version and I make sure it stays part of the file.
NOTE: Some videos have an English translation uploaded into a synced file. That can be realllly helpful.
Anyhow, in this case my step is to take Google’s rough translation and then use it as a skeleton to sync up the official lyrics:
[00:12.80]心ということを持って生まれた
[00:12.80] I was born with something called a heart
[00:20.03]事のほか冷たい春であった[00:20.03] It was exceptionally cold spring[00:26.55]教えておくれよ、パスカル[00:26.55] ,Tell me, Pascal
[00:33.59]よくを覚えた私のごうを[00:33.59] About the badness in me, now that I’ve learned to want things
[00:40.14]さらばの声で夜を超えて
[00:40.14] Past the night saying goodbye[00:46.37]みょうね、私は言葉を話せぬのに[00:46.37] How funny, I can’t even speak with words
[00:54.41]まだここで息をしてるの[00:54.41] Yet I’m still breathing here
[01:00.88]みちくさよ かぜのねよ 目をあけて見て[01:00.88] Little weeds, little sound of the wind,
open your eyes and look at me
There is the twist that I haven’t 100% gone back to make sure that those ARE the right Japanese lyrics but, you know, pfffffffft for the moment. I’m just going to have to trust my fellow humans.
No clue. When I first started it was chunky going. It could take 2-3 hours to get through an album and feel good about the result (well, at least assuming some work was required, not the “freebies”). Yesterday I got through something like 10 albums over four or five hours.
I don’t want to spend four or five hours a day doing this, though, so I figure I’ll get to where I can crank out an entire album in about half an hour and then aim for maybe two of those, plus a couple “freebies” per day.
Still, easily a few months. Focusing on new (to me) songs and the old standards, though, will help.
In the previous entry, I talked a bit about how I’ve been a fan of various Japanese pop and rock acts for years but it was relatively recently that I got this into it [largely by the way of the more indie/alt side of things].
Before I continue, let’s show some love to Necry Talkie (and their new song, “Extra Things”):
The whole Smoke & Blue EP is worth listening to if you like that one.
In this song, you get this lyric:
苦手なことならさ、いくらでも見つかるのにまるで平気なフリばかり上手くてそれは、それは
Which (most likely quite roughly) translates to:
“I can find countless things I’m bad at, but I’m so good at pretending to be okay with them. That’s just…”
And it’s that crossroads between the energy of their music and the introspection of their lyrics that got me into Necry Talkie and brings me back time and time again to listen to them.
My first song by them was “You Should Head North” and at the time I was just a little bit amazed they had English subtitles right in the interface. “They” being either the band or Youtube or whoever provided them. I don’t think I was used to that experience.
And that was a game changer, because I am decently guilty of what David Grohl said: “Most white people dance to the lyrics” (around the 33 second mark). I appreciate there is a whole gaggle of folks who speak not a lick of Japanese who jam out to Top 50 J-Pop countdowns on the reg by sheer vibes1, but it also is an aspect that held me back a little.
There were essentially two bands — you will be both shocked and awed to see that I’m about to list The Pillows and Do As Infinity, again — whose music I listened to enough that I went out of my way to find lyrics for…and sometimes made super awful attempts at translations. For a lot of bands and songs, there was a lot of just vibes and beats. I was doing the song equivalent of reading a book entirely by looking at the cover.
Sure, I did not need to know precise lyrics to know The Pillows’ “Thank You, My Twilight” to appreciate it but I also liked knowing what was being sung, you know? Like, listen to it and then go back and listen to it while reading the lyrics. Even if you can listen to Japanese without aid, just having the rhythm of the syllables pulled out helps. The vibe is not deeply buried by any stretch, but it’s nice to have that deeper connection.
Also, holy shit, finding that video to link is how I found out that the drummer, Sato, died earlier this year. Christ I’m about to openly weep for a moment, ok? And then get back to writing. Just keep in mind that the rest of this post will be while I’m playing The Pillows’ last couple of albums in the background and wiping tears.
Ok, I’ve recovered a bit. I already mentioned frederic’s “oddloop” and it was interesting finding that and not really needing to know the meaning in the way it wasn’t necessary to know a precise translation of Mika’s “Elle Me Dit”…but it helped. Those songs are bops. Fun just for the audiovisuals. Even then…
This is why Necry Talkie was an important band for me to discover because their videos like “Tangled” and “The Girl Who Hates Music” and, a personal favorite, “Kininatteiku” kept me coming back for the audiovisual but also the lyrical experience. The ironic contrasts to facing, overcoming, and being overcome by various issues just fit a spot in my heart where music needed to fit.
It was the lyrics of “You Should Head North” that made me fall in love with the band. I’ve seen picked up a regular rotation of bands across a half dozen languages and its fun to have a connection across that “barrier”.2
The Algorithm has its upsides.
Anyhow, I think I was going somewhere with this but I’ll wrap up with saying “Thank you, Necry Talkie” for being one of those signposts that got me into music and helped inspire to keep reading deeper into what lyrics are on the page. This white boy is dancing to lyrics, again.
Back to jamming out to Rebroadcast and Nook in the Brain while I cry some more tears.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
It is later than I intended to be up while writing this, so it will be briefer, but first let’s have today’s Music Video Pick (#12!), Ado’s “Monstruo”:
It’s a very bombastic song. I like it. There’s not really anything by Ado I haven’t liked. I own something like four concert blu-rays by her. Have merch. You get the idea.
There was another band who released a song yesterday that was a potential for the slot but they will be tomorrow because I wanted both of them to get spotlight near one another.
Technically in the wrong order, but we’ll get to that.
It is probably pretty obvious that, so far, all the songs in the Music Video Pick series have been Japanese. It’s not precisely intentional. Just a side effect of me being really into a particular flavor of Indie/Alt-Rock at the moment and that flavor being represented, essentially, by Japanese artists and by folks featured on the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack. Also hey, nothing and generally I would put a few others but you get the idea without spoiling the joke.
The odd thing is that despite being a pretty massive tokusatsu nerd for years, I’ve not really done a whole lot of listening to Japanese music outside of a few bursts. The Pillows were absolutely influential in my overall musical tastes. On par with Rush and Smashing Pumpkins, really. Moreso than Nirvana. Maybe behind the Pixies but we are splitting hairs.
I was pretty obsessed with Do As Infinity through the first three albums. I had a Nana Kitade greatest hit album. Utada Hikaru. Sheena Ringo. Jammed out to those two pretty hard. Ringo was a primary inspiration for a character in my solo RPG playthroughs. She stuck with me. I still listen to all these bands, but we are starting to hit the edge of fandom pretty fast. I had a single EP of Asian Kung Fu generation. An album by Rip Slyme and maybe two by Orange Range. I had an album by Beat Crusaders and not the one with “Hit in the USA” on it. I went to a Dir En Grey concert. I actually ordered direct-from-Japan multiple deeply experimental albums. Kenji Siratori and such. I used to be into a lot stranger variety of music, let’s just say.
Stuff that featured on some Kamen Rider openings got picked up here or there. Especially in the Kamen Rider W/OOO-eras and after. Not consistently, though.
Back in my heavier Spotify days, the only Japanese music on my playlists that wasn’t from something toku related was frederic’s “Oddloop” and Superfly’s “Kakusei.” And The Pillows. Whole albums by them. There was various bits from Kenji Ito and other game composers, as well. I added a Scandal video to my Youtube music video playlist somewhere in this era and liked a few others.
Then a couple of years after “Oddloop” there was some stuff like Mondo Grosso. Kana Boon. I got my first taste of Majiko (through someone making video which used it, kind of a fake music video type thing). Leo Ieri, though I never knew her by name, she just showed up and at some point I subscribed. Ueda Marie is also in this era for me though like Ieri it took me this most recent resurgence to really start recognizing her.
Time and time again I listened to some music from Japan, generally stuff a bit more in the Pop-Rock range, but nothing quite like The Pillows. Either in style or in just the intensity of how much it actually stuck with me.
Then there was Necry Talkie, which fired off an entire wave of Youtube flinging Japanese Pop and Rock music at me which I think made it all the way into the early-ish days of Hitsujibungaku (pre-“More Than Words” or it might have stuck a LOT harder, that track absolutely slaps).
Necry Talkie is tomorrow, though. Today we are going to fast forward up to just a couple of years ago, when I got into Ado. Because I first I absolutely did not get into Ado. She was another artist that showed up from time to time in playlists and recommendations.
I came across a song or two by her. There was her collab with Imagine Dragons. With that I saw how passionate her fans were (and still are) and based on their passion, picked up a couple of albums by her. But didn’t quite listen to them, yet. I played them in the background or put them in a massive collection of “play these, sometime.”
Then, bit by bit, I started paying attention. “Lucky Bruto” and “Readymade” got stuck in my head. “Ibara” and “The Show”. I started watching clips of her playing live.
I think it was around the time I sat down and just listened to “Elf” that whatever slight roadblock had kept me from appreciating her completely cleared. This was the build up to Ado’s Best Adobum. By the time we moved to Belgium (sadly, it was something like 2-weeks after she played here in Brussels) that album was my primary music disk. The Pillows level of being replayed.
I listened to something off that album essentially once a day. Every day (or, as we say in Flanders: elke dag). At some point I started picking up physical albums and getting concert disks and all that. Dandadan and Creepy Nuts would have also been around this time and hooo boy, that was another deep dive for me. I had already heard, and enjoyed, MindaRyn’s “Black Star” (linked because of those glasses, hot dang) but I her second full album was out also around this time.
And the way Youtube works, once I started consistently playing a couple/three artists singing in the Japanese language then it decides I am a complete and total weeb and 90% of the music recommends need to be from Japan.
It’s ok. Shortly after that I got back into Necry Talkie. I got re-introduced to Majiko — with apologies to the “Adomination” types, Majiko is my preferred solo female singer…like, most preferred across all languages I’d say, though Ado, Pommelian Thijs, and Paloma Morphy are all close behind — and even some old “music flames” like Sheena Ringo. I’ve never really stopped being into Do As Infinity. I possibly should buy higher quality versions because I’m pretty sure I’ve been using the same 128bit MP3s for years.
More importantly, in my eyes, I started getting the kind of Japanese music that would not have been shown to me a few years back. Stuff like Crazy Blues and tiny yawn. Stuff like Monthly Shonen Irony. Muque I think would have gotten there. And thank all the gods for Brandy Senki and 171 getting in front of my eyes. Yorushika was another one that I’m sure I would have gotten along the way, and likely did before I clocked who they were, but am also realllly glad to have heard them.
What I am saying is that pretty much every artist on this list is because of that weird frederic to Necry Talkie to Ado pipe line and the way those three clusters of music (around 3-4 years apart) brought in other artist that seeded my liked videos, Spotify playlists, and music video playlists. Spotify has been gone for a year, now, and I mostly buy stuff and then just play it off my own devices rather than rely on streaming services, but I like being exposed to the new.
Also, I am getting a lot of acts that only have a few hundred views (regularly under 2k) and that is a bit interesting but I am starting to fill up on all the new music I can even mentally conceive. Fun, though.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
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