I think this title is begging for a spanking joke.

It’s really quite ironic.

If you don’t know this by now, Raid and I are big fans of Urata Naoya. We were waiting for the release of his solo album, TURN OVER, for ages. Since it was announced that he’d be working on a solo project, at least.

Somewhere along the way, it went totally wrong, and based on the web reactions (for example, Brett over at Kurayami Monogatari and Noah at stylejapan), there are definitely people out there who love it. Us, on the other hand? We’re not entirely impressed. Or maybe that’s just me. Raid’s the one you want for lines like “OMGAH THIS SUCKS”, after all.

Tell me something I don’t know

I’ve listened to Japanese music for probably 9/10 years now. They didn’t get the brainwashing in too early, but it’s there all the same.

I’ve actively considered myself a fan of various artists for 6/7 years. It’s a bit of a scary thought.

But there are still some things I can’t wrap my head around.

Bet on them or not?

I’ve been informed that I’m pretty lacking as an AAA fan of late, and also because I’ve sort of just left them hanging on this blog. This is apparently not allowed, and justice must be done, especially before their next album comes up.

So let’s go back in time a bit and finish up with the boys-only efforts, before they stopped being an actual boyband and went back to being a boyband with two (possibly 4) girls in it. I’m referring, of course, to the official release, CHOICE IS YOURS.

Sweat Baby, Bang Baby…

 

“…sex is a Texas drought.” I wasn’t entirely sure whether to title this post “Baby Got Bang” or “Baby Go Back”, but then I decided to pay homage to the Bloodhound Gang’s The Animal Song. It’s a song that will always be a classic source of nostalgia (oh, late nights in middle school watching VH1’s Insomnia and late night MTV when it was still about the music), and a karaoke staple.

Sacrilegious though it may be (especially given my past track record), I sort of wish I could say the same about the promotional track off Urata Naoya’s upcoming album. Instead, Baby Bang! feat. SPHERE isn’t likely to head that way anytime soon.

I must give the song its props. It’s a dance track so it’ll make perfect use of Urata’s dancing chops, and based off the group dance shots in the video he’ll have a good performance to show us with this song. It grows on you too, if you haven’t outright decided that you hate it. Urata spends most of the track in a falsetto and his higher range, too, so when SPHERE makes his grand entrance it makes a perfect contrast. All the same, I’m hoping that the rest of the album doesn’t keep him in this area, because it will hurt to listen to within the first three days.

What I can’t stand is the video. It’s just ridiculous. The aforementioned group dance shots work. Urata walking down the empty street towards the camera? Come home to mama, baby (bang!). The solo dance shots with the paint-splattered backgrounds are nice too. But Urata’s solo scenes where he’s in that ridiculously colored hoodie, moving spastically against a metal closed-store grate, with equally horribly-colored lighting… y’know, I love a shot of pop star nipple as much as the next person, but not at the cost of my eyes. No, man, you can not get a kiss. That was just not sexy. SPHERE’s also pretty stupid looking when he’s not walking down the street. Stick with the street, guys, even if there’s an oncoming car. It’s really better for your image.

Even worse are the scenes where he molests a random Caucasian lady. Oh, I’m all for the molesting. It was really rather hot, even if she clearly didn’t think so. I’m just not for the goopy blue paint. What is this, a new form of protection? Thick blue paint will not stop your guy cooties from reaching her. It just makes her look more ugly and less sexually attractive. Actually, when the video started with her, it’d gotten to the point where I’m not even sure she was sexually attractive to begin with. Hell, even Urata has a guilty look as he smears the paint all over her limbs. “I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean to kill your skin cells like this.”

I’m still looking forward to this release, between Urata and the revelation that KURO (of HOME MADE KAZOKU) had a hand in the lyrics of a song, but avex is trying a bit too hard to not remind us that the man is already 26. Or turn him into a male Amuro Namie where we can’t remember he’s 26… and either way, it’s not working.

BEYOND～この曲ノカナタ

If you’re an AAA fan and an astute reader of this blog, you’ll notice that their most recent single hasn’t been mentioned at all. Of course, some people might excuse it because of the promotion of the boys-only mini-album around the same time. Others might bring up that I was on a hiatus (if unannounced) from my ramblings.

For the past month and a half, that most recent single didn’t exist for me. In fact, have a quote from a forum conversation over AAA’s periods for me.

AAA 2005-October 2006 = growing into it. (Let us never bring back Hallelujah’s cornrows, Nissy.)
AAA November 2006-June 2007 = smoking hot and working the “idol” concept.
AAA July 2007-September 2007 = duck-ing. (As in, being like a duck. Not ducking under something. Though they did a lot of that too.)
AAA October 2007-January 2008 = experimental.
AAA February 2008-June 2008 = My fanhood is ashamed.

And that last line? Can all be blamed on BEYOND～カラダノカナタ [BEYOND~KARADA NO KANATA].

Dispersing the MIRAGE.

It has come to my attention that I don’t get to continue calling myself an AAA fan unless I review the MIRAGE single. I assure you the perpetrator was swiftly dealt with, including techniques that involved (but were not limited to) setting rabid dogs after him into a maze of barbed wire and motion-activated flamethrowers. But you know, bodies are pretty incriminating, and I don’t have enough vats of acid to dump them all in, so I decided that I’d have to review the single anyways to shush any further naysayers.

And so, here we are. None of you are going to contest my claim as an AAA fan, yes? Good. On a slightly unrelated note, wow, it’s been a full month since I’ve done a review of any musical release on this blog. I guess I managed to uphold the “ramblings” part of the subtitle.

avex, this isn’t the oasis I was searching for.

Even AAA isn’t above laughing at themselves, at least. Except Chiaki. She’s under contract to be adorable for the camera 24/7.

It wasn’t until I visited the official AAA site and watched the loading screen that it hit me. MIRAGE will be the 17th single. Already?

Granted, the 17th single won’t be released until 2008, but it really hits home the fact that AAA has been releasing ridiculously. Most people, at just over two years into their careers, have 7~10 singles. If we take into account Izayuke Wakataka Gundan 2007, Climax Jump (still their highest selling single despite not making it to their AROUND album), the digital boys-only release, and maybe consider alohAAA! a ridiculously expensive single with a shitload of extra stuff (because all it had was one new song that I can’t even remember the melody too, for avex’s sake); AAA’s rocketed past that. Hell, they’ve rocketed past it even without the stuff avex doesn’t include in their official discography.

I only recovered from my burnout and got around to checking out the video last week. (But I’m still fawning over my 2008 calendar, so I can safely say it’s not because of mental Arashi-dominance.) I don’t have much to say about it – Raid can attest to that – but if there’s one thing I do like, it’s seeing costumes. Unless they don’t work so well with the members. So let’s go over that, shall we? [WARNING. This post becomes ridiculously long, and the screencaps despite the lack of actual PV reviewing don't help. If reading gives you seizures, stop now and go lock yourself away with the TV, pathetic fool.]

If it’s only the boys, …I don’t love it.

Let’s break up the Johnny’s pace for a bit. I haven’t given up my love for AAA yet, and I still very much prefer the group with two girls, yes. (I had the oddest dream last night about that, actually, but this isn’t the journal for that.)

However, even the title of the boys-only winter concert (男だけだと, …こうなりました! / Otoko dake da to, …kou narimashita!/If it’s only the boys, …it became like this! – thanks to Ruri for the correction) seems to be pointing at avex aiming for the boyband crowd with this group. I am, of course, a member of that same crowd. But the group I developed an obsessive fandom for was not 5 guys (that’s the other group whose name starts with “A”. No prizes for guessing who.), it was 7 (formerly eight) talented young people, 2 of whom are girls and probably won’t be getting a gender-change anytime soon. Oh, please no.

Between that and an admittedly drastic shift in my listening patterns (for the past two weeks I haven’t been able to listen to anything other than Johnny’s songs), it took me a while to get around to it, but I finally bought AAA’s four boys-only digital tracks from mu-mo today. Okay, so a week isn’t that much of a while, but it took me that long to realize I didn’t have to find an iTunes Japan gift card or wait for it to be released on a disc. Shuddup.

Happy Birthday, Urata!

…gee, you didn’t think I was trying to post every day this week for the hell of it, did you?

So now it is past midnight where I am, and it is both the day of one Urata Naoya’s birth here and in Japan.

Happy 25th, oyaji. Congratulations, you’re back to being 5 years older than me, and another year closer to a midlife crisis.

My “heart-felt” message popped up on the ATTACK’d ALL AROUND forums the instant it turned midnight in Japan already, but the Cliff Notes’ version: I can’t tell you why I love him, I don’t want to because that may mean I love him more than anyone else who’s not in a direct relationship with him. (You are welcome to shoot me now.)

Also that I’m going to continue to support him and wish him all the best. DUH.

In the grand tradition of Santos-san, I went and got a cake to celebrate!

Yes, it’s just a slice. I hope you didn’t think I was going to eat a whole cake by myself?

Here’s to many more months of fangirling to come. ♥

When Substitution leads to Subtraction.

First things first. KAT-TUN sucks because they’re not shiny enough.

[Okay, onto the real post.]

“There has been a substitution of AAA for Hello!Project and Johnny’s in this fandom (but I’m not quite sure how I want to react to it).” – Kimitsu, completely mangling a Vinton Cerf quote.

Though news from and rumors about AAA releases have been trickling a bit more steadily of late, it can’t be denied. After the massive post-Otakon hype, AAA quieted down for a while and so has the fandom. Can you blame us? We hated it, but we thrived off the constant releases, the endless ATTACKs, and the blog posts.

And then suddenly it all stopped. Considering the next AAA release apparently won’t be until in January, the tour in 2008 won’t be an ATTACK, the blog has vanished into oblivion (we get our AAA hits from when Hidaka posts in the Mother Ninja blog now), and that it was almost two months before we heard any of this; I mean it stopped.

Of course, fandom never dies, it only shifts. (Once obsessive about something, always obsessive about something, albeit not the same thing.) And so a lot of the longer AAA fans are heading to the next closest thing: Johnny’s, H!P, and a few who drift towards the three boys of w-inds..

Unfortunately, I’m a victim of this too. I’ve generally kept an eye on NEWS, but my laptop’s hard drive currently has more space allocated to Arashi than AAA. (So if any JPop fans have felt something unbalanced in “The Force”, that’s probably what it is. The midi-chlorians don’t run so strong within my laptop now.) But between the hype over NEWS’s double-release, and how almost all the current JE groups are or will be crashing releases upon us in these coming two months, it’s just a lot easier to pay attention to them if you need a pretty boy fix. And of course, we can’t forget AAA is a boy AND girl unit. Even with its decline, Morning Musume remains the definitive girl group of Japan, and H!P has its share of AAA fans. You people know who you are. Leave me alone in my corner, ‘kay? I’ve had one non-fan card ripped up already, let’s save the others for the next year.

(By the way, between “w-inds..” and “NEWS’s”, I’m pretty sure I’m making English majors wince. Blame the companies who name them.)

And what is avex going to do about this? For all our complaints, AAA was defined by two things – members being both male and female in the age of pop scandals, and their constant release activity. The latter has stopped, and it seems like in an effort to drum up more interest and popularity in Japan, avex may be looking into developing the male-only aspect of the group.

…wake up, avex. You can take away the blogs, you can take away the “ATTACK”s, you can take away my money. You don’t take away the girls. That’s when AAA stops being AAA and becomes another Johnny’s imitation. Likewise, you don’t take the boys away from the girls – Chiaki and Misako are talented in their own rights and deserve to be more than just expansion packs to a boyband. (So I was playing video games while writing this post, leave me alone.)

But this leaves me wondering what will happen to the AAA fandom. Most fans were already also fans of Johnny’s or H!P prior to AAA’s debut, and the new recruits seem more than happy to eat up the more substantial offerings from the two pop group superpowers without ever looking back. Meanwhile, the newer AAA fans, for whom the novelty has yet to wear off, all seem to be in the same line – either trying very hard to unnecessarily prove that they love the group every bit as much as the ones that came before; or being discontent with the jadedness of the older fans. There is no unity in the fandom anymore.

AAA, where has the love gone? Yeah, yeah, I know. To greener and more active pastures. So you guys enjoy your time in the sun, but avex, can we finish with winter here already?

About that statement at the very beginning of this post: In my currently not-so-humble opinion, they do, but mostly it was flamebait to see whether or not JE fangirls actually read. Not to worry – I have fire extinguishers aplenty… as soon as I can figure out how to work them.