I drunk a glass of water and all this got way more disturbing ngl

Album Rating: 2.5

the tinnitus heard round the world

Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off

it's a lyrical thing in the context of social norms; the short end is that the way she represents herself is unorthodox and raw/chaotic/unpolished in a way that's significant for a majorish pop artist, ultimately cogent with that vocal style, and v much at odds with traditional japanese artists, particularly as a woman. any of you can do your own reading on japanese society or oomori seiko lyrics, but i have a world of respect for the way she expresses herself across her work and, p much the only red line i have on any artist, i will not stand to see her voice as an artist reduced to superficial vocal criticisms, however well-intentioned or language-barred they may be

this thread is henceforth a colton-free zone

Album Rating: 2.5

reading into it certainly gives me more respect for her, even if i don't understand exactly what molds she's breaking bc i lack cultural context aside from certain gender molds



the whole "idol" culture seems weird to me in general. from my perspective it's just the japanese version of that they're doing with k-pop bands or singular pop stars in the west, where some company successfully creates the media equivalent of a cult of personality of fans around some plastic-looking singer. the biggest difference is that it's preying on japan's burgeoning population of lonely virgins rather than directionless teens



am i somewhat correct or does this perspective also lack nuance?

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sorry lol i fell very deeply asleep and have been busy-ish at work all day. you are p much right about the general shape of the j-idol industry and how it operates; v manufactured and often unsavoury. the one aspect in which i prefer it to western names with pisstake numbers of songwriting credits on their tracks like britney or avril is that it's treated as entirely different institution to the pro music biz; idols are not viewed as musicians, but as a different kind of entertainer-persona, whether that's an adorable cult of personality thing or manufactured whateverness.

seiko fits in because she has a strong love for idols and that whole relationship-with-public-personality schtick that the industry caters to, but absolutely no time for the business model or paradigm of the greasy man orchestrating everything from the wings. she sets a p significant precedent on an industry level, in that she runs her own, decently successful idol group without a controlling producer-manager presence and is a judge on an all-women talent show for alternative role models that directly feeds fringe idol groups. if all this had capital in western pop culture, we'd probably call it 'reclaiming idol' or whatever

this ties into her solo work because her background is thoroughly pro-musician, but parts of her style (esp her vocals) appropriate idol norms in a way that shakes off that culture's constrictions and simply live whatever truths (or otherwise) she throws into them. when i was first checking her lyrics, i found it confusing and often challenging to find her voice in them outside of a contradictory flair, like she was living out a whole range of liberally interrelated selves and experiences from track to track, all of which were intense, personally charged, sometimes performative, and often confrontational in a very gendered way. best examples of individual songs are probably "pink" and "shinigami", both of which have decent translations online.

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i think this is very important coming from a japanese perspective for reasons that can sortof be understood from a western one - we have a singer-songwriter tradition that supposedly affords generous artistic license and self-distance within narratorial voices, but is often applied to women with incredulity - look at how some of pj harvey's clearly fictional '90s work was met with autobiographical speculation, while stuff that, say, nick cave was releasing at the same time was not. this is even more the case for women in japan, where you're basically encouraged to have a single public self and voice, which is then all but erased by virtue of being the same as everyone else's.

seiko airs different parts of typically non-public selves in a way that's very much at odds with the uncontroversial model that most japanese female songwriters are largely confined to. there are precedents (jun togawa comes up a lot), but i haven't heard anyone else contemporary do this so prolifically, with such strong songwriting, or with such a keen sense of which aspects of the mainstream to draw from. i think it's incredibly powerful to hear someone tear that culture apart so willfully while drawing on specific elements that typically fuels it, and to that end i think it's totally cogent for her musical vocabulary to be thoroughly pop but for her voice to be resolutely unpolished.

that does not mean there's any imperative for anyone to like it, but this is why i feel so strongly about it being reduced to a dodgy set of vocal chords tuned to a language virtually no-one speaks behind a mic in a foreign market. i also hope you don't feel specifically @'d by any of this - there's no reason any of it would be obvious to anyone without q a specific interest in j-pop, and i definitely struggled with her voice for my first few spins of sennou. only reason i got into her so much was that album's flashiness and a gut reaction there was something special goin down

Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off

and there was i thinking i would never be bothered to write a blog post about this lol

Everybody sssshhhhh

Johnny's gettin his teach on. To you lazy bastards that tl;dr'd that blog post, scroll back north, read the whole thing in Werner Herzog's voice, and try not to gape and drool as the secrets of the [idol] universe unfold before ye

Johnny[oftheOlympus]

Album Rating: 3.5

"the short end is that the way she represents herself is unorthodox and raw/chaotic/unpolished in a way that's significant for a majorish pop artist, ultimately cogent with that vocal style, and v much at odds with traditional japanese artists, particularly as a woman"



I mean, she's basically a modern Jun Togawa. It's everything Togawa was doing back then.

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to a point, but seiko's never gone for the ero-guro stuff and idk if togawa ever went for emotionally charged social antics in remotely the same way

Album Rating: 4.5

opening track still the best thing ever

Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off

https://kittysblues.tumblr.com/tagged/oomori-lyrics

there's finally a proper lyric translation for the opener (2nd one down) for y'all to see. it's stunning and defs one of her best statement tracks

There is a new album?

Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off

ooo

say it's a self-cover album, so semihype ig

ah that's lame. Which albums would you rec to me? I did not like pink, but the albums seemed better from memory.

I really like the song 少女3 号 because it reminds me of the band Radiohead

Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off

sennou is her best and weirdest and maybe catchiest, so that. anything prior is mainly worthwhile if you're willing to engage with the rawness on emotional tones, although her songwriting has been killer from day 1



lol listen to her pink tokarev indie band re-versions of songs including that one they are very indie big landfill

what about Mahō ga tsukaenainara vs Zettai shōjo?

ew mb I will

Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off

Mahou is more apocalyptically sadgirl folk in a similar but less razorwire vein to Pink, Zettai Shoujo is an artsy daydream with a couple of sugar pop singles at the start because Reasons. It is objectively one of her worst but at the same time my second favourite but it took many many many listens to get there