Several years ago, I was wandering around San Francisco with my girlfriend at the time, and we stumbled upon a music video demo machine from Japan. There was a little menu and you could choose which video you wanted to watch. My girlfriend at the time saw a cute music video and liked it. While it was quite cheezy and bad, I was amazed at the production quality of it all.
Later on, I was visiting Japantown and on a fluke, I saw the CD with that song on it so I picked it up. The whole album was pretty lame pop, but the over-the-top production quality really drew me in.
Later on, a friend and I started to research Japanese music. It was kind of a game to see who could find out most information. This lead me to some terrible Japanese bands. What kept us going is both our love of really stupid music videos and the occasional good band that would slip out. Also, I felt the American music scene was becoming somewhat of a bland wasteland of generic songs by boring singers. Even though a lot of the Japanese music was bad, it was at least interesting and different.
After a while, my friend hit the jackpot. He stumbled upon an English speaking community based upon sharing Japanese music and videos. We went almost overnight from trying to get anything we could to having our choice of DVD-quality music videos right at our fingertips. Besides the quality difference between the previous stuff we could get recorded off of TV, the selection was amazing. This added much fuel to the all-raging fire of interest I had towards modern Japanese music.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment