jpop flashback
Sep. 28th, 2009 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johncomicSo I'm sitting here listening to Chase the Chance and remembering the first time I heard it, which was also the first time I saw or heard Namie Amuro...
For me it was January 1, 1996 but in Japan it was still December 31, 1995, and I was watching the Red and White Show. I'd started getting into the show a couple years back when I stumbled across it and saw how marvelously tacky and flashy it all was, and as an aside got into how frighteningly catchy some of the music was. [I wish that regional station still carried the show, but they dropped it a few yonks back.]
Anyhoo, I found Namie to be something of a revelation. She was better at hitting notes than almost anyone I'd ever heard in jpop [where a forgiving attitude toward pitch goes a long way], and her rhythmic flexibility was again completely new to me in this “genre”. She was loose and comfortable and accomplished on stage... basically, she was good, in a way that very very few of her peers were, in a way that I wasn't sure Japanese singers could be. She really made an impression on me, that's for sure.
At that time I had no idea that she (and her producer Tetsuya Komuro) were going to re-shape and dominate the face of jpop for years to come. But looking back it's not hard to see why it happened. And for me it's all encapsulated in this song...
For me it was January 1, 1996 but in Japan it was still December 31, 1995, and I was watching the Red and White Show. I'd started getting into the show a couple years back when I stumbled across it and saw how marvelously tacky and flashy it all was, and as an aside got into how frighteningly catchy some of the music was. [I wish that regional station still carried the show, but they dropped it a few yonks back.]
Anyhoo, I found Namie to be something of a revelation. She was better at hitting notes than almost anyone I'd ever heard in jpop [where a forgiving attitude toward pitch goes a long way], and her rhythmic flexibility was again completely new to me in this “genre”. She was loose and comfortable and accomplished on stage... basically, she was good, in a way that very very few of her peers were, in a way that I wasn't sure Japanese singers could be. She really made an impression on me, that's for sure.
At that time I had no idea that she (and her producer Tetsuya Komuro) were going to re-shape and dominate the face of jpop for years to come. But looking back it's not hard to see why it happened. And for me it's all encapsulated in this song...
