This is just a public service announcement to let everyone know that I’ve opened up my general music/thought piece blog:
Only one entry so far (I’ve been busy), but there are many, many on deck, including but not limited to reviews of the new Coheed and Cambria, Erykah Badu’s latest, of course ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus’, and a snazzy write-up of the Third Eye Blind show.
So, “Vee,” I said to myself, “why have you never made an Ayumi cake?” And “Self,” I replied, “I get panic attacks just thinking about what I went through with the Yuke Yuke Monkey Cake, and that was a boring, two layer REGULAR CAKE. For a pwopah Ayu cake, I’d just have to make the ~A~ symbol, and I don’t know about all that.”
Myself and myself argued back and forth for a few days, and finally on Monday I decided, YES, I was going to do it. I WAS GOING TO JOIN TEAM AYU FINALLY.
Oh, wait, that seems sort of random. No, but seriously. I’m a member now. Thanks to a brilliant tutorial by walking.proud on AHS, and some blessedly free space on one of my credit cards, I finally became a member of the only fan club I really give a damn about. Yes, I’ll be getting the magazines, my card, and my strap. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
But on Monday I also decided I was going to make that damned Ayumi cake. Because she deserves it.
All right. Settle down, spazz.
I don’t actually need to TALK about much, either, because it’s all in my EXCLUSIVE MAKING-OF VIDEOS.
And the pics of the process/finished project are below the cut:
I know this is supposed to be the post where I make some baked good that is relevant to wota interests, like a cake shaped like SooYoung’s legs or a sweet potato pie with “MAIMI” scrawled across it in butterscotch, and, in fact, I have one of those coming up. That’s for part two. But the most interesting thing about all this is what was supposed to be for Pink Wota’s Cake Day 2010. It was set to be EPIC when I began planning it last month:
CLICK FOR DELICIOUS CAKEY PLANNING.
Above are my plans – hatched with Ash – involving baking about 40 cupcakes of varying flavors glorifying the varieties of Delicious Cake. A glorious idea, if I may say so (AND YOU KNOW I DO). Yes, there was going to be one cupcake per girl, spanning Morning Musume, Berryz, C-ute, S/mileage, SNSD, and even Perfume (I would’ve added AKB48 but I’d have been in the kitchen all WEEK, for srs).
Then, two things happened. One, I realized with no lack of second-guessing and trying to deny the truth, that I really don’t care that much anymore. I’m more excited to see what you all come up with, frankly. Give me credit for taking the planning stages that far, at least. Cake Day 2009 put me back several dozens of dollars, and Cake Day 2010 was going to be and has been no different, to say nothing of the sheer TIME commitment involved. But neither of those things was really my problem. Yes, Virginia, it really was just lack of feeling the love. I was going to use the cupcakes for my (now-traditional, I suppose?) Spring H!P Rankings, too, but now that my two favorite H!P girls have graduated and I find myself loving all the members of Berryz equally, I really can’t be arsed.
But, oh yeah, something else happened. Pink Wota saw Muse. I’m sure you saw that post. If you didn’t, fuck you, it’s right the Hell there. Anyway, I’d always thought this mythical “Muse concert experience” thing was a crock, but you don’t even – ~I~ don’t even….it goes beyond that. Here, how can I explain this? I’ll let one of my favorite old Penny Arcade comics do the work, substituting Myself and Ashkta for Gabe and Tycho. You can imagine the ladies are our hot friends, but we’re pretty antisocial, all told. Anyway, this is how we’ve been FOR THREE WEEKS NOW:
This Is Exactly How It Is.
We’ve been to many an anime convention together since 2001, and have always experienced the dreaded phenomenon known as “Post-Con Depression” to varying degrees of severity. Quoth Ash, though: “this is worse than any Post-Con Depression ever.”
Maybe this is what wota feel like after H!P Wonderful Hearts shows, or what TA members (hey I’m a TA member now, have I mentioned that yet? Hell yeah) feel like after Countdown Live. I WOULDN’T KNOW. I mean, sure, I fangirled Nine Inch Nails pretty hard, but I always had a healthy bit of restraint. I don’t know what other things might inspire this sort of comedown, this sort of haze, this sort of need to keep consuming all things Muse, but I imagine my fangirl side that rears its head on this blog despite even my best efforts to remain staid (HAHAHAH no really. I try to do that occasionally) might have to be involved.
Muse has effectively brought me back to my 14-year-old fangirl self again. And there is this overwhelming happiness I feel in existing inside of this delightful bubble. The need to see them again, live, is strong – stronger than most things, though obviously not strong enough to not spend $70 on my Team Ayu membership. Just sayin’.
So how do we deal with this Post-Muse Gig Withdrawal? What else makes sense? Have a H.A.A.R.P. viewing party at my house and bake Muse-themed cupcakes. Yeah, it’s for Cake Day, suck it! I can wota for Muse just as easily as I can for Buono! This red glowstick is for Matt. This yellow one is for Dom. Chris, they don’t have proper black glowsticks. Enjoy this blue one. I hope that’s manly enough.
READ ON. LOADS OF PICTURES AND AWESOMELY BAD CUPCAKES FOLLOW.
A huge thanks is in order for Solo of www.solo-kun.com for providing an rss cache of all the Pink Wota 2.0 entries after the site crashed mysteriously (my database “disappeared”, says tech support) a few days ago.
Oh, well, it was time for a Version 3.0 makeover anyway. Now what’s left is to tweak this sucker and finish up my sidebar widgets.
All entries prior to today’s may remain untagged, uncategorized, and as WALLS OF TEXT because the rss file doesn’t retain any cutting/captioning information. Nor does it remember some YouTube links, so a few entries will look strange. AT LEAST WE STILL HAVE PINKWOTA.COM, though, amirite?
You may notice the plethora of new headers here on Pink Wota. That’s because I spent way too much time doing them today. I’ve chosen to err more on the side of Asian artists only this time, since I won’t have much longer to fangirl about NIN (BBBAWWWWWWWWWW), and I’d really rather just hide in silence than blog about Beyonce, much as I might want to. Beyonce. ;___; I LOVE YOU.
The pink of the new logo looks more purple for some jpg vs internet problem I’m still too ignorant to care about. Who cares, it’s still slightly pink. I don’t have time to color correct 22 images I didn’t have the time to make in the first place, really.
Links to “About” and “PW Glossary” are now located over there —————->
So, because most of you won’t want to refresh the page constantly, here are all 22 of the headers in one convenient post. HEY WHICH ONE IS YOUR FAVORITE. :B :B :B :B Tell me. You’re all going to say the AKB bikini one, aren’t you.
Yes, Michael Jackson’s unexpected death saddens me. I never truly condemned the man in my mind, considering the strange and multifarious reports from every possible angle on every aspect of his notoriety. No one can deny that the man was unusual, eccentric to the point of elevating eccentric to a new level, and the recipient of some unforgiving press.
But I’ve had a wholly different reaction to his death than I expected. For the first time since Frank Sinatra’s expected but still untimely death, I’ve felt nothing but joy, thankfulness. For what he gave us as a musician and performer, I am proud to be a music fan. Listening to Michael Jackson’s old songs, reading through his mammoth Wikipedia page, I realize just how much of an impact his music had on the evolution of my musical tastes. As I was growing up in the early 90’s, the first time I had to really develop my own musical taste without anyone’s else’s input, I found that Michael Jackson was the only musician who really spoke to everyone. It was still sort of sketchy to love TLC and Salt n Pepa (both of whom were huge at the time) because they were largely viewed as “black groups” (I said “fuck it” and they were still my two favorite groups, but being a preteen in the Bible Belt wasn’t easy because of that. :/). I liked Garth Brooks and U2 in 1991 as well, but that music was as white as you could get. Michael Jackson released ‘Dangerous’ that year, and I loved literally every song from that album. It felt right. Thanks in large part to the mastery of Teddy Riley (whose influence is perhaps most audible in ‘Black or White’ and ‘Remember the Time’), the album combined everything I loved about the oldies I grew up on with the R&B/hip-hop I loved as a kid, with the vast array of Top-40 pop I was becoming interested in as well. Perhaps my musical genre really got lost in New Jack Swing until I discovered J-Pop. In Jackson’s ensuing absence from the Top 40 charts following the scandals of the 90’s, I began to dig in my parents crates and discovered 70’s funk and R&B, developing my fascination with Motown and appreciation for the musical genius of Stevie Wonder. But I can honestly say that Michael Jackson laid an important foundation for me with ‘Dangerous’.
I’m considering the dates now. I thought that Paula Abdul was the first artist whose dances I learned step-by-step from MTV. It wasn’t. Now that I think about it, it was Michael Jackson’s ‘Remember the Time’. I wasn’t very good at it – remember, I was 11. But I recall practicing that dance with my best friend Stella, re-enacting the video (she always got to be Iman, LOL) which absolutely mesmerized me in my youth.
Michael’s sister Janet followed with her groundbreaking ‘janet.’ in 1993, which also grabbed me and found its way into my very first CD collection as a staple. I composed a dance to the song ‘This Time’ for a sleepover in the 7th grade and, since then, my friends knew me as “the one who danced”. So embarrassing, in retrospect, but so very satisfying and invigorating at the time.
This is the legacy a truly powerful pop idol leaves. As I alluded to earlier, I felt the same happiness – thankfulness – upon Frank Sinatra’s death. A deep-abiding gratefulness for everything that had been given to us. These were two people who devoted their entire lives to performing, to evoking emotions in others. Not simply creating or producing things, but putting their entire bodies, their souls, right out there on stage for everyone to see, night after night, sacrificing a lot of things in the process.
Thinking about Jackson’s death led me to consider how strongly I would react when one of the idols I feel more personally invested in passes on. Paul McCartney. Paul Simon. Billy Joel. Elton John. And then…what about my J-Pop idols? These girls (and a few guys) have been my raison d’etre for so many years. I’ve put more active effort into appreciating them, studying them, ruminating, learning songs, learning dances, memorizing statistics, than I’ve done with any other musician or performer.
And why?
Why does it sting so personally that I won’t be in the audience at Morning Musume’s Anime Expo performance? It’s not a misplaced sense of entitlement, and it’s not for the simply experience. I feel like all of us who have shown them support from the American fandom front, who heard about them long before the more mainstream anime fans (wow, those two things seem mutually exlusive), deserve to be in the audience to say thank you, because we will know the chants, we will know the wotagei even if we don’t perform it, we won’t know what to do with all our glowsticks. I’ve heard of some of the tension that Western fans feel at Japanese H!P shows, and I don’t know if I’d want that to be the way I experience H!P for the first time. I want to say thank you, from my heart, and let them know that if they make the effort, we will reward them. But America is a vastly larger country and it’s not like I can climb in my car and drive the 26 hours to L.A. without majorly damaging my pocketbook. I am not jealous or envious of those who get to go, in the very base senses of those words. I admire them. I hope they “represent” for all of us who can’t make it. No, I’m not jealous. I just want to be there, too. More than words can say. Because these are my idols and this is the power of an idol.
Our true idols are the ones that bring tears to our eyes just for being how they are, for performing the way they do. When I was feeling rotten the other night I queued up a bunch of Ayumi Hamasaki songs. Ayumi’s songs are not, inherently, sad most of the time. They are very insightful, they read like diary entries. And the emotional punch they deliver…sometimes it’s too much to bear.
She’s always been a 100% performer, Ayumi, and it’s difficult to separate her from that. So difficult, in fact, that it becomes a little bit sad. I wonder what her life is like, if she’s as lonely as her lyrics always seem to suggest. The above clip, of ‘NEVER EVER’ as performed in 2001, is entrenched in theatrics, yes, but when a 5′1″ girl can command a stage full of dancers with emotion rather than flash, it’s a rare thing. I’d also like to point out that this is her best vocal performance of this song, which is murder to sing if you want to actually get into the lyrics. She stretches out her hands to the audience and repeats, twice: “If I could give you one thing, it would be my unchanging, certain thoughts.” She sings in the second verse about the times she has hurt herself, and you can see her face pinched in emotion. It’s magnificent, understated performance from Ayumi, and it pretty much sums up what I love in her.
Ayumi is a graceful, fantastic songwriter, even at the times when she’s tarted up to absolutely Stepford-Wife levels by the mass media. She has the unfortunate distinction of giving in to the dream machine of J-Pop completely, and I daresay that her public image of a perfect, fashionable, airbrushed-to-high-heaven doll is incongruous with how I read her lyrics. She has a heavy hand in the creative decisions behind her music and her stage productions, and for the most part those remain indicative of her theatrical, entertain-or-die idol ethics. So if Ayumi is my favorite idol who still has failings in my eye thanks to her over-homogenized public image, what about Hello!Project.
Curiously, on the day of Michael Jackson’s death, I found myself watching this clip on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09DAizITAYs It’s a subtitled clip of Tsunku discussing his idol formula, and discussing H!P in general with the other guests. This sort of behavior is verboten in America. “Old guys” talking about pop idols as potential wives (not in an entirely sexual way, though the implication is there, where in America it would be far beyond an implication). But one exchange amongst the guests says it perfectly, in a part that really resonated with me:
(subtitle transcription from Hello! Project Subs (H!PS))-
“You know, when Morning Musume came out, every man was thinking “which one is the best?”…There’s no question, everybody did!”
“‘Love Machine’ on Music Station…it’s like the TV was sparkling!”
“It was like the messiah appeared!”
“And then SPEED came out around the same time, and it was like “this is the start of a new era in the idol world”!”
…granted, some of these guys are professional comedians, but the lines struck me. The strength of a country’s pop idols, of a particular generation’s pop idols, is to inspire and make memories for its people. The Beatles did it, as did New Kids on the Block, The Supremes, Paula Abdul, Backstreet Boys, and, yes, Michael Jackson. The job of these idols is not to be deep or artistic, but it is to entertain the hell out of you, to get you motivated, to get you to give a damn about enjoying something. Much as I am loathe to admit it, The Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus are busy doing the same thing right now for the kids of America and beyond.
But give me Hello!Project. Very specifically, it is the sort of idol formula that makes me feel so many things, always without fail. I watch these concerts on DVD and sometimes I am overcome with happiness. Do these girls even know, beyond the more obsessive wota they cater to, just how much happiness they bring with a simple song and dance number? When I see Golden Age MoMusu absolutely throwing themselves into a performance of ‘Koko ni Iruzee!’, I get so happy, so motivated, so ready to do something with my life, because these girls make being happy look so easy! (relevant aside: while searching up the following video, I found a Morning Musume vid description that said: “After I put this video together I was in such a good mood that it got me through all my classes today with no problems – I was happy most of the day because I just thought back to this video!”)
Abe’s introduction ends at the 1:00 mark…seriously, this performance was epic. They are tired, they are sweaty, they are heaving for breath, but the girls of MM circa 2003 are absolutely kicking the roof off with this one. It is everything I look for in an H!P performance and, frankly, I can’t say what impact this sort of thing will have on me ten, twenty, thirty years down the line. Right now, though, I need this in my life. If you took my idols away tomorrow, I don’t know what I’d do. All their distinct personalities, their positive message, their good clean fun images, their infectious joy…it is more than projection, it is more than a crutch.
In some weird way they become a strange, anomalous third party cheering me on, showing me that girls are awesome without shoving it down my throat (I enjoyed the Spice Girls, okay? But there are limits to the ‘Girl Power’ thing before it feels strained and insincere). Even knowing that Tsunku writes their songs, it’s mostly in the way they perform them (or performed them, past tense, as is the case with most of my favorites).
They dance their hearts out (eat that, Miley Cyrus), sing live (okay, for the most part. I’m looking at you, Koha…even though I just watched the intro for her favorite performance and exclaimed in what seemed such an involuntary way: “GOD SHE IS SO CUTE~!”), work through most of their teen years, sacrifice schooling opportunities and real-world relationships to preserve their “idol” image, and deliver astounding goods most of the time.
My aim with this article is not to go into new gens vs. old gens, member vs. member, Kago vs. H!P…I’m just saying thank you.
Before they’re out of our lives, which will hopefully take a very, very, very long time. I’m saying THANK YOU. To H!P, to all my J-Pop idols. You are appreciated more than you can know.
R.I.P. Michael ♡