Yup, you’ll have to put up with my Muse obsession just a wee bit longer. The good news is, I’ve found a way to tie it into H!P. What!? How can this be? Epic mash-up of ‘Independent Girl～独立女子であるために’ and ‘Bliss’? Although I think that might actually work, sadly, no. I don’t have those skills. But what I am going to do is compare and contrast my two favorite trios – possibly my two favorite acts in all of music right now. (No, Alessandro Cortini, I haven’t forgotten about you…I’m just enjoying your random tweets and also your Twitter updates <—see what I did there?)

It all really started with the performance of ‘We are Buono! ~Buono no Theme~’ in which they donned very extended costumes consisting of musical instruments. Now, they’d done this before. Trust me, I jizzed in my pants when the FC DVD featured Buono! trying their tiny little hands at musical instruments to varying degrees of success/failure. This was just too great, though…

OKAY FIRST OF ALL THEY ENTER THE STAGE TO ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, which is just as epic and just as fitting as Muse entering Wembley to ‘Dance of the Knights’ from Romeo and Juliet. A parallel can be drawn, right there.

Then, they proceed to not even attempt to play their instruments. It’s so cute. However, the song does rock my world, and it does establish that Airi = guitar, Miyabi = bass, and Momo = drums.

My brain, as it usually does, began racing.

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I’m starting with the TL;DR version, because some of you may not know this, but I’m a strong proponent of Gonzo Journalism and I like to chronicle entire trips when I chronicle events. Therefore, to put it shortly, Muse in Duluth on 2-27-2010 were…let’s see…what were they, Johnny?

YES. YES THEY WERE.

Now, if you want to read about how Pink Wota went, saw, got our faces rocked off, and in the process had horrible sinus colds and/or trouble navigating Duluth and I-75, read on.

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Since I spent my New Year’s Day working and then waching the two television broadcasts I’d been waiting FOREVER to see, it seems fitting that I put both the review together, here. I was just going to put them up here without any pics, but sucks to that, and your ass-mar (tits or gtfo, amirite?). I’ll just put whatever pics I can find. It’s cool! I can do zat!

Anyway, if you haven’t seen Doctor Who’s Christmas Special for 09-10, ‘The End of Time’, in its entirety, don’t read this. It will really confuse and/or spoil you (both would be hilarious). If you haven’t seen Ayumi’s Countdown Live My Titles Continue to Get Longer and Longer 09-10 ~FUTURE CLASSICS~ who gives a shit, no one cares about being spoiled on that. In fact, I think the Ayumi fan community eats spoilers for breakfast. They eat HATING ON AYUMI for lunch. I am part of the Ayumi fan community. I do not hate her. But I will give honest criticism.

Also, I’m sick as fuck and feeling very cheeky, so be prepared.

I wrote these this morning, who am I kidding. I’m only going through and adding pictures and other observations, durpity durp durp.

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Muse threatened to sue Celine Dion and won. I’m not going to go into the details, because if you really want to know the whole story it’s all over the internet and only takes a quick Google. My point is: Muse threatened to sue Celine Dion and won. Whatever your musical tastes (unless you happen to be a Celine Dion devotee), you have to admire that sort of tenacity. Hell, even if you’re a Celine devotee, you should at least admire the balls, there.

For what it's worth, they're not bad to look at, for a bunch of regular British blokes who don't try too hard to dress up.

If I had to name for you my favorite English-speaking musical act, it would have to be Muse. That comes with a caveat, because Muse is still together and Muse is still making new music together. A month ago the answer would have been Nine Inch Nails, but NIN is Trent, and Trent has assured us, after a three and a half hour long final concert this month, that the ship has finally sailed and to stop fucking whining about it (essentially). Considering mine and many a NIN fan’s usual cynicism regarding Trent’s word, our acceptance of this is pretty phenomenal.

Ah, but here’s the rub. I believe part of the reason we all accept the “Wave Goodbye” from Trent and his ever-changing band of misfit musicians was because of the good old ‘parody’ paradigm. You know, when an act becomes too much of an act, when the formula is too good, or too played out, or too anything, and suddenly every critic is using the word “parody”. Elton John became a parody of himself. Whitney Houston became a parody of herself. But even the more esoteric and multifarious acts, such as Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, and REM fell into this ghetto of self-parody from the critics’ perspective. Now, I didn’t have the time before needing to churn this review out, but I have a few Susan Sontag books on order, including “Against Interpretation and Other Essays”, in which this inimitably brilliant woman posits that “the aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” Then again, she also says that “the taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.”

I might be taking Sontag out of context, here, but the parody ghetto is a gasp from critics who try to be more important than they are. We like to assume that a Western musical industry is more advanced than, say, the Japanese idol industry, where there is a distinct “shelf life” on any given artist before he or she even records one track. There is no difference in my confusion over the obvious tendency of well-meaning but ultimately self-important critics’ tendency to fall over themselves adoring a back catalog of an artist while at the same time ripping apart their newest artistic offering. In some cases, this is justified. U2, for example, is doing nothing new, and has indeed become a self-parody (hard as it is to admit sometimes, I am a fan of U2, but I would rather chew glass than listen to No Line on the Horizon again). Look at 311. They were my favorite band throughout high school. Now…just stop, 311.

But, in some cases, critics go over the line. Look at REM. A good friend of mine had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Buck not terribly long ago, and even Buck mentioned, more or less (and I relay this without a direct quotation), that he hated the band, he wanted out before the ground was laid for their latest album. Have you heard Accelerate? Or, like many, did you write it off because the critics panned it as a self-parody of REM? It’s fantastic. It is a back-to-the-basics REM album.Also, who saw Dig! Lazarus! Dig! coming from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds last year?

A band like Muse hardly has passed the “shelf life” date for critics to start throwing out the parody accusations, and yet I check metacritic and…there they are. Everywhere. A stand-out factor for Muse is their consistency. I’ve been steadily impressed by their recordings since I first heard of them (as background music for a Cowboy Bebop AMV at JACON in 2005), and their “old shit” is just as good, sometimes better than, but not always up to par with, their “new shit”. There are times when audible periods of the band’s musical development overlap, which to me smacks of a good formula and a solid musical foundation rather than any stagnation.

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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 ♡