I’m too 1) lazy and 2) busy to complete this Year in Review the way I wanted to. I realize that I just don’t have as much to say as I thought I did. Therefore, considering that this week marks the release of THIS:

SHIT JUST GOT REAL.

…I’ve decided to throw my format out the window (like a professional, responsible journalist) and just count down my Top Ten Asian Artists of 2009 like every other regular jackoff. *shrugs* Eh, come for the eyecandy, stay for the snark. There may be snark. WARNING: THERE MAY ALSO BE SOME BILE-SPITTING. Just getting that out there.

Who wins? Who loses…well, let’s see. This is a list of the artists whose songs I’ve liked most in 2009. This is not a countdown of which Asian artists have, all history spoken, made the most impact on me. I think everyone can guess on those. 2009 was a strange year for me, musically. I didn’t quite know what to think of what my tried-and-true favorites were doing. Things were changing, not always for the better. Sometimes simply for the mediocre, other times for the WTF. Nonetheless, I was up and down and all over the place during 2009. Very few artists retained the same status they did from 2008, whether it be moving up in my ranks or slipping down, down, down.

So who made the cut?

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Thus begins my countdown of the issues and topics I feel were most substantive to the year in Asian music appreciation for Pink Wota. I have a lot more to say on certain topics, a lot less to say on others. I’ll be presenting ten topics, then offering a year-end Top Ten list of musical releases. All from a purely subjective point of view, you understand. Let’s begin!

Contemode is pretty much the opposite of “something new” in the world of J-Pop, but this year a lot of attention was turned on mastermind producer Yasutaka Nakata with Perfume’s ⊿, an album that drew as much ire as it drew love. I can break it down easily in my mind with one simple phrase, and it’s pretty much the same thing any of you can use to rest your minds when I sigh and shake my head over Morning Musume: Haters Gonna Hate. Though the standard allegation that “Perfume aren’t real singers” is incredibly easy to disprove, the image that Contemode has marketed only furthers this misperception.

Look at these GQMFs

Watching them in concert doesn’t really help if you’re one of the people who thinks that singing ability is the only thing that defines an artist. A Perfume concert, no matter how magical and well-executed, is pretty much 100% playback. Never mind the great, always perfectly synchronized and certainly physically challenging dancing, the never over-the-top acting, and the absolute fierceness of A-chan, Nocchi, and Kashiyuka. Let’s just throw all that out of the window and say that songs like “Edge”, “NIGHT FLIGHT”, and “love the world” just don’t count because of how much production went into the vocals. Never mind that Nakata basically took all the best parts of artists like Oakenfold, the Chemical Brothers, Erasure, Kraftwerk, and to a pop idol extension Kylie Minogue. He threw those parts in a blender and added a decidedly Japanese dash of eccentricity. Toshiko Koshijima of capsule was Lady Gaga before Lady Gaga was in junior high. Now Perfume are accused of not being real because they don’t sing live.

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