As a longtime Yossie/Rika fan (I refuse to attach the word “shipper” to my adoration of those two, and how they interact…), the announcement of the HANGRY & ANGRY unit was something I greeted with equal parts trepidation and excitement. “Finally,” I thought, “UFA has its finger on the pulse of what they need to do.” Yes, the ladies are essentially nothing but marketing puppets, but isn’t that the way UFA usually bleeds through the mainstream cracks? Getting its records off of the H!P Store shelves and into the more public eye? This is a far cry from anything we’ve seen out of the H!P stable of talent…well, ever. I won’t lie and say my eyes didn’t bug out a little, that I didn’t need to warm up significantly to the idea of Yossie and Rika inhabiting these severe and over-the-top characters. Something about Rika being “ANGRY” doesn’t work so well in my mind (even taking the Sports Festival shenanigans and her infamous temper into consideration…she doesn’t seem like a dark goth queen any way you look at it…). Yossie fits nicely into the “HANGRY” model, probably because it’s such a nebulous concept in the first place. Really, I’ve been hither and thither in theater and acting and modeling, and if a director ever told me to “act hangry” I’m not absolutely sure I’d know what to do. Even knowing the definition, it’s not something you’ll look at and go “oh, that’s not hangry enough.” Have I rambled sufficiently about the hangry thing? Okay, I’ll give it a rest now. I’m not fond of the name of the unit. If I’m going to spout off made-up words, I’d rather they be pleasant on my tongue. Like “Viyuden”.
Before going any further, I’d like to point out to those who don’t know that hangry & angry was a Visual Kei band stumping for h. naoto clothing prior to this. So our lovely Yossie and Rika are, essentially, step-children of this enterprise.
Despite the obvious appeal of HANGRY & ANGRY with the Hot Topic/Gothic crowd (which I tend to look down upon, because, let’s face it. I was in the shit. Back in my day, we didn’t have ready-made counterculture clothing. Self-expression was something you made, man!!), and despite the bargain-basement marketing tactics (bad MySpace page and all! I’m biased there, though – I think MySpace pages are bad as a rule), I couldn’t wait to hear the girls together in this capacity. I was and am convinced that Yossie and Rika are magical, so I wasn’t particularly worried about HANGRY & ANGRY tanking. Still, tell me that something didn’t seem strange about this unit from the beginning. From the rumors of U.S. expansion which still persist with confirmation only through the MySpace page (now the rumor mill is professing a North American TOUR…if I’m proven wrong on this I’ll be happy, but it’s one of those too-good-to-be-true things), to the almost shady-seeming advertising (I know we shouldn’t expect the advertising budget of, say, Glico or Panasonic, but still), it was all a little strange. For a unit that departs so drastically from the proven UFA formula, going beyond even the comfort zone of TNX, it could be argued that this was a risk in every way. No one wanted to attach HANGRY & ANGRY to anything too early, lest the venture be a flop. But if that were the case, would an obvious endorsement have really been put into motion? Most of you have seen “celebrity endorsements” or “official spokesmen/women/ducks” fail over the years and die quickly, but this synergy seemed strange. Live-Action versions of dark, angsty plush mascots? A high-risk venture, maybe not in the financial way, but in the “credibility” vein. “Yes, I’m here to apply for the position. Yes, that’s right, Yoshizawa Hitomi. Mm-hmm. Well, yes, I was HANGRY, but I try not to talk about that too much.”
But it was the straw we clung to. “We” being those of us who cared enough about Yossie and Rika, especially in light of the recent “Mass Graduation/Burial” announcement, to follow HANGRY & ANGRY news with skepticism, hope, and maybe a little fear. I know that I scoured every news source at my disposal for proof of the many rumors floating around, but all I could find for the longest time was a few publicity photos, a bad MySpace, and speculation. Maybe…and this is a big maybe replete with my usual brand of reckless fancy…some of us transferred a lot of our Elder Club dreams to the only persistent thing we saw: HANGRY & ANGRY. Even if the girls were cut loose from their stable, surely the clothing line wouldn’t resign a brand new spokesduo. Fanciful, maybe, but there’s some common sense there. HANGRY & ANGRY are a thing to watch, and be excited about.
I’ve had the song on my iPod for a while as a LQ rip, and I’ve been in love with it. But it’s not a dutiful love. Not the sort of love I have for each successive new Buono! song, a situation in which the songs had better be gold or SO HELP ME GOD *shakes fist* or Morning Musume, who I swear planted a worm in my head that’s slowly eating at my sensory cortex. That said, maybe I’ve been brainwashed by J-Pop over the last seven years. But ‘Kill Me Kiss Me’, though derivative (overwrought/abused vocoder effect, tommy heavenly6 guitar riffs), is a new classic for the H!P fan. And it should be. If you don’t like the song, chances are that you’re just not into overwrought vocoder effects and angsty guitar riffs. But the simple fact that those two things exist in a song by Yossie and Rika is astonishing. Could we have predicted this a year ago? Definitely not this lady. I thought Buono! was tripping the progress fantastic with an actual band and no Tsunku-vocals backing them. But rock guitars and a throbbing bass rhythm can elevate any song, no matter how synthetic. This isn’t a pulpit for me to preach my music puritanism. I have no music puritanism – I think people who do are, essentially, douchetrucks. Yet I fly into a frothing rage when anyone mentions the genre “pop-punk” in a non-ironic sense. Oh, god, I can’t even write about it. We’re not going to go there. So, I’ll talk myself down by justifying it. HANGRY & ANGRY is like Duffy, in a way. I know it’s overproduced, I know it’s targeted at the demographic I don’t get along with as a rule, and I know it isn’t pure in any way, but for what it is – Japanese Advertising Pop – it’s smashing. It is not the sum of its parts that makes HANGRY & ANGRY sound awesome, it’s the fact that they (like Duffy) surpassed all those limitations to make something that most of my friends won’t hear and go “here we go with the J-Pop again” or “are they selling clothes?”
Kill Me Kiss Me
Which brings us to the PV. It’s difficult to foster those same reactions with a PV that practically attacks you with the business end of its marketing message. The budget is…negligible. The backgrounds look cobbled together from the lesser works of a first-year computer animation student. The “band” scenes are cute but laughable, even though the girls manage to strike some alarmingly awesome poses throughout. Somewhere Iida Kaori is smirking and saying “bitch please” (but in Japanese. I guess) over the way Rika’s treating that there gee-tar. Worst of all, the bad-Flash style repetition of the mascot characters makes this less of a PV and more of a ‘Powered by The Cheat’ parody of itself. Rika looks fabulous, and hardly ANGRY. Yossie is…Yossie being Yossie. She’s intense, she’s over-the-top, she’s beautiful. But for the uninitiated, she may be a little much with her dinner-plate eyes and strange expressions.
But it’s not Yossie’s crazy faces that ultimately make the PV a loser in my book. Nope nope nope. It’s a very specific factor: the lack of interaction. They could have been on separate sound stages, for all its worth. I want Yossie and Rika to be Yossie AND Rika, together in a unit. Not Two Young Ladies Who May Be Vaguely Aware of One Another in a Unit. So, while I can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, I will say I was left wanting. But I’ll promptly roll over and beg for more. Because it’s Yossie and Rika, and they’re going to rule the world someday. If not the world, then some corner of Shibuya, maybe. This would be a good start to that end.
