Pop, Popped, Popping

When I told Kyoko I like the J-Pop group called L'arc-en-Ciel (ラルク アン シエル) her eyes widened for a few seconds. I felt smug that she acknowledged my good taste in music, that was until she exclaimed, "Yadaaaaa!!!! How can you rike such a group?!!! The main vokarist is such a strange guy!!!!!" and looked to the side as if to spit.


Indignant, I asked her, "What's wrong with Hyde? He writes good songs and his voice is great!"
She said, "How can you rike someone who rooks rike that?!!!"
Since her reason did not stand logically I insisted that I still like the group anyway and had continued to sing their songs in karaoke until she banned me from singing them.

My infatuation with J-Pop started when I had a jap punkwannabe as the first guy to date me back when I was seventeen. I progressed from the high-pitched sickeningly cheery Kome Kome Club (米米CLUB) to Southern All Stars (サザンオールスターズ) and had since continued to expand my musical boundaries to include canto and thai pop, the latter which was insisted upon me by my then flatmates.

More recently I have included malay-pop, korean-pop, and les chansons francaises into my repertoire and was just dipping my toes into german pop until I listened to a Marlene Dietrich rendition of "Ne Me Quitte Pas" in german. I started listening to it in the dead of the night with my earphones on. The song started with some creaky violin and as soon as her voice entered my ears, my heart jumped. It had sounded so eerie, so creepy and so.. so.. bassy, like a low growling sound from some ancient black and white horror masterpiece. The clicky and nasal german pronunciation didn't help. I am not surprised if Murnau had used this particular song in his 1922 Nosferatu had it existed then. Naturally I stopped my musical exploration there and then.

Last week I brought my Zero Assoluto cd to let Gio listen to it since he said he's never heard of the group. I thought Zero Assoluto is good for the italian music scene standard, they definitely sound better than those strange old folk songs with weird tunes sung by the likes of Sud System, Eros Ramazzoti or Adriano Celentano. But the two italianos in the car violently protested against 90% of the songs in the cd. They asked me vehemently, "Do you really like these songs? How can you like these kinds of songs?!!" and proceeded to forward through most of the cd.

I had trouble sleeping the other night pondering on the popular saying that 'a man's meat is indeed another man's poison'. My late night sleeplessness had caused me to chance upon this hell of a gem of a music video from the above-mentioned Southern All Stars. This music video was made in 1984, which was like from 22 years gone. I don't know what the video was trying to say but I'm amazed that they can get away with stuffs like this. I am not even sure if today's MTV would allow this to be screened. Then again with the charismatic ultra-eccentric Keisuke Kuwata as the lead singer you can probably get away with most things.



Now, how can most of Japan, for the past 28 year, has been able to rike this guy who wears such ridicurous red cap with such ridicurous hair making this kind of weird videos? I don't know, I like him too. But if you don't, I understand.