If you are under the impression that most international rap and hip-hop music is repetitive and non-original, you're right. However, there is some hope at the end of the rainbow. Rainbow 7, that is -- one of Morning Musume and Hello! Project's excellent concert series staged during this past year in Japan.
So it is with this Christmas blog that I usher in, for me, a new era in the understanding of the high art of musical communication, through the all-girls Japanese music of the Hello! Project, or H!P, system started by an innovative Japanese rocker simply called "Tsunku."
Tsunku was a washed-up leader of a nowhere J-pop band called "Sharan Q" (and I hope I'm spelling it right) in the mid-1990s when -- as the story goes -- he got the grand idea of recycling some of his song ideas that just didn't mesh well with his male rockers, and let a bunch of girl-singer wannabes take their shot.
The group "Morning Musume" (which roughly translates to "Morning the Daughter" from Japanese to English, shortened to simply "Morning Girls") produced its first single, "Morning Coffee," a mellow little part-softrock, part-ballad tune that caught fire in 1997 and spawned a new kind of J-pop sound -- not rap, not hip-hop (thank God), but a fizzy kind of effervescent, semi-techno, part-jazz, part-'60s softshoe, part whatever, that has grown into 32 singles (and some albums), each single rolled out with staggering fanfare, Japanese TV airplay, complete with commercials and the faces of Tsunku's girls plastered in every fanmag and newspaper in every Japanese urban area.
Morning Musume, or simply "Momusu" or even just "MM" to its cult legions of crazed, geeky fans -- mostly computer and anime nerds referred to as "otakus" or "wotas" -- is but a small part of this all-female, mostly underaged equation of singing and dancing that is astonishing in its prolific nature. The concerts are legendary; thousands of light-wand-waving lunatics (a la Luke Skywalker) thrusting their fists upward in synch to the gyrating bodies and pealing sounds of amped-up high-pitched female pop-music vocalists that at once amaze and stun the senses.
Like the junkie wannabe who firsts ingests heroin, then pukes before feeling anything, those who first indulge in Momusu or the H!P experience have no idea what hit them or why they suddenly become addicted to the waves of color, dance and percussive vocalizations of juiced-up techno-tracks that are masterpieces of state-of-the-art digital sound engineering that only the Asian mind can conceive and complete.
The girls themselves are nothing short of raw, exotic, scorched-earth beauty mixed with generous humor, impish pranksterism and a playful, wide-eyed, refreshingly juvenile approach to living as to defy any human imagination. MM's lineup recruits from the 13- to 14-year-old ranks of Japanese pop talent, and H!P keeps roughly 40 girls at any one time in his ranks, with MM the "varsity" team. A younger group was launched a couple years back, called "C-ute," and yet another, which goes by the moniker "Berryz Koubou," and both memberships have grown from 11- to 12-year-old greenhorns to savvy stage veterans with their own bodies of work, sensational dance routines and surprisingly sophisticated songs and lyrics.
A bittersweet aspect of this is that retirement often hits around age 21, and the oldsters are "graduated" out of the Momusu family in a highly public display of emotional, tear-laden little speeches between the remaining girls and the "graduates." It is a rare and touching experience to sit through one of these sessions, usually done right dead in the middle of an otherwise raucous concert, with spectators cheering on the criers, and all the girls quietly tolerating, even inviting, this awe-inspiring farewell ritual.
The whole H!P entourage packs out major arenas in Tokyo, Yokohama and other cities, putting on amazing shows that feature all or portions of the H!P family of girl singers, very loud sound systems, massive stages that either encircle entire arena floors or form stories-high centerpieces from which Momusu and the others twirl their mesmerizing style of brash, in-your-face, fist-pumping, sassy siren-blasting sound.
Mix that with the most elaborate color combinations imaginable, sequins, silk, warparound skirts, leggings, outfits with overlays that pop off, revealing cheerleader-like suits, two-piece, single-piece, skirts, long dresses, more often than not sleeveless tops, cut in a way as to impugne the sensibilities of Western culture that does not, by and large, approve of sexualizing young girls in such a manner.
Now, to be fair, young girls have been sexualized in the United States for decades -- cheerleaders, Miss America contests, dance camps, American Idol tryouts, high-school plays, glee clubs, flag teams, pom-pon troupes, Britney Spears-inspired low-cut jeans, JonBenet Ramsey-esque beauty contests for 6-year-olds, and the like. At least in the J-pop world, the lines are clean, songs are straight and the DVD feeds are cropped from the waist up most of the time.
The bottom line here is that the concept of a large-scale girl singing-dancing group with a dozen or more top-flight members -- with satellite groups of seven to eight members each, plus a crop of youngsters coming up through the "academy" of H!P -- with a stable of proven hits from which to draw and repackage for schools, small auditoriums and major arenas, it's quite a show. Quite a show.
Just hang on to your hat, buy a cheap region-free DVD player from Canada (most H!P DVDs play only on Region 2-purchased DVD players sold in Japan and that part of Asia), order up a few Momusu shows from YesAsia.com or other suitable online source (Ebay has a few on sale from time to time) and let the music play.
YouTube.com and Veoh.com have been invaded by the many H!P groupings in recent months. Just go to those sites, feed in the search coordinates for "Morning Musume" or "Hello! Project" or "C-ute" or "Berryz Koubou" and see what pops up.
It will be different, and it will forever change your impression as to what a good song and a good dance should sound and look like.
