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NEWS: 3 Anime Themes in May 20-27's Top Singles in Japan

What's interesting is that they are all pretty bad songs in my opinion.

you could make a record of Aya Hirano belching the alphabet and it'd still move several thousand copies.

Well, I suppose if you hated good pop songwriting, one could say that the LoveCom ending theme is a "bad song." But as a player of about 3-5 instruments and a sometime composer-arranger-songwriter, I'm looking to the Lovely Complex and Seirei no Moribito theme songs as shining examples from this season.

Of course, the Lucky Star theme was driven entirely by wota sales; you could make a record of Aya Hirano belching the alphabet and it'd still move several thousand copies.

And since when have sales rankings been a marker of quality, anyway?

You know what this reminds me of, the Boy/Girl Bands of the mid to late 90's in North America. Welcome to the 90's Japan (I've always felt the sound of Japanese music is like 10 years behind the rest of the world for the most part)

What does tee me off is when Japan's stubborn traditionalism allows pointless cultural institutions to be formed in popular music. SMAP is a goddamn joke (imagine if New Kids on the Block were allowed to exist two decades past their expiration date) and Morning Musume should just retire already and let some new girl group win our hearts over. But what do I know, I'm not a professional music exec/producer. I just make it.

Let the girl groups that actually play their own instruments have the top of the charts. Oreskaband, TsuShiMaMiRe, Pistol Valve, noodles, chatmonchy, any of these bands are more talented than these label-made "eye candy" groups. If only Japan would warm back to Puffy, too, while we're at it.

omnistry wrote:

Let the girl groups that actually play their own instruments have the top of the charts. Oreskaband, TsuShiMaMiRe, Pistol Valve, noodles, chatmonchy, any of these bands are more talented than these label-made "eye candy" groups. If only Japan would warm back to Puffy, too, while we're at it.

I was with you up until "performers who play their own instruments are inherently better." That's just not true.

Performers who play their own instruments are performers who play their own instruments, nothing more. Sometimes they're better than people who only use "the voice" as their instrument. But sometimes they seriously need to go back for theory lessons. (The same can be said about "performers who write their own songs..." honestly, that just leads to overinflated egos who don't realize that they might want to let REAL songwriters do the songwriting. Case in point: garage bands.)

And let's not sell these "eye candy" groups short. All I said was that stagnant ones should be removed, but you know, they put in just as much work as "proper" musicians. These girls are learning 90-minute dance sets that basically demand them to be endurance athletes sometimes TWICE in one day, not to mention the sheer mental effort of learning every dance move, ON TOP OF being able to lip-sync every word of every song (and sometimes they don't even get the luxury of lip-syncing and STILL have to vocalize).

I remember in high school how memorizing 10 minutes of marching band music and field-show maneuvers pretty much wiped me out (I always liked concert performance better because you could sit and read the music), and yet idol singers have to learn almost 10 times that, plus keep in physical shape, which basically adds up to a full-time job. AND most of them have barely reached high school!

So to think that cutey pretty vocally inept girl groups are a bunch of lazyasses who don't work as hard as "proper" bands, or are lacking in ability, is just misguided, Rockist thinking. The demands of these music performance styles are simply different. But tired old girl groups that have lost their charm with the general public should definitely retire.