Artist: Downy Song: ? (Delta) Album: ?? 4th (Mudai)

Here’s the video that first introduced me to downy. It came like manna from heaven at a time when I was at a dead end in my exploration of Japanese music.

The Japanese music industry has a whole lot in common with the American music industry; in fact, it’s probably a glimpse of the American Industry’s near future state: A behemoth of advertising, mass production, formulaic repetition, and blatant revenue creation. Years ago I used to hear it rumored that the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync etc. were creations of record companies, more or less genetically designed to make the most money from the least effort by pandering to a demographic with sparse discernment and extremely liquid assets. Well, often the Japanese industry doesn’t even pretend to hide it, and no one seems to mind.

Take Johhny’s, for instance. It’s more or less a boy band factory. It scouts members based on personal magnetism and charm, and then puts them through boy-band-bootcamp to learn how to dance, and hopefully at least marginally, to sing. Johhny’s does this successfully over and over and over, people keep buying the records, and they end up #1 on the charts. Also, basically each member in one of these groups is guaranteed a starring role in at least one tv drama, product endorsement deals, and various variety/gameshow appearances, and in fact, most groups actually get their very own TV show.

Not that any of this is intrinsically bad, it just gets old after a while. One can, perhaps, only take so much of the same sound, same routine. Thank goodness for downy, my first taste of life after so long having wandered in the aural wasteland.

Listen, listen again, then let go and really hear.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 7:13 am and is filed under Japanese Music, Japanese Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.