Now get thee to the drowning

[sovay]

1. My poem "Antique Water Magic" has been accepted by inkscrawl. It's named after elisem's earrings and partly influenced by Denis Forkas' "The Triton's Mirror." Some of it is an insomnia poem.

2. So there is the thing where I know almost nothing about J-pop, so I have no idea if Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is representative of the genre or any particular style thereof. I picked up "Invader Invader" in 2013 as the closing track on a Pacific Rim fanmix that made good writing music; I didn't dislike it, but it didn't get any more play than the rest of the mix (Excision's "X Rated," Chicane's "Saltwater," the Genitorturers covering "I Touch Myself," and Combichrist's "This Shit Will Fuck You Up" being previous favorites, as a matter of fact) until the last twenty-four hours when all of a sudden it wouldn't get out of my head. I don't know if it would help if I understood Japanese or not. The melody is a bouncy chiptune earworm that effervesces along like Tigger, matched by an equally springy accompaniment of dissonant synth, hopscotching drum machine, and out-of-tune music box, at least until the dubstep breakdown. I haven't yet watched the video, but it is apparently something. Having listened to Nanda Collection (なんだこれくしょん, 2013) and Pikapika Fantajin (ピカピカふぁんたじん, 2014) on and off all day, about half her music sounds relentlessly upbeat to me and the other half sounds like it's pushing the concept of relentlessly upbeat until it breaks. (The cover of Nanda Collection shows the singer wide-eyed, blond-haired, buried in fuchsia and pink marabou with an enormous, toothy mouth painted across the entire lower half of her face; she is holding hands with a fluffy pink muppet whose face is nothing but mouth. It's pretty effectively augh.) I have no idea if I'm even approaching the art form correctly. It's catchy, though.

3. Courtesy of awhyzip: there's an Enigma machine in Natick. Road trip?

Query: What happens when your cornbread recipe calls for a cup of vegetable oil and all you have in the house is Greek olive oil? Answer: DELICIOUSNESS.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Mostly what I know of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is that when they come up, my (fully grown, theoretically mature adult) sister has a tendency to squeal in a range only dogs can hear. Your description sounds about right, both the audio and visual aspects; the only thing I can really add is that "J-pop" is about as specific of a genre as "American pop," at least as the term gets used over here, so she's more representative of a style than the genre as a whole. (Wikipedia tells me she's associated with the Harajuku street-fashion end of things, which doesn't surprise me. Actually Wikipedia gets very specific, telling me she's associated with kawaisa and decora -- but that rapidly falls down the rabbit hole of "no seriously, people, I cannot tell these styles apart.")

If you ever decide you want a curated introduction to J-pop, let me know; I'll ping my sister and see what I can hook you up with. I suspect visual kei would amuse you, as it appears to be Japan's answer to glam rock.

[sovay]

"J-pop" is about as specific of a genre as "American pop," at least as the term gets used over here

My knowledge of American pop music is also pretty vague and terrible. I have no idea what most people are listening to this year. I'm not even sure what most of them were listening to last year. I'm relatively in touch with movies, I think, but mainstream music is one of the places where my knowledge of zeitgeist just fails.

I suspect visual kei would amuse you, as it appears to be Japan's answer to glam rock.

I have some familiarity with visual kei, thanks to rushthatspeaks and gaudior! It did go over well.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm there with you re: American pop. Basically, the radio drives me mad, so I don't listen to it. (This dates all the way back to high school, when I started listening to the classical station largely because it didn't repeat things ad nauseam and also its ads were very quiet and civilized, mostly read by the DJ.) It takes an absurdly long time for pop hits to filter their way through society far enough to really register on me.