Shameful Otaku Secret!

You may have noticed a large hole in my internet presence lately (at least, my twitter friends and the good people of #oihayaku may have noticed — it’s not like I’ve been a blogging machine in ‘09), but I’ve been rocking out at the South by Southweset music festival. And before that, the interactive conference of the same name, learning some tasty stuff for my work on the series of tubes. Busy times.

The SXSW music fest is one of the world’s largest; our city, with its hundreds of music venues, turns into a giant mega-venue for something like 1500 bands (that was the ‘08 number). You plan your day around some bigger acts, and then wander in and out of bars to various other things with a hundred gazillion of your closest friends from all over the world. By the way, Australia, you’ve disappointed me. I expect Australians to be fitter and more tan. But then again, musicians don’t tend to be the outdoorsy types.

While wandering through the increasingly trash-covered streets, mai waifu spied a flyer announcing THE GEEKS from AKIHABARA TOKYO. This was, needless to say, both intriguing and slightly frightening. So when midnight rolled around, we made our way to the Irish pub, which if you ask me is the perfect setting in which to see a Japanese band.

It was kind of intimate, considering no one had heard of them, but the crowd all had big grins on their faces as the four young rockers blasted through some pop-punk cover tunes (Green Day’s “Basket Case” when we walked in). After that, they threw out a bunch of original songs, still pop-punk but with a little more complexity and “pop.”

I gotta say, these guys rocked the house. They jumped around, they posed for cameras, they stood on railings, and taught all the Americans how to say “saiko” and do their hand gesture (one part devil horns, one part middle finger, and one part… the shocker?).  Whether they were actual geeks, or actually from Akihabara, or whether 10% of Americans got that joke, it doesn’t really matter. They were tight as hell, polished in sound and fashionable looks but with just enough sweaty punk edge. Check out their site at geeks.co.jp or their myspace.

Hopefully tonight I can manage to see Peelander-Z, who are always entertaining.

Sure, I’m an anime fan. But that apparently came as a surprise to some people who knew me, hence the name of my site. One thing that won’t come as a surprise to anyone in “RL”/meatspace/whatever you call this fleshy prison is that I’m a giant music person. I think I have three shelves of anime DVDs (formerly known as “the Gainax section”) but literal rooms full of records and CDs, as well as terabytes devoted to what used to be more CDs and records, freed from their round plastic confines like something out of Lain.

When I first started my music series, I didn’t get a whole ton of response. In fact, the response was pretty much a record low for the blog. But I suppose it was my fault.

The mission statement for this series, written in Esperanto but roughly translating to introduce weaboos to music they wouldn’t normally listen to and almost certainly still won’t is admittedly a bold first step on the bright and shining road to failure. Starting the series with icons of Japanese salaryman-hardcore Gauze didn’t help my case.

would you buy a car from these guys?

But recent forays into the last.fm accounts of fellow anibloggers (like OGT, Martin, and TheBigN) has made me want to revive a little J-music blogging. Reason being, I can scrobble all day long with nothing but Japanese tunes and never intersect with any other anibloggers. I admit, there’s not a lot of actual J-Pop in my collection and I don’t expect everyone to just jump on board with “uber cult band” G.I.S.M. (see above lols) and other classic but probably fringe Japanese bands, but there’s gotta be something amidst gigabytes of mp3s and hundreds of slices of vinyl that you people will not only try but love. So the mission will continue. Also, I could use an excuse to rattle on about Merzbow or Susumu Hirasawa.

anitations – tj_han, Ali Project either has Powerful Daddies or Loves to Suck Cock.

I won’t go too wild on tj_han’s point that “even non-anime viewers think they are trash,” because I think it’d read better without that “non.” Music probably has to be better than the average anisong for other people to pick up on it. I say this as someone who listens to a lot of Japanese tunes but very little anime tuneage. But I probably shouldn’t say it, I tend to get branded a musical elitist when I talk about music of any kind. Let’s just say Ali Project caters to a pretty specialized fanbase.

Whether tj_han is right or not is irrelevant, it’s an opinion thing, but the fact that Ali Project’s songs sound very similar seems pretty obvious in ways I’m surprised lelangir played down. I guess at least that specialized fanbase knows what they’re gonna get.

For extra lulz watch Geass on Adult Swim when they compress the credits into about 20 seconds using computerized speed-up of the Ali Project tune. If Brzezinski is still looking for his sonic weapon, that’ll do it.

Anyway, long story short Ali Project remind me too much of going to the goth club in the 90s when Darkwave was super big before all the goths discovered their nuevo-EBM and retro-synthpop. And I don’t need that.