And here’s Patrick, with your daily context…
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Patrick St. Michel: Oh boy, it’s that time of the year again. Starting in the middle of February every year, the Japanese-pop landscape gets swamped with sakura songs, singles aiming to soundtrack that year’s cherry-blossom season (starting in about the middle of March). It’s the type of song Japanese artists have been singing for hundreds of years now — and a style that refuses to change with the time. Sakura songs almost always are ballads focusing on the same subject matter year after year — the cherry blossoms come along at the same time kids graduate school and adults transfer companies, so they always focus on tearful goodbyes and hopes of meeting again someday. AKB48 have released several of these songs in the past, and “So Long!” sounds like all of those previous singles, down to the lyrical content (the title being a giveaway). They also all suck, mournful little ditties worsened by the group’s dozens-of-girls-singing-at-once vocal approach. What especially blows, though, is that AKB48 have spent the last six months releasing the most interesting songs and videos in all of Japan (while also being victims of Japan’s messed-up pop rules). This is a surprisingly forward-thinking music project bending towards woeful traditionalism. Summer can’t come fast enough.
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Edward Okulicz: This is a treacly sakura that evokes the forced goodbyes and we’ll-stay-in-touches of high school graduation, and even the short version of this goes on a bit (the full version is six harrowing minutes). Methinks it’s writer Yasushi Akimoto who should have shaved his head in shame.
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Crystal Leww: Listening to “So Long!”, I am reminded of those songs that American Idol finalists sing while holding hands with each other at the end of the season. It’s a pretty easy song to sing, but everyone is singing together so that nobody’s voice stands out anyway. They are looking at each other and smiling and crying a little bit. The piano sounds like it was produced from a karaoke box. Ahhhh, we are going to miss you all for a week and then go back to our lives.
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Brad Shoup: AKB48’s latest seasons-change anthem has me thinking about America’s relationship to high school. I can’t back it up, but it feels like those were supposed to be our best years for a while: quarterback and mousetrap-car engineer finding common ground, teens standing up to authority, white people getting laid. Now it’s college: 20-somethings finding their true destiny, sheltered kids finally letting loose, white people getting laid. As I’m desperately hoping for a raft of movies and TV shows to assure us that freelancing at 30 is the best time of our lives, I’m utterly befuddled by “So Long!” The bassist does fantastic harmonic work (as well as adding some beef) while our heroines go crazy-major. It’s hard to construct a defense against their massed melodic line, which implies a kind of wisdom no one but a few dropouts have.
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Alfred Soto: From the start I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but even so I don’t oppose twaddle like this on principle (it boasts a mellotron — how can I?). But the harmonizing male vocals aren’t up to the required bombast.
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Anthony Easton: About half way through this, I thought that I put my laptop on my cellphone and the discordant beeping noises were the result of my klutziness. Recognizing they were embedded made the song slightly better. Extra point for the la-la chorus.
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Katherine St Asaph: A J-pop “Graduation (Friends Forever),” maybe destined in three years for a J-pop Pachelbel Rant.
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Scott Mildenhall: For anyone doubting J-Pop’s modernity in the wake of the Minami Minegishi madness this must serve as a riposte, because you don’t get much more bleeding edge than titling a song as an exasperated lament to its playing time. If there’s any opportunity that length does offer (other than the one to make an obvious joke) it’s for at least six massive, dramatic key changes, ones conspicuous by their absence here. It would have been both ludicrous and amazing if those incessant la la las had gone up and up and up instead of just on and on and on, but they don’t. Never mind.
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Frank Kogan:What happened to Minami Minegishi is why I’m here writing about this, even though in a quick Web search I couldn’t find out for sure if she has anything to do with the singing on “So Long!” (I think she’s not on it.) The song itself is bright and full, makes me think of the words “cruise ship” or “travelogue” (the one time I was on an actual cruise ship the music had nothing that sounded like this; actually, all I remember is some guys in grass skirts singing “YMCA”). This is lusher and more powerful than the adjectives “cruise” and “soundtrack” imply, and anyway they obviously don’t apply to how this song is being used in Japan, but nonetheless they are what I hear and can’t shake. The power wears off after a minute as the song continues interminably, the bright singing feeling ever damper and dull as time passes. I really don’t get J-pop. Take my opinion with a grain of salt. As for Minami humiliating and abasing herself, the record company and fans are fully implicated even if it was her own choice to shear off her hair and apologize abjectly. The ignorant and predictable international outrage by people like me seems to be shared by a lot of less ignorant people in J-pop fandom and in Japan; from news reports I gather that many Japanese are angry and embarrassed by the episode. So whatever our motives and smugness and glibness, our outrage may contribute to reassessment, change in the idol system. I don’t think it’ll hurt the system to run into such opposition. I do feel queasy about the way this plays on American news, seeming to mix in with international atrocity pr0n, a gang rape in India, a gang rape in South Africa, 5 polio nurses murdered in Pakistan, 9 polio nurses murdered in Nigeria. All totally legitimate stories, all far more horrifying than what was done to poor Minami, and I click on every one. I just wonder whether the never-ending stream of such stories are a bulwark protecting our own probably undeserved sense of normality. But then, I wouldn’t know how to test whether that is how such stories play here in America where I live, if they are such a bulwark. In the meantime, I refer you to petronia and askbask and AG and anhh and subdee and warthoginrome, whose stake and whose upset are greater than my own.
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