The end of today all over the sky

[koganbot]

Trying to start a conversation over on poptimists about the new IU video ("Good Day"):

http://community.livejournal.com/poptimists/793519.html

By the way, what would you say are the best IU tracks? I've heard very few of them. I like the one variously translated as "MIA," "Missing Child," and "Lost Child"; and I totally love her live version of "Gee"/"Sorry, Sorry."

Watch on YouTube

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I liked that cover too, but The Marshmallow Song so traumatized me (previous to this convo - I saw it on a screen I happened to be sitting in front of at a... restaurant? bubble tea parlour? I didn't know who the singer was) that I haven't dared to look up more of her stuff. My tolerance for cute/twee is high but my tolerance for burikko is extremely low. XD; If it's not representative I'll check out the rest.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it twee vs. burikko is also an authenticity debate LOLOL

[askbask.livejournal.com]

It's not! You should listen to her new single Good Day, and the album tracks on her new mini-album, none of which come close to sounding like Marshmallow.

[koganbot]

I hadn't run across the term "burikko" until I read your comment (unless you told me about it before, and I forgot). Does "the core meaning of burikko remains that of a woman who displays bogus innocence" (this statement found on the Web here) correspond to what you mean by the term? If so, it most certainly does raise authenticity issues.

I also hadn't heard "Marshmallow" until this very moment. My cultural reading here is poor enough that I can't tell whether the bogusness is on display - like, watch me! I'm being bogus! - or if the basic premise is "Watch her act like a little girl." In any event, I haven't heard enough IU to generalize, but "MIA/Missing Child" is sure different from "Marshmallow": the singing is almost like freestyle in its passion, and in the video IU is menaced by bleached-white gollums who seem to have escaped from the haunted dance club of Laura Branigan's "Self Control" and are now inhabiting a contaminated, frigid forest. I suppose that one could take IU to represent "innocence threatened" in the video (I can't tell you anything about the lyrics), but it's not particularly girlishness or sweetness that's represented, just vulnerability.

I'm sure Mat's right about the unrepresentativeness of "Marshmallow," and that there's plenty of promise in this budding star, with no predetermined path necessarily laid out for her. (Not that "Marshmallow" shows no talent, mind you.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I don't remember mentioning it before but very well could have: IMO it's an essential concept for understanding Asian pop since the 80s, insofar as it involves constructs of femininity/girlishness/cuteness, not to mention idol culture.

The IU PMV (yes, I put myself through it again!) does rather enter the realm of conscious artifice - burikko suru, per the book you linked, a gender performance, related to camp (if Nicki Minaj performed this set of physical movements in a music video I suspect we'd read it as camp). IU is in actual male drag for part of this, notably. I'm not sure whether the campiness is intentional, given that her audience seems very aware this is not "the real her", or if the whole attempt was just a bit faily on the part of her label XD; (apart from the song which is genuinely if annoyingly catchy).

I went and watched some vintage Matsuda Seiko vids, since she is still the gold standard in matters burikko, and she was a lot more subtle about it - still very controlled, even though she makes it look natural. To me the semiotics of this body language aren't even "burikko" so much as they are "pop idol". If I were playing charades this is how I would convey "idoru": elbows tucked close, toes pointed in, head tilted forward or to the side, poodle-skirt-flouncing side sway. Although that could just be the 80s, the side sway was really widespread.



Some of this stuff was codified long before Western pop. (The kimono is designed to promote the elbows-and-toes-pointed-in stance.) My $0.02 theory is that there was some sort of perfect-storm collision with whatever it was in the water globally during the 80s that produced early Kylie (very cute, although not burikko), early Mylene Farmer (burikko made perverse, but terrible at it all the same), and... yeah. The French are culturally prone like the Japanese, but the focus is more "underage" than "cute", there. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vanessa Paradis, Alizee.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Matsuda Seiko also had (has - it hasn't changed at all) the Voice, an aspect that was entirely natural to her as far as I can tell.

Also, I ended up watching SNSD's live cover of "I'm Your Girl", in which they actually do S.E.S.'s dance, as far as I can tell. Which is very different from SNSD's normal choreography, being a product of the Max Martin teen-girls-in-giant-cargo-pants era. (S.E.S. was contemporaneous to and probably had the same listenership in Asia as M2M, though you can probably tell that from the song itself.)

[koganbot]

I hadn't thought I'd heard of S.E.S. until this very moment, though my browsing history says that I've listened to their version of "I'm Your Girl" (one of you all must have embedded it for me at some point). Definitely need to explore more.

I hear M2M in the sound, all right, though M2M didn't have the dance or the hip-hop. (The vid does include hired dancers, however; covering the bases, I guess.) My sense of M2M is likely distorted by subsequent events, the American teen confessional that they foreshadowed*, but they carried with them an air of being complicated girls who wrote poetry and kept diaries, which is probably exactly what they were. Don't know if that aspect was a big thing for their Asian audience, or if there was a contemporary Asian teenpop equivalent, or if the image of the teen poetry girl was included in the Korean girl groups. Wouldn't be surprised if it was.

*I also wouldn't be surprised if the words to Avril's "Complicated" were inspired by Marit's verse on "Give A Little Love," except Avril had to go and make things less complicated:



Did Hoku ever get much of an Asian audience? She was kind of halfway between the poetry girls and the dancing girls (though she's not on the writing credits)(and perhaps the main reason I associate her with M2M is that Chuck Eddy put both her and them on a mixtape he made for me in 2000).

[koganbot]

If I'd just listened to Matsuda Seiko without looking she'd have reminded me of the early '60s American girl group singers, the Ronettes and such, many of whom dressed like bad girls in their time (which was about when Matsuda Seiko was born). There's little in the arrangement and the style - until the synthpop song at the tail end - to tell me that this music is the '80s and not 1962.

Her singing is excellent. But is her innocence bogus? The performances seem fundamentally straightforward, though of course the frilliness is a form of dress-up (i.e., I don't assume those are what she wears on the street). But "dressed-up" doesn't mean "bogus." It does, I suppose, indicate a choice, that since you can don the role, you can take it off, too. But I wouldn't say I see that in the Seiko vids, that she could easily choose not to look like that. I mean, how you look onstage doesn't match how you look at funerals, which doesn't match what you look like in the grocery store, but that doesn't mean you necessarily feel that you can hop from style to style within each of those particular environs, once you've established a style.

I'm struggling here with a concept I don't grasp intuitively.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The perception of bogusness w/r/t Seiko has to do with the context at the time - there was something of a divide between the popular singers who behaved cutely/girlishly, versus the ones who did not. In particular, Nakamori Akina was set up as Seiko's rival and ideological opposite: a mature-sounding, sophisticated, "real" singer (powerful vocalist) and "real" woman (ownership of her sexuality). I mean, if you just look at their song titles, Seiko's are all "Sparkly Angel Kisses" and Akina's are all "Passionate Tears of Desire" or whatever. And the Akina type of "mature" female singer has a longer history in Japan - enka, as troisroyaumes mentioned - so it was the Seiko type that needed a new word in the 80s.

The kicker is that Seiko was the one who was nakedly careerist - that is, she refused to retire after marriage, which for Japan at the time was as outre as Madonna. She dated celebrities. She had extramarital affairs. She dated foreigners who wrote tell-all books. In a major Debbie-Liz, Jen-Angelina moment, she stole Akina's boyfriend, and Akina attempted suicide. Somehow her career survived all this.

(If anything there is a lesson for Taylor Swift here, both in terms of who she seems to be as a person and how she's perceived - and how ppl assume she wants/is trying to be perceived.)

[koganbot]

I'd have thought of Mylène Farmer as bogus sophistication, not bogus innocence, though the only videos I've seen of hers are "Libertine" and "Désenchantée." She is playing a kid in the latter, but not necessarily an innocent (I think we're expected to go "oh, poor thing!" at the start; but urchins are supposedly wised-up, not innocent, except in the sense of "not guilty"). I actually think "Désenchantée" is a great song. The videos for that and "Libertine" strike me as very good, but also unbelievably kitsch, with a sense of shameless opportunism. I really don't know if we're expected to be taken in by them or expected to play along with them, as if we're in on the game. I probably don't understand France any more than I understand Korea. I thought the point of Alizee's "Moi Lolita" was that she was underage but not innocent. Merely underage. (Which is what you're saying, right?) I guess she could be "innocent" in the sense that 'cause she's young she gets to be careless, maybe.

I remember Vanessa Paradis' attempt at an American LP coming across as just plain stupid, with possibly the worst version of "Femme Fatale" in history. However, although there's an air of knowingness and risk about Farmer's "Libertine" video that I find completely phony - knowingness that's not supported by any knowledge - at the same time I'm impressed by its gall. It has a kind of reach. I don't hate it at all, not in the way that I hate the knowing tone of the average snide rock critic, which is just small and crabbed.

I guess that "Libertine" was an actual risk, in that Farmer hadn't had any big hit up to that moment, so she and Boutonnat were rolling the dice bigtime on "Libertine," with everything in the pot.

Is there a word for bogus sophistication, not the sort of sophistication that's merely phony, but sophistication that knows and tells you it's phony?

Mary Martin's original "My Heart Belongs To Daddy" strikes me as bogus innocence and bogus sophistication, the innocence of course being a self-conscious put-on, whereas I don't know if Porter et al. were aware of how silly the "sophistication" was, though maybe he knew that it was innocuous underneath, just a gesture towards worlds of complication that his songs didn't actually deliver. Don't think that that kind of knowingly naughty "innocence" is what you mean by "burikko" anyway, but I'm not sure if you're saying that when it comes across as a donned "innocence" that we're in on, that it's burriko, but that when it crosses over into camp it's a failure. And do we need necessarily to be in on it?

IU seems plausibly girlie, whether she's playing dress-up or not; whereas Orange Caramel are dressing as if they stepped from the pages of a pre-schooler's picture book, young women in their very late teens in costume as little dolls. But not camp, as far as I can tell, though I'm not sure why I say it isn't. And I guess scores or maybe hundreds of performers are doing the same thing, though my ignorant impression is that most of them are Japanese, not Korean. It's kind of off-putting - well, not that I necessarily react against it so much as I almost have no reaction to it at all, other than "I don't quite get it." And that's not how the Orange Caramels dress when they're in After School.

[askbask.livejournal.com]

One of the Orange Caramel-members is in fact not in her teens at all anymore. It's odd, because they almost have a supermodel look to them with their long legs, and it just seems grotesque to put them in cheap girly Halloween costumes.

I disagree with more than a few things in this recent commentary on k-pop vs j-pop idols - http://neojaponisme.com/2010/12/09/2010-k-idols-vs-j-idols/ - mostly when he tries and fails to talk about the music, but he does observe real differences in presentation:

"The Japanese industry has always told us that consumers like barely-trained, not-too-good-looking, off-pitch idols" and the idea of idol group members as the 'average girl' or as he says "little sister", ie no j-idol who dresses like Orange Caramel's Nana looks like Orange Caramel's Nana.

[(Anonymous)]

One of the problems I have with scholarly articles about Japanese culture (pop most likely), is that they use a series of concepts to examine a culture that is, at least lately, immersed in feedback with their own references, creating micro-niches and micro-variations on themes and riffs already overexploited for decades, and that those concepts are so general as to feel like empty containers or a bit like using dated slang to refer maybe the same things the younger generation are doing, but with new traditions, memes, senses, etc. (Another problem I have with them is how most of them doesn’t value at all the cultures they are talking about (skips the idols, they are empty, let’s talk about mainstream artists with real contents that I happen to like!). Oh, and another one: everyone in Japan is a pervert, so if there are examples of cultural trends that are quite extreme (like shotakon or eleven-years old gravure DVDs), everything that could be identified with those extreme examples are softer expressions of the dark truth).

There is manga, “Bakuman” about a couple of guys that want to become mangakas and each time that they are pitching a new idea, they explain how the conventions of every genre are used (like when they explain the love story that triggers all the plot the manga is going to have, like “Bakuman”). If anybody is interested on that, I can put some examples from there. If not, you only need to check some conventions from this video. I don’t really know why they do this, but when I tried to learn the writing, maybe had some glimpse of how they are accustomed to think that way (different “drawings” combine themselves to form new meanings, new words (always with the same sounds)).



I only heard once before the term burikko. It was in a quite repellent moe-oriented website that usually publishes polls about what boys hate girls doing or the reverse one. Usually they are mortifying, narrow minded and are mere excuses for quite colourful commentary about gender, the country and the rest. So one of the things guys hated was that the girl pretended to be cute, that she was burikko. Having in mind that as mentioned, that website is quite found on a very particular form of cuteness (moe), that usually derives in all sort of sexual fantasies about moe characters, maybe is a misuse of the term “burikko” and what is acceptable for them is not so much for society. The most known example of moe anime right now.





These girls are Onyanko Club. They are acting like teenagers but the lyrics are talking about having sex and taking off their school uniforms. So there is a divergence between the presentation and the contents.

[(Anonymous)]

These girls are AKB48 doing a medley from idol songs from the 80’s included the one before (the guy that write the lyrics for their songs is the same guy that wrote for Onyanko Club but I think that sex is presented in a different light in this group). With each song, they adopt the style of their original performers. You can even check some surprised faces between them when they start with the last one. My theory is that current idol groups play with the conventions of cuteness as a way of presenting themselves, not necessarily in ironic ways, but like things that they have to do because that is what their audience wants.



The same girl criticising one girl (age 23) every time that she acts as a little girl and at the end presenting herself as a cute girl (her real image is closer to the first one). When some of the main girls graduated from high-school they said that starting that day they were “cosplaying” each time they were in the group (because the school uniforms are not part of their own life anymore). So if some girl always does this cute image, is just an accepted way of presenting themselves or acting as an archetype (like the yankee one, the bad guy that has a way of walking, sitting, talking, etc.). Again, AKB48 girls going yankee for the opening credits of their own dorama “Majisuka Gakuen”.



These girls are Ebisu Muscats. Most of them are pornstars. The song obviously is mocking some ideas about innocence and idols (because you know, they are “used” and the banana is the banana and the mango is…). Funny thing, it only works because they adhere to the idol genre conventions. The thing is that they are not mocking their own cuteness in the way they present themselves (check their third single, the PV has some sort of documentary feel about it: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xft9d0_yyyyyyyy-yyyyyy-pv_music), just the excess of artificiality that comes out of nowhere. Anyway I’m going to read that article that was linked above (found a PDF copy). Like I said above, never tried to make much sense of it, because everything else in show business over there falls inside of some image container according to age, sex, etc.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking of an even earlier Mylene Farmer (I wouldn't have said "Libertine" and later was part of this debate - she figured out the sexiness that worked for her, which has nothing to do with innocence bogus or otherwise, and stuck with it). "Maman a tort" and "Plus grandir", more like. Those are some fucked up videos. But that first album was not bad musically. And of course, there's a strand of Japanese goth (visual kei) rock that took both the earlier and later templates and ran with them very, very far indeed.

I'm tempted to say all French "sophistication" comes off as bogus sophistication to American tastes, but that's me jumping ahead unsupported to the epigram. XD For the most part I see classic-period Mylene Farmer videos as over-the-top spectacle, theatre, in which she's an actress playing a role - sometimes seductress, sometimes ingenue, but even when she's ingenue the audience remembers she was the seductress last time. That sort of "which Madonna/Gaga are we getting today" curiosity, if Madonna/Gaga had more of a Kate-Bush-ian offbeatness. (Mylene's offbeatness being more intentional than Kate Bush's.)

Vanessa Paradis: again only in reference to her debut ("Joe Le Taxi"), in which she was simply an unadorned, slightly gawky teenaged girl wearing realistic street clothes, singing a song. And so was Alizee in "Moi Lolita", appearance-wise; and the tATu of the early singles. The latter two examples being deliberate, styled not to evoke an ideal of burikko girlishness but a more authentic actual-young-girl-ness appealing to, I dunno, the more realism-inclined dirty old man. The Ur-video-girl in France almost certainly being the Charlotte Gainsbourg of "Lemon Incest".

[koganbot]

Reposting the vid (assuming this is the one you meant):

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