The Big Fat Chip On My Shoulder
15 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Serious Side
Happy New Year!
Well, now that that’s out of the way, ahaha…
There’s been a draft post in my queue for over 2 years that I could never bring myself to finish nor to post. It’s just too personal. But, as I enter my mid-mid-life crisis in the last 9 months of my 20s (TT^TT), I figured I should go ahead and put it out into the aether, let come what may.
This post is a bit disjointed, because it is but the tip of an iceberg that’s been in my mind for 10 years. I think the point I ultimately want to make is that humans judge each other based on looks, and we should accept this fact and be honest about it.
And so, on to it!
The biggest lie I’ve been told is “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.” I grew up thinking that I’d be judged on my character and actions, not how I looked. I think the tenacity with which I held on to this belief, and lived honestly and diligently, was really a defense mechanism for what my subconscious knew and feared all along: we’re judged by our looks. I couldn’t verify it through personal experience though, since I always looked the same.
Enter 2005.
While I’ve been obese ever since my family immigrated to the United States in the late 80s, my weight peaked my senior year in high school. After a return to my usual weight, in my senior year in college I went up to my heaviest again: 235 pounds. At 5’6, that put my BMI nearly at 38. Upon graduating, I decided to make a change. Both fortunately and unfortunately, it took 9 months for me to find and get a job. In those 9 months, I embarked on a lifestyle change. Through proper sleep, calorie counting, and daily exercise (so much easier to do when you’re unemployed), I lost 40 pounds. I was pretty happy with my accomplishment, and was ready to keep going, shooting for a weight of 150 pounds. But then, I started noticing something.
People were so much nicer to me.
Not just strangers, but friends and family also, and eventually, my new coworkers. It was eerie. I wasn’t acting any differently. I didn’t really have more confidence in myself; as far as I was concerned, I wasn’t even at the half-way point yet. Yet there it was. People were acknowledging my existence, and taking me seriously before I even displayed any specialized knowledge, for the first time in my life.
I remembered having experienced something similar when a friend of mine plucked my eyebrows sophomore year in high school at a sleep over. Without any tweezing, I have a unibrow and my eyebrows completely obscure my brow bone. I didn’t see anything particularly wrong with this, that was just the way I was. When I got home from the sleepover and looked in the mirror, all I saw was a stranger. I felt completely phony with that new face, and couldn’t wait for my eyebrows to grow back. But when I went to school the next day, I got so many approving comments and glances. I thought to myself, “Who knew people cared this much about eyebrows?”
I let my eyebrows grow back, but when I started college, I thought, “maybe I should pluck ‘em after all.” At first I’d do it every now and then. Eventually, it became a weekly ritual.
If ever I’m complimented on a physical trait, it’s on how straight my eyebrows are. I haven’t seen my natural face in 10 years.
Just as I was experiencing a new level of social acceptance having reached 190 pounds, life got complicated. Late 2007 through summer 2008 was the worst year of my life. I dreaded going to work. I had the crappiest coworkers ever. There were arguments, which nearly came to blows, meetings, disciplinary actions, pregnancies, and lots of yelling and crying. It seemed the people I worked with were hellbent on turning life into an episode of Maury. I was angry every single day but felt the pressure to keep it together, to maintain a shred of sanity in that circus. But the stress got to me: I gained back 20 pounds. And once again, I became invisible.
I haven’t really recovered from that. I’ve been stuck between 200 and 215 for 3 years. One day I came across this interview with Jennifer Hudson where she echoed my feelings exactly: “You never know you’re being discriminated against until you see what you’re being deprived of.” I thought, “So it’s not just me trippin’.”
It’s become a huge chip on my shoulder. I’ve read many a weight loss success story where the person comments on how they get better treatment. But that’s all they say. My immediate question is, “Doesn’t that make you angry?”
I once overheard a coworker say to her boyfriend, “You wouldn’t have dated me when I was chubby.” I don’t remember the guy’s reply, and I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop so I just kept on walking, but I thought, “How can you date him while knowing that?”
I remember reading an advice column, where a man wrote in saying that he lost all attraction to his wife after she gained a lot of weight. He loved her and was afraid of hurting her feelings, but he just couldn’t take it anymore. The advice columnist replied that he should think about her health instead, and express his concern for that rather than the wife’s size. I thought, “But isn’t that a lie? When it’s that special hubby-wife time, the man isn’t gonna bust out the wife’s medical charts to get turned on by her low cholesterol and good blood pressure, he’s gonna be looking at her body.” I’ve since read many other magazine and newspaper articles, online and off, and readers’ comments on those, that urge people to think about “health,” but more often than not I get the feeling that “health” is just a euphemism for what people really want: “looking thin.”
But as in the example with the eyebrows, there’s more to looks than weight. Today, what perhaps prompted me to finally get these thoughts out of my head, was a friend posting this article to Facebook, and the ensuing comments about “women need to learn to love their bodies, no matter what size,” “Real women have curves!,” etc.
I looked through the editorial, and indeed, while I think the plus size model in the spread is more beautiful than the average thin fashion model, the spread didn’t make me feel any better about my own body because:
- She has been photographed to showcase sexiness – notice the 3-4 inch heels on her otherwise naked body
- She is shown as having perfect skin
- She is shown as having no body hair
- She is shown as having perfect teeth
- She has been perfectly made-up and coiffed
- She is posed in ways that accentuate “womanly” fat, but hide “ugly” fat
The message I get is, “It’s okay to be plus size, so long as you’re perfect in every other way. And sexy. Be sexy.”
Well, that’s a huge FAIL for me.
I have frizzy hair that can only be tamed by hot metal. I’m hairy all over and it takes hours of shaving and tweezing just to get to something approaching a “womanly” level of hair. I have acne. The gaps between all of my front teeth up to my molars are so huge nothing can get stuck between them.
All of these “flaws” could be taken care of with cosmetics or cosmetic surgery, and loads of time. I already find the amount of time I invest in my appearance to be too much, but I know that I would be utterly invisible if I didn’t to at least this much. That’s the kind of beings humans are. Not just strangers, but friends also. Not just friends, but family also.
I don’t want to hear anyone tell me to just “accept myself and be happy.” That’s how I was for years. When I first heard the concept of “self-esteem” it was really weird for me, because the concept of thinking about oneself at all had never occurred to me. I was a kid who just went through life playing and learning. I believed it when I was told that it was what was on the inside that counts and kept going, giving not a single care to my appearance. All I did was throw on some jeans, a t-shirt, and put my hair in a ponytail. As long as I was clean and neat, that’s all that mattered, right?
I don’t think I’ve ever made a bigger mistake in judgement. I realize that now.
I tried explaining this to a friend once. The friend totally didn’t get it. It went something like this:
Friend: You really do have such great eyebrows.
Me: Hahaha, only after tweezing them like hell.
Friend: Whatever, some people can’t get that even with tweezing.
Me: You know, I actually hate getting complimented on that.
Friend: Why?
Me: Because it’s the only thing people ever say to me. People say “I love your eyebrows,” and I think, “Thanks, you just made me feel like shit.”
Friend: Oh, you’re so negative!
I was blown away by this complete lack of understanding. I got the Spinning Beach Ball of Death in my brain and couldn’t explain clearly what I meant. Only later did I realize what I should have said:
“People never compliment me on anything other than my eyebrows. Sometimes I’ll get complimented on an article of clothing, but it’s never ‘that looks good on you,’ it’s ‘that’s a cool piece.’ In other words, what’s being complimented isn’t me, it’s the item. Same thing with the eyebrows. Imagine living your whole life hearing other people get told, ‘you’re so cute,’ ‘you’re beautiful,’ ‘you’re handsome,’ but all you ever get is ‘this one little part of you is great!’ Wouldn’t that make you feel kinda crummy?”
Well, wouldn’t it?
And I hate it when people try to show that they get it after you’ve called them out on it. It’s the fat version of “I have black friends.” They’ll go out of their way to show that they like fat artists, or fat actors. Ha! What a joke.
I sometimes ask myself, “If I had a daughter, what would I tell her about all this?” I think I would tell her the conclusion I’ve come to. That people do judge based on looks. That you will make some friends, and not make others, based on how you look. That looks are trivial when it comes to choosing a life-long mate, but if you don’t even feel like approaching someone in the first place, could you even get to that stage? That having intelligence, skill, and a good character are important, but that doesn’t mean that appearances aren’t. That people should neither be consumed by a quest for beauty, nor ignore the issue completely. That I wish this weren’t the case, but it is.
L’amour (Or A Lack Thereof)
26 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in Light-Hearted Side Tags: Gackt, iTunes Music Library, My Bloody Valentine
Songs: 92
Albums Represented: 48
Albums Complete in Library: 3
Finally we come to the Ls, where resides an album that I’ve brought up so many times before that I don’t need to say anything else about it.
Well, how to pick a track to represent My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless? With tracks that melt into each other, it’s hard to recommend just one.
Wait…I think that my very first post on this blog was about MBV! *Goes to check*
Ah, it wasn’t my first post, but it was an early post: It’s time to play, “What are they saying?!”
“Only Shallow” is definitely one of my fave tracks on the album. Another one is “To Here Knows When,” which also happens to have a video.
Last, I’ll share one of my favorite GACKT tracks. It came up in the L’s because it was the b-side to the track “Lost Angels.” It’s the hauntingly beautiful song “Suddenly.” I’m pretty sure we’re meant to understand the person singing as a woman, something I didn’t really pick up on until I watched the Requiem et Reminiscence II Final DVD and GACKT was being so femme during this song. But when I saw that, I felt like an idiot for not noticing it sooner given the style of the lyrics. Anyway, here it is, from that same DVD, which I highly recommend and is available legitimately from CD Japan.
♡
A Nice Reliant Music Sampling
19 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in Light-Hearted Side Tags: iTunes Music Library, Killer Cuts, Killer Instinct, Kingdom Hearts
Songs: 77
Albums Represented: 19
Albums Complete in Library: 3
The K’s turned out to be a short bunch. Of these 77 tracks, a good chunk were from video games. Usually when I think of video game music in my music library, my mind goes straight to the hoard of Castlevania and Final Fantasy tracks. But there were two games represented in the K’s: Killer Instinct and Kingdom Hearts.
In the F’s I wrote that Keiko Matsui’s Full Moon and the Shrine was my first ever CD. I guess it was in the sense that it was the first CD I had all to myself. However, if items owned by the children as a whole count, then my first CD would be the Killer Instinct soundtrack Killer Cuts, which came packaged together with said 1995 SNES fighting game. Back then, the graphics and sound on this game were unbelievable. I was a bit surprised by some of the vocals that were added to the BGM for the CD (what’s with the moaning on “K.I. Feeling”? @_@) but overall I still love this soundtrack. My favorite piece is definitely Cinder’s theme “Trailblazer.”
Haha, actually, one time a student was falling asleep in class, a boy sitting right up front too, and since I had my computer and speakers out for use in the lesson, I quietly warned the class that I was about to play some really loud rock music to try to jolt the sleeper. I played this track. The class thought it was hilarious, but Sleeping Beauty didn’t budge. ^o^; (For those who care to know, my sonic attack having failed, I put a snowman plushie on the student’s shoulder. What can I say? I think mild humiliation has a place in education. >o<;)
Now, going in the opposite musical direction…
I bought the Kingdom Hearts soundtrack for two songs: Hikaru Utada’s “Simple and Clean” and “Dearly Beloved.” The latter is the under 2-minutes piece that plays, if I remember correctly, only on the load screen. Sometimes I would turn the game on and let it just loop over and over before actually continuing my game. Perhaps “Simple and Clean” would’ve served better as the title to “Dearly Beloved”!
Justify My Music Library
06 Dec 2011 2 Comments
in Light-Hearted Side Tags: iTunes Music Library
Songs: 63
Albums Represented: 12
Albums Complete in Library: 0
I want to share three songs from the J-titled albums.
First, from one of the first ever non-bootleg CDs of Japanese music that I was able to buy in the U.S., Japan for Sale Vol. Two, comes “yume no nakae — malted milk mix” by Dt. Nice and tripped out track. The pics in this particular YT upload are unrelated to the song, but it has good sound quality. Well, I think it’s the only upload of the song on YT, barring usage without tags.
Ha…come to think of it, I bought that CD at Borders, which went out of business recently. *Sigh*
Well…speaking of using songs in YT videos without tagging the song title, that takes me to my second song to share, an electronica remix of GACKT’s song “Journey through the Decade,” included with this song’s single. It was labelled “J.t.D Re-mix RIDE ‘Distort’” on the CD. I used it as the background music for my photo video about Seoul. You can hear it starting from 3:03 in this video.
Last, comes the collection Just Say Sire: The Sire Records Story, which is probably the only time I’ve bought music after reading a review of it. Well, really, when I read the review, I was already familiar with many of the artists on said record label. But even as a young teenager, I had barely begun paying attention to who sang what. Thinking about the role that record labels play in what music gets heard was a whole ‘nother topic that I had never given much thought to. So when I read the review for The Sire Records Story and saw that it included artists as diverse as Madonna, Echo & The Bunnymen, Seal, Talking Heads, My Bloody Valentine, The Cult, and Depeche Mode, to name a few, I was intrigued.
I’m going to cheat a little here and share a track that’s on the DVD of The Sire Records Story, and therefore, not in my iTM Library. *Sneaky sneaky*
Does anybody else think that the very first shot of the singer looks an awful lot like Vampire Hunter D as illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano?
Gravity-bound Plasma
06 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in Light-Hearted Side Tags: iTunes Music Library
In other words, a star.
The title of this blog post is dedicated to the song “Stars” by Dubstar from their album Goodbye, the only complete album I have in the G’s. Dubstar, and this song in particular, is another group that I discovered through the now long defunct radio show Big Sonic Heaven.
I really like the lyrics to the song, and when I heard it, the line that caught my attention the most was “Is it asking too much / of my favorite friends / to take these songs for real?” At the time, it stood out to me because I had been hanging out with people, or driving around in their cars, and noticing how many people turned music on, then turned it down, and talked over it. I remember thinking, can you really say you like music if that’s how you listen to it, as background noise for the conversation? What’s the point?
Anyway, here’s the video for the song, which, before looking it up to put it in this post, I had actually never seen before, since this came out in 1997 (I discovered it more around 1999 or 2000), pre-YouTube, and my family didn’t have cable.
Wow. It’s more “Cute Artsy Fartsy” rather than the “Dark Artsy Fartsy” I had been imagining all this time, ahaha.
This time, I’ll end with the stats:
Songs: 140
Albums Represented: 30
Complete Albums: 1
The Post Wherein I Realize I Don’t Know My ABC’s
27 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: iTunes Music Library
Ahahaha…so, I have a confession to make: I’ve fallen way behind on chronicling my iTunes Music Challenge. Now, because I’ve been deleting tracks after going through them, I’ve been making draft blog posts that contain just the specs (number of songs, complete albums, etc) pre-deletion. I had the drafts containing only this basic information for the G, H, and I albums in my draft queue. Today, I thought, “lemme bust these posts out right quick.” I see the draft titles: “Incomparable,” “Heavenly,” and “Great.” But I pick “Incomparable” anyway when I should’ve worked on “Great.” >o<;;;
I’m sure there’s a way I could remove the post and stick it back in later, but I don’t feel like doing all that. So there’s just gonna be a little hiccup in my alphabetical order.
A B C D E F I H G…
LOL
Well then, let’s keep going! The H albums!
Songs: 101
Albums Represented: 22
Complete Albums: 4
Hmm, what to share? Something a little embarrassing perhaps?
Well well, there’s only that then.
As I chronicled over at my job-specific blog, the students of the school I used to work at have to put on a play in English for Culture Festival. My first year there, they did High School Musical 2, and my second year, they did Camp Rock.
Now, I had a passing awareness of HSM’s existence, and hadn’t even heard of Camp Rock. When the kids had decided to do HSM2, I watched the movie to be able to help them better. Suffice it to say I ended up wishing my students had picked something else.
So, how did this music end up on my computer? Long story short, I had to edit the tracks to make them shorter for the play, which had to fit in at most an hour. None of the kids knew how to do this, so I offered to do the editing. Not that I’m a pro sound engineer, but I’ve got GarageBand and can do simple stuff. I kept the edited versions of the tracks for both plays on my computer just in case the students lost the CD, or for future reference. But when I was transferred schools, I got rid of most of them. Meaning, I had actually ended up enjoying some of those tracks! *Embarrassed*
Well, they are lively, catchy tracks, but I think for me, I just associate the tracks with English Play and the whole experience over at my old school. So when I hear these songs, I don’t think of Zac Efron so much as I do of my former students. I even remember their choreography, LOL.
So here’s my guilty teeny-bopper pleasure: “I Don’t Dance” from High School Musical 2! XDDD
Techno Keeps My Mind In Check
27 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
in Light-Hearted Side Tags: iTunes Music Library
Stats for the I albums:
Songs: 81
Albums Represented: 30
Complete Albums: 0
Not a single complete album out of 30?! Wow. Well, in the case of the ones that come close, I actually do own the CDs, I just didn’t like every single track on the albums and didn’t import them all. The albums that I have in near completion in my laptop’s iTunes Music Library are Madonna’s Immaculate Collection and My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything.
In the I’s we find a track I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of, not because I’m listening to it, but because I’m ignoring it.
I had said in the very first post of this Challenge Series that I don’t put music on to ignore it. I had forgotten about one special occasion where I do, in fact, turn music on so as not to listen to it: when I’m studying kanji or checking tests. Well, it’s a little unfair to say that I’m “ignoring” the music, since it serves a very important purpose.
What I ended up discovering was that if I tried to study kanji or check tests in complete silence, I would either space out, or start doing the practice/ reading the answers out loud, which inevitably would lead to going on monologue tangents and spacing out. Not very productive at all. However, if I play lyricless, repetitive music, it helps me check my wandering brain. Basically, without music, I’ll be distracted by any errant thought or external stimuli. But if there’s music, when my mind wanders, it goes straight to the sound at hand, which ends up reminding me to focus. I had actually discovered a similar principle in my school days; if I drew in class, it would help me mentally stay in the room if a lecture wasn’t interesting; if I didn’t draw, I’d tune out the teacher’s voice and go off on all sorts of mental adventures.
Yeah, so basically I’m a space cadet but have developed effective techniques for combating this. (I wonder if I actually have some sort of high-functioning ADD sometimes, LOL.)
Anyway, one of the 400+ tracks my aforementioned friend had given me is actually a whole disc compiled as one track, disc 1 of Tiësto’s In Search of Sunrise 6: Ibiza. Since I hadn’t really thought of it as being composed of all its individual tracks, I can’t say I have a favorite part of it. So what I will suggest is that if, like me, you need a sonic barrier to keep your mind from leaving the Milky Way, that you turn to the playlists on Tiësto’s official YouTube channel.
Hmm, I hope that doesn’t come across as an insult. ^_^;
Finite F’s
13 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
in Light-Hearted Side Tags: iTunes, iTunes Music Library, Keiko Matsui
Songs: 128
Albums Represented: 35
Complete Albums: 3
The bulk of the tracks from albums in the F’s are definitely Final Fantasy tracks. Mostly just FFVII and its spin-offs, but also a few from FFs IV, V, VIII, IX, and XIII. But, I don’t think it’s particularly necessary to promote FF’s music, especially not the track that is my favorite, “Advent: One-Winged Angel.”
Whoops, I went and promoted it anyway. >o<;
I don’t like the Advent Children Complete version as much, because it has a long pause for the scene that I really wish hadn’t been added to that fight.
Alright, might as well bring up my favorite FF track that isn’t super famous. Out of all the airship themes in the seven main FF games I’ve played, FFVIII definitely wins with “Ride On.” I used to fly around aimlessly in the Ragnarok just to hear it! And the Ragnarok is definitely my favorite FF airship. It’s just cool. Honestly, the whole “boats flying in the air” thing always seemed mighty ridiculous to me. ^_^;
Last, I’ll end with a track from my very first CD ever. Keiko Matsui’s Full Moon and the Shrine, from 1998. I fell in love with the track “Steps in the Night” when I heard it on Smooth Jazz V98.7. This was the first time in my life that I felt that I should have an official recording, not just my taped-off-the-radio copy. (I had amassed quite an army of music taped off the radio by then, ahaha.) My brother gave me the album as a birthday gift, but I didn’t even have a CD player! I would play it in his CD player until I got my own CD player 2 years later.
The album also came with a digital copy of the music video for the title track, but my family didn’t have a computer back then. I didn’t get to see the video until I went to college; one day it occurred to me to try to play the video on the school’s computers. Nowadays, the format of the file is so old none of my Mac computers recognize it. Don’t know if it would still work on a PC.
The first time I came to Japan, when people would ask me what Japanese artists I liked, I would mention Keiko Matsui in addition to GACKT, L’arc~en~ciel, and Hikaru Utada, but barely anyone knew who she was. (That said, my host father in Hiroshima didn’t know who GACKT was, and it amused my host mother so much that a foreigner would know a Japanese artist while a Japanese wouldn’t. ^o^;)
Anyway, the video to “Full Moon and the Shrine” was filmed at the famous Itsukushima Shrine in Hiroshima, and features what look like gagaku dancers. Well, I didn’t know that when I first saw the video, but when I visited Itsukushima Shrine, luck would have it that someone was having their wedding there, complete with gagaku dance and music! They must have been very rich!
Ahaha…
Without further ado, I end with the aforementioned video:
Eclectic E’s
01 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment
in Light-Hearted Side Tags: iTunes, iTunes Music Library
Songs: 129
Albums Represented: 35
Albums Complete in Library: 4
In contrast to the C’s that were dominated by the haunting sounds of Castlevania, and the upcoming F’s which are filled with Final Fantasy, the E’s are just all over the place. From 70s prog rock to the gangsta rap of the 90s, to Mexican diva pop and the shoegazer wall of sound, the E’s had it all.
Let’s just go in the order I laid down there then, shall we?
Last time I went back home, I bought an iTunes Card, then realized that I had to use the balance up before coming back to Japan, since unused balances expire after…6 months I think it was? And you supposedly can’t purchase songs from iTunes Music Stores that are outside of the region you’re accessing from. That’s what the Terms of Service say, but I’ve never tried to see for myself. The threat of being banned from the iTMS for breaching the terms is enough to keep me from trying.
Anyway, I had downloaded all I wanted, and still had credit left over in my American iTMS account. So I asked my brothers if they wanted anything from the iTMS, and one of them requested some songs from Camel.
I immediately thought of cigarettes, even though I don’t smoke. >o<;
I’ve ended up digging many of the tracks I downloaded for my brother, especially “Air Born.”
And now for some gangsta rap!
I was in middle school when Bone Thugs N Harmony were at their peak. I prided myself on being able to keep up with their fast-paced rapping. Now, I’ve always had a sense of humor that gets branded as “dark” or “twisted” by what I’ve come to find out is the mainstream (^_^;;;). Back then, what fascinated me about BTNH was that they rapped so melodiously about the grim subject matter of murder, weed, bitches, and ho’s. Despite growing up in some unsavory parts of Detroit, and witnessing gang violence, sometimes very close to home, I found gangsta rap…hilarious. ^o^; I guess I knew from a young age that swagger’s just a front; if you’ve really got it, you don’t need to flaunt it. The bravado of the petty gangbangers, the ones who dream of getting to the top but end up just shot on the bottom, it was too ironic to take seriously. Likewise, the bravado of gangsta rap was just too funny not to sing along.
This is not to say that petty gangbangers don’t do real damage; there have been countless tragedies in my hometown on account of fools with guns who wanna be hard. What I’m saying is, those people think the gang is the only way for them to get somewhere in life, the only way to beat The Man and The Pigs, but the guys at the top of the gang are taking advantage of them just as much as The System. Perhaps even more so. After all, if you switch jobs, your old company doesn’t come try to shoot you for leaving them. Try to leave the gang and see what happens.
Uh…right, this blog post is supposed to be about music. >o<;;;;;
The BTNH track that everyone thought was too fast for mere mortals to rap: “First of tha Month“
Ah, that’s right, that’s the other thing I found hilarious about gangsta rap: in this song they’re talking about making all this money dealing drugs, but that money is welfare money, money that came in on the first of each month. I remember being in middle school thinking, if you were really rich, and if you were really “runnin’” anything, would you really be dependent on large numbers of poor people buying small amounts of drugs from you with cash they got by selling their food stamps? If you really cared so much about your hood, would you help keep it in destitution?
I think a really naive side of me found gangsta rap hilarious for another reason: I hadn’t yet realized that people actually could be that stupid. So part of the hilarity, in my mind, was the thought that, of course no one would be so dumb as to think the rappers are really praising this lifestyle, because it’s a lifestyle that treats people like shit, so to come up with these rhymes about it and sing them harmoniously was funny.
*Sigh*
Ahaha, moving on…
…to Mexican mega-star Thalía. She’s actually come up in my iTunes Library already, pretty early on with the album Arrasando, which I bought because it included the theme song to the telenovela Rosalinda. I can no longer remember why I picked up her album El Sexto Sentido Re+Loaded. I may just have felt that I didn’t have enough Latin music in my CD collection; or maybe I did watch the reality show Cantando por un Sueño (which is like Pop Idol / American Idol) and liked the song, also titled “Cantando por un Sueño,” and decided to get it. In any case, my favorite track from this album is “Un Sueño Para Dos” (meaning “A dream for two”).
For the shoegazing, there’s My Bloody Valentine’s combined EPs Ecstacy and Wine, where I heard “The Things I Miss.” It takes you to another world in under 3 minutes!
I’ll admit, I learned about MBV indirectly through Final Fantasy VII. The first time I played through FFVII, I saw the Loveless poster in Midgar in the beginning, but I didn’t really pay it much attention. Then I saw on a fansite that the poster said “My Bloody Valentine” on the side, but the fan thought it was just a reference to one of the game’s characters, Vincent Valentine. A web search for “My Bloody Valentine Loveless” revealed what the game’s programmer’s were really getting at.
Back then there wasn’t that much on YouTube YouTube didn’t exist (GASP–I can’t believe YT’s been around only for 6 years! To me it’s an existence before time!) so I didn’t get to hear much of MBV save what I happened to find on some random website. The site listed its contents as coming from a “rarities” album. The MBV covers of Wire’s “Map Ref 41°N 93°W” and Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All The Time In the World” were all I needed to hear to know that I needed to listen to more of the band’s music, and I ordered Loveless off of Amazon eagerly. The rest of their albums and EPs soon followed.
Alright, so that was me eclectically sharing some eclectic albums! ^o^
YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz at Zepp Fukuoka 2011
16 Oct 2011 2 Comments
in Light-Hearted Side Tags: Gackt, YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz, YFC
Last week was the weekend I’d been waiting for for 3 months: the Zepp Fukuoka shows of YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz. Like everyone else, I was curious about the new songs, and how the twin vocalists thing would work out.
While I missed Jun-ji and Chirolyn, I did enjoy the new YFC. I don’t quite understand why there need to be so many guitarists, but some interesting effects can be had by having two vocalists. I thought adding Jon worked well. Of course, this is because GACKT made it so that it would. One of my friends thought that Jon seemed to be trying to upstage GACKT, but I didn’t get that impression.
As for the songs, the track 妄想ガール (Mousou Girl) sure seems like a load of fun, even if the lyrics are a bit iffy. ^o^; I can’t wait for these new songs to come out on CD so I can hear them clearly. Don’t know if it was my ears that were bad, or if the speakers weren’t calibrated properly, but there was a crap ton of white noise that made it really hard to make out GACKT’s voice. His mic might’ve also been on too low.
I don’t like the English version of “Mind Forest,” and I don’t like the addition of new English verses into “EVER,” “Jesus,” and whatever other song had this done to it. Frankly, GACKT’s English pronunciation isn’t good enough, and since Jon felt the need to rhyme the lyrics, these lyrics seemed forced into the melody of the original. I don’t understand why GACKT is doing this; after all, he gained non-Japanese fans with songs in Japanese. There is no need to force English unto these songs to gain more fans abroad. I think it would be better to just write new songs that are in English from the start, such as “The End of the Day.” Especially during “Mind Forest,” I had the original Japanese lyrics playing in my head.
Last year’s Fukuoka crowd was, I thought, way too well-behaved for a rock show. This year, the crowd was more frenetic, but I think it was because there were only 2 nights instead of 4. This year I was also able to get really close on the second night, and apparently there’s a huge difference between the area right in front of the stage, and that just like 7 feet further back. I know some local DEARS members who were up in front who said they were even knocked down to the floor by people’s pushing! There was one girl with dyed blond hair in pigtails who had started out behind my friends and I, but pushed and shoved her way to the front. Now, I’m all for people finding openings and taking advantage of them to move up, but pushing people out of the way is not cool. If she had come my way, I would’ve given her a good elbow to the ribs!
One thing that always bothers me is that encores seem to be taken for granted here. The band leaves the stage, and people wait in silence. Sometimes someone will start up a “YFC!” chant, but it doesn’t last long. I guess since when the band leaves, it isn’t announced that that’s the end of the show, so maybe we’re just supposed to take it as the band taking a break. But I think it’s a corrupted encore. The second night, my friends and I waited about a minute or two, then started up a YFC chant. A few people around us joined in, but for the most part, the crowd waited on in silence.
When the band came back out, at least then the crowd became really loud and lively. GACKT started smiling suddenly, and he said, 「やぱり福岡は違うね」(“As expected, Fukuoka’s different”) and 「この押し方結構好きよ」(“I really like the way you push us on”). They came out much faster this night, and I like to think that it was thanks to my friends and I, who didn’t give up chanting “YFC!” even though barely anyone else joined us. ^o^;
The second night, Shin’ya came out with a big-o fistful of drumsticks to throw into the crowd. The first night, YOU had thrown a cushion into the crowd that looked like it had the members’ signatures on it; but first, he rubbed it on his crotch.
Hm, now I’m just rambling about the different things that happened, so maybe it would be better to stop. >o<;
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