DocumentaLy

Do people really care about Music Station countdowns? I mean, they're really searching for crumbs and trying to make mountains out of them...

What's going on?

Congratulations!

A really good friend of mine left Miami Beach last night and just got to Manhattan. Him and his aunt that lives in Brickell drove straight up 95. They're staying with his cousins / her daughters until everything is done. His apartment is clearly going to be destroyed seeing as how he lives two blocks from the ocean and on the first floor. His street floods during a regular storm.

It's a good song and release.

A fave:

There were genre threads on here, but people just decided to post everywhere instead of just keeping things in the genre threads. It was a good thing though to break things out of the thread. But my thread was going to be more along the lines of "What do you think of when you think of 'JRock'?"

Basically visual kei is dead, and when people say "JRock" now, some people (mainly international fans) think of hard rock acts like ONE OK ROCK and MY FIRST STORY. It's similar in that there is a lot of fawning over the band members due to their looks and less of a focus on the actual music. But then there are some people (mainly people who know what is actaully selling and getting attention in Japan currently) who think of JRock as bands like Sakanaction, Ame no Parade, Kyuso Nekokami, and KANA-BOON, meaning the indie wave that really has become the face of Japanese rock this decade. But I should make a thread about this...

That's just the first set of performers.

When I was on break today, it happened again! Less stuff was stolen. Four items, like $2000.

Both

There is some truth to that.

If I wanted a rush I could die from, I would just do more drugs.

Ohh, I was off for two days and when I went back, it was as if nothing had happened.

I was trying to see her at the Guggenheim a few months ago, and that obviously didn't happen.

The real show of the year though:

Which reminds me: Click here to view the Tweet

They have high sales due to gimmicks, like any other idol act. To look at 200k in album sales by an idol act and think that they have 200k people buying their album is highly erroneous. Only KPop fans care about the generation stuff. The average Japanese person doesn't care about KPop, let alone its generations. Oricon no longer counts foreign sales, but there are ways around this. When I buy physical releases, I have a middleman buy it and then ship it to me and it counts on the chart. One thing to note though is that Kara and SNSD had million selling digital hits, songs that the public actually knew, in addition to their physical sales. TWICE has no digital hits in Japan. They haven't even been in the top 10 digital songs except for the week of their release, and that was just for a few days, not even the weekly chart, if I recall correctly. There is a lot of fuss about TWICE, but a lot of it is inflated. And it's not only KPop fans. The Japanese media is doing it too. In the end, they have high album sales due to gimmicks, and no breakout hit song. That's what happened to everyone in this thread. And age does play a large part in it, contrary to popular belief.

The trashy needs to come back. Even though the idol phase may die, for some reason, I think companies will still pump out idols just to keep international fans happy, in effect maintaining the status quo.

There was more talking about KPop then as far as music. I also feel that back then there was more unity and less fighting because everyone wanted KPop to advance onto the world stage. I feel like it got as far as it was going to a few years ago, and now things have devolved into infighting. It's all about who has the most views, who sold the most, who has the most followers... It wasn't as much like that a few years ago, in part because there were less measures of success. There was a hierarchy everyone knew, but since the veterans are basically all dead, there is a new crop of acts so things are very unstable now as far as the hierarchy goes. And these acts are so focused on international success, more specifically Western success, that they've become more and more Western in terms of music. That's great for fans who are looking for Western music mixed with the idol world that they can't get in the West, but if you don't want that, you're out of luck. I also feel that this change in sound is why KPop won't catch on again in Japan outside of KPop fans, because it's not as if current Western music really succeeds there now. They want something that is a bit diffferent, more rooted in the past and alternative sounds, and KPop just doesn't provide that. Another thing I like about the Japanese industry is that things are pretty much settled, nobody's really rocking the boat, which results in the fandom not fighting each other for supremacy.

I will admit I was messy on forums back in the day, but I was also of age and among the youngest members on a forum full of gay men. It was just typical bitchy gay shit. Nobody was trying to kill themselves though... I was 16 in 2000, so Britney, Christina, Backstreet Boys, N Sync, all that stuff was at its peak. But I was also old enough to follow people like Madonna, Whitney, Mariah, Janet, and so on. But then I was also really into British stuff then too. And then the Japanese stuff came too when that industry was around its peak. With KPop, I was able to see the wave building into what it became. The wave hit really big, but then pleateaued. People always talk about KPop getting bigger, but if anything it's just new fans replacing old fans as opposed to the fandom really growing. Teen culture today is so internet heavy today. It was beginning to become like that when I was a teen, but now it's very much that. Maybe even all that? I feel like now it's very heavy on memes / viral shit, which is something I don't really get. A lot of it is supposed to be humorous, but I don't find these things humorous. By the way, I'm going: I blame KPop.

I honestly like being the age that I am. I couldn't imagine being into the things the youth is into now. And if I think about it, I was a teen at the point where youth culture was really big.

It's kids being kids. I don't know these people so...

I'm off for the next 2 days, this was planned before last night, but I'm still annoyed...

I'm in a shit mood today because last night I closed alone and some people stole over $5000 worth of clothes from my department. I chased them, which I was not supposed to do, and they escaped. Everyone says it's not my fault, but...