a long story about nothing much in particular

i don't, by any stretch of the imagination, consider myself a blogger... and yet i have 2 blogs (2.5 really since i have a 3rd which was supposed to replace this one). i told my friend in a facebook message that i hadn't written a post for a long time and that maybe i should. so~ maybe i should. 

i haven't yet decided what i'm going to write about so i'll be making that up as i go. and since this is supposed to be a japanese-themed blog, i suppose i should stay in that area. 

~~~~~
i must admit something. i'm a fan of morning musume (and much of the other crap thrust out into the world of j-pop from under the hello!project umbrella). it's a guilty pleasure. it's just so.... pop-py. so singable. so danceable. and so damn cute with their sickly sweet and innocent lyrics. but something just now occured to me tonight why i might like them. ...or perhaps it's just my snobishness trying to find deeper meaning in the otherwise meaningless and therefore embarrassing delight i feel when i listen to them (the most played on my i-tunes ...other than weezer, of course!)

please bear with me as i digress for a moment~ 

at the end of the school year, several parents give teachers gifts. i was very happy to receive several myself. one of my kid's parents gave me a $25 i-tunes card.

anyone who knows me knows i'm an avid and shamless pirate but i was still happy nonetheless because there are songs you just can't download off torrents from time to time. so, almost right away, i added the card to my account and purchased the cars 2 theme "you might think" by weezer and something by lady gaga. i still had $22.72 left on the card. two days later, i went back into the i-tunes store not to buy something but just to look up what a certain song that i didn't have in my own personal collection sounded like. i noticed that my balance was now at 74 cents. wtf?! so i went to my history and somehow, i figured, someone had hacked my account and purchased some weird app and installation thingy totaling the difference. i was pissed. i ended up writing to support, changing my password, etc. (luckily, my credit card info wasn't on the account ~although i remembered putting it in...) anyway~ a very nice guy from i-tunes made an exception for me and reinstated the money and also gave me 5 free song credits! (yay him ~ made my day.) 

so, slightly back on topic~

tonight, i stumbled across rivers cuomo's website (http://riverscuomo.com/) which i never knew existed and was perusing the discography section (actually, the entire website thoroughly, but only the discography part is relevant to this account) and i came across a few songs he had collaborated on with other artists that i was previously unaware of. (normally, i would have known since i was a frequent reader of weezerpedia... but it's been down for several months.) 

since the incident with the i-tunes theft, i have been nervous about the same thing happening again, however unlikely. i thought it would be wise to use it up as soon as possible so every now and then, i go on to see if anything new has been released from weezer or if there is something new in the north american music scene that i actually like. no such luck usually. (as previously mentioned, i mostly listen to japanese music, much of which is only available on japan i-tunes.) so, after learning about these songs, i logged in and bought 5 songs featuring rivers cuomo with my free credits. that was all i could find. 

i still have that $22.72 to use up and still feel uneasy about it but i don't want to buy something for no reason. i was even going to buy some foo fighters stuff (husband and i just went to their concert on tuesday ~ it was pretty awesome!) but i could easily find that on torrents if my husband didn't already have it, which he does. 

on rivers' page, it mentioned he will be releasing a japanese language album (i'm so excited about it! he previews on of the songs on his youtube account and i LOVE it. check it out.) and it will be titled the kumamoto kid.

i thought i would type in kumamoto into the i-tunes search to see what would turn up. i already knew i wouldn't find anything of rivers but i didn't know what the name is in reference to so i thought i'd see if anything came up. (i looked it up on wikipedia too. it's a city in kyushu. ...maybe that's where his wife is from?)

when you search kumamoto, there are some apps and podcasts to do with the city. i scrolled down to the songs section and the very first one listed is called songs of kumamoto and the album it's from is what piqued my interest. it's called traditional folk songs of japan. i clicked on it, selected the first song and hit preview all.

that's what i'm listening to as i've been writing this.

and now back to my original point...

immediately what struck me was how the background singers chanting-style singing sounded exactly like what morning musume frequently does in their music. so, maybe tsunku writes songs with a little more substance than what i previously thought? ne? shh. just let me think that so i don't feel like a brainless idiot.

another thing i found interesting was that the very first song on the 2-disc album is called soran bushi. when i listened to it, i found a similarity to the melody of the para para song odore! soran by the group soran happies.

judging by the name, it's probably no mistake. i learn things about japan by looking them up online. not always the most reputable but the best option i have. i thought i had read that odore meant dance and i just assumed that the soran part was taken from the name of the group. never thought to check it out. after i heard the song, i decided to look it up again. apparently, whatever i had read (or my own mind) had mixed up odore with odori. as in bon odori~ a type of dance. denshi jisho informs me that odore is an insulting way of saying you in the hyougo banshu dialect (whatever that is). and soran only refers to that particular song which wikipedia says is one of the most famous traditional songs in japan, originally sung by the fisherman of hokkaido. it's also frequently sung along with bon odori... so i was wrong... but sort of right.

when i heard the similarity between the songs, i wasn't imagining it. i was thinking i was really clever knowing that the modern pop song was referencing an old traditional song... silly me. all the japanese kids probably got that right away.

anyway, i learned something.

now my only problem is, do i buy just that song or the whole album. my card doesn't cover the whole $24.99. what to do?...