Rant; Band Review; Berryz Koubou; PV Review; Happiness ~Koufuku Kangei~
Okay, it's that time again. It seems that you all enjoyed my last review of a band, so we move forward with more crap I personally feel should be buried deep within the earth and then somehow set aflame. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you.... Berryz Koubou.
I'm sure a lot of you don't know who they are. Hell, I only just figured out exactly who they are recently. So here we go, with a PV Review, Band Review, and my general thoughts. Are you ready? Me neither. Please join me in what I like to call
~The Sad and Strange Descent of Berryz Koubou~
About six months ago, I was hanging out with a few friends of mine. I was in the other room getting ready to go out, and my friend vegeta_eyes was in my room with my computer, since it is filled with literally thousands of sweet Japanese rock music mp3's and he is in envy of my most excellent taste. So anyway, I came back into the room to the sound of what can only be described as a number of kittens in heat yowling in my very own language, something roughly along the lines of "...meetings will bring a long term happiness, DO IT DO IT!"
Terrified that vegeta eyes was soon to be exposed to the horrors of preteen-looking 35 year old idol girls rubbing dead eel parts on their naked bodies and urinating on their cell phones, I rushed in in an attempt to save him from the number of things lurking in my Special Tatchi Happiness folder. He looked up at me and said "Holy shit, do you know about this group?"
He was on youtube, viewing some J-pop.
The group was Berryz Koubou, which I knew about in the sense that one knows about Britney Spears' sex life. You hear people you don't want to be near in any way jabbering about it in passing, and you try your hardest to leave it at that.
"Oh, some Morning Musume knockoff, right?"
I was wrong, readers.
First, a history lesson.
Berryz Koubou was formed by Hello! Project Kids, and named as such because the thought of a "workshop", koubou, would reflect the other members of Hello! Project Kids switching in and out and whatnot like Morning Musume does. However the rest of the members of Hello! Project not in Berryz Koubou apparently got as sick or horrified by them as I now am, and made their own band. For those not in the know (the lucky ones), Hello! Project Kids is to music as McDonald's is to chicken nuggets. They select the nicest, palest, best-looking material for their quality standards and usage, and then proceed to cover them in unnecessary crap and mangle them beyond all recognition and belief. Then people buy them.
They all have their own little names and personalities and are on radio shows and music programs and videos and t-shirts and pencil pouches and anything and everything you could possibly imagine and more. Still like Morning Musume, are you following? Okay. I'm getting ahead of myself. Please for those of you who do not know of them, be exposed to them as I first was, with this video.
PV Review - Berryz Koubou - Happiness ~Koufuku Kangei~
First off, you'll need to see the PV. Find it here. The lyrics are in Japanese and romaji below it. If you really want the English, I can post it for you. Some notable excerpts are...
"My lover's tears make my chest grow tight. Don't hold back, talk to me. DO IT DO IT!"
"My conversational English did not improve, but I met you."
"When we have conversations in the classroom, and your seriousness as we talk in the cafe... Hey darling, what time will be good tomorrow? Where shall we go tonight?"
Love, kisses, the autumn. It's nothing you couldn't find in an An Cafe song. By J-pop standards, it would rival the poetry of Yosano Akiko. But still, these girls look five years old.
The PV starts out with a magical train flying through the clouds. The whole thing looks like some sort of Dragonball Z ending. The members are all excited and pour out of the train in matching uniforms in slow motion. They begin to dance.
My first thought is that this group has more members than there are attractive people working at PS Company. But in all fairness, you can say that sort of thing about any band with more than two members. However, there are not two members in Berryz Koubou that could be deemed attractive. The starting and apparent leader, I think, seems to be a cute-looking girl. Normal, cute. As in I am being forced to name a cute member and if I saw her on the street I would be hard-pressed to call her cute or anything other than "Why am I still looking at this girl?"
The rest of the members pretty much look like composites of these two:
If that gives you any idea.
Naturally I am immediately experiencing some personal red flags because, like Dong Bang Shin Ki, each of the "unique and vivacious" girls are working that "dead behind the eyes" look. They are all singing and smiling at the same time, but both seem to have been forced out of them after 72 straight hours of work with no sleep. For a song that seems to be welcoming happiness with every fifth word, that is a sign of danger.
Please don't cry, not-Abe-Natsumi.
They are then all seated around a big table playing with their little food stuffs. They do their hand dancing, peering into the camera as if hopeful the person watching them might show pity and help them out. Listen to the second soloist of the first verse. She has some sort of retarded baby voice thing going on.
Guess which one she is.
Got it?
That's right, it's Little Keiyuu Side Ponytail!
Her face and voice and unfortunate hairstyle easily make her my instant favourite.
They go on for quite some time with the patented DBSK "filler super kawaii dance happy time". But they seem to be choreographed within an inch of their lives and it is kind of horrific how many default lolita Japanese girl hand gestures they manage to pack into a span of about thirty seconds. I begin to notice that it sounds like, in the chorus, there are some backup vocals by what seems to be a middle aged man. I hope I am hearing things.
The second verse begins and it literally is a lather-rinse-repeat of the opening. However, if you watch, I mean, LOOK at these girls and their faces. They seem to be longing for the sweet embrace of death and escape from having to sing frothy pop songs for men four times their age.
So, that's pretty much the entire video. This girl:
And then they all get back on board their magical sky train and choo choo off into the sky.
"Wow." I said to vegeta eyes. "That was truly disturbing."
Unfortunately for both me and the world, he turned to me with a devious smile and said "Wait. You haven't seen anything."
He was right.
In the next PV he showed to me, they appeared to all be dressed like little shrine maidens from hell, doing the sort of hip-hop dance seen only on comedy shows that accentuate the fact that Japanese people cannot do hip-hop dancing.
I guessed this was a newer PV of theirs, for they seemed older. Their music was less cute and more dance-pop with a number of little groans that made me begin to feel uncomfortable. The sketch part of the PV confused me.
Little Keiyuu Side Ponytail? Is that you?
They began to ask to put makeup on each other. Then each of them applied some mascara and gave a big wink.
"Creepy." I said. "That's sort of overtly sexual, isn't it?"
I was interested to see where this PV might be going, but vegeta eyes immediately exited it and clicked on another one. I made to ask him to wait, but saw two things on my screen that eventually laced together and stunned me into silence.
The first thing was that the video was labeled "Berryz Koubou PV", and then the title.
The second thing was that what was on my screen was this:
"What?" I thought to myself. "No.... nooooo...."
Yes.
Berryz Koubou had become sluts. This PV consisted of pouting seductively at the camera, running in slow motion, doing some sort of dip-and-grind dance that was making me long for hip hop shrine maidens, and generally playing in lingerie.
Even Koda Kumi and her dirty grime-streaked Hepititus-carrying sweaty body made me more comfortable.
Sprinkled in between the dancing, running, and pouting were the same familliar shots of girls pretending to be happy and smiling hopefully at the camera, begging for approval.
Well.
Begging for something.
Watch this. It's a promotion video for member Momoko's photobook!
Things like this happen in it.
At this point I'm kind of just along for the ride, staring in horror. This is the sort of extended video release I'm used to seeing my beloved Ogura Yuko doing. Ogura Yuko, the gravure idol, whose extended videos of her staring curiously at the camera for thirty minutes in panties are NOT tied in to some Hello! Project Kids promotion. I think fondly back on Happiness Welcome Happiness where I first "met" the Berryz Koubou girls. I've known them since they were like twelve years old. From Hello! Project Kids. KIDS, you guys! They were pop-singing KIDS! Don't you remember, photoshoot man?
Oh yeah. He remembers.
So I had that knowledge on my conscience, but I still really liked the catchiness of that original song. I was surprised to see that, in my music playlist folder, a recent dance-pop song that was riding the Oricon charts was actually a new single by the one and only Berryz Koubou! I seem to recall at one point seeing a PV of them literally just rolling around in a hallway wearing bras and panties, but I can't find it now. If you do find it, please share it with me.
Anyway, so, while I was looking for that PV which thankfully got lost someplace, I happened across the PV for that song I had been enjoying! As it began, it had the kind of moon and screen backdrop from a Megamasso PV I liked. I was wary, but hopeful. This was a happy and upbeat song! They wouldn't be rolling around in something wholly inappropriate, would they? No way! I mean, the only way they could turn me off of this song was if they appeared in some sort of slapdash revealing wedding dress looking things...
With extreme close-ups of really lustful and provacative and downright suggestive singing by the girls...
With them laying all over each other...
And featuring Little Keiyuu Side Ponytail having solos and sounding and looking exactly the same as she did when she was twelve years old...
Thank goodness for that.
I mean, okay, some if not most of them are downright hot in this video, and one of them is starting to look like a young Amuro Namie.
Hello.
Project Kids.
See? You can't escape it. It disturbs me like they would somehow know that they were going to grow up to be hot and even more marketable so they'd better select a few homely looking girls and start pimping them out as the next MoMusu until they eventually grow up and satisfy every creepy old man's dream since he's been watching them since they were too small to be wearing bras yet.
Which brings me to my next point. Apparently, one of them at some point graduated from the group. Graduated like in Morning Musume style? As in, "You have to shave your armpits now, and soon you will start growing tits, better ship you off and bring in some younger girl. Good luck posing in swimsuits, you'll never be the next Goto Maki, bye bye!"
So, why did that girl have to leave? Did she realise what was going to happen and choose to leave? Because obviously, having breasts isn't a death knell like it is in Morning Musume. Hell, Berryz Koubou seems to give you extra solos if you have breasts. Why did you go away, graduated member?
I guess we'll never know. At least Morning Musume keeps it generally G-rated and the gratification is only implied since no one in their right minds would ever look at those girls for their musical talents. Which we see each time a member "graduates" and releases the obligatory "Please look here I am in stockings and a teeny bikini, at least I can put that I was in Morning Musume beside my name so you can remember me and differentiate me from the other hoardes of thousands of girls who look just like me and do the exact same sets" photobooks. So it disturbs me. And it's funny that it disturbs me because it's pretty fucking common. I guess I just miss the times when Little Keiyuu Girl could be wonky and downright creepy looking without the sexual undertones.
Maybe.