Issue #89: Terminal Disease
The last issue for the year covers the new ASP album, Namie Amuro's "GIRL TALK" and our top 50 TikTok songs of 2024
Hi! Welcome to This Side of Japan, a newsletter on Japanese music, new and old. You can check out previous issues here.
Confession: 2024 was my first full year being on TikTok, but I got on the app at a great time. For the past couple of years, stories about J-pop and TikTok revolved around the younger generation giving old songs a second life. This year, more and more new artists step out from the app onto TV to perform their respective viral songs. FRUIT ZIPPER became TV mainstays after their Best New Artist win last December, and music programs continued to book acts like Kocchi No Kento, noa, and KOMOREBI after the buzz around their songs became too big to ignore.
Occasionally, I’d catch a highlight of, like, the Shikanokonoko Koshitantan meme on a daytime new show or see comedians parody “Team Tomodachi” in their green rooms and be assured I’m watching the same popular content as others. But most of the time, I’m aghast at the algorithm bringing me the most wicked collisions of my personal interests. The other day, I came across this fan-made edit of Ano at her All Night Nippon radio show throwing hand gestures in quick succession set, somehow so in sync, to Tay-K’s “Gotta Blast.”
Sure, idols have been dancing to Project Pat a lot these days, but who thought to put these two together? But also how is it that these aesthetic clashes somehow work? The algorithms get seemingly unrelated music to be in conversation with each other as they drift along the same niche stream, or better yet, reveal that they were always in conversation with each other all along: aespa, Ken Carson and Charli XCX’s brat tracks, for one, all evoke this electroclash sleaze that colors a lot of the feed. There’s enough stylistic consistencies—distorted sonics, tampered vocals, warped tempos—to start drawing up the lines of what you can call TikTok music.
With this list, I tried to give a survey of the music diversity populating my feed, which is made of: idols, both J-pop and K-pop; clips from variety shows, J-dramas and Japanese YouTubers; and the random teen TikTokkers in between. Determining the music of TikTok in Japan, let alone a TikTok hit, is difficult when everyone’s feed provides different content by sheer design but also with no way for me to gauge how the song is spreading around socially in its home country. But I did my best using objective math: the song had be interacted by users from Japan to count, and used for more than 5,000 posts. If it was an idol song, a drama insert or a record similarly tied to some promotional angle, it had to circulate outside of its immediate circle: as much as I love ukka’s “Oshi Koi,” for instance, I didn’t see it gain impact outside of the groups from their agency, while even regular civilians were recording themselves doing the meme inspired by Da-iCE’s “I wonder.” Non-Japanese music was eligible as long as it fulfilled the above criteria.
That said, the ranking here is way more subjective. I considered the song’s popularity, both in and outside of the app. But the novelty of the song and dance went into it, too, as well as my simple love for the song or the life the song has taken after flourishing on the app. The more that its identity or its story couldn’t be easily explained without mentioning TikTok, the more deserving it was for this list.
But before we get to the main list…
Honorable Mentions
These were great Japanese songs to appear on the app, though they made the rounds more on the Western front rather than audiences in Japan, so it wasn’t eligible for a list compiling music from Japan TikTok. I still wanted to highlight them since it started a conversation about the American’s interest in Japanese music and their particular taste for them.
“Lonely in Gorgeous” by Tommy February6 [Sony, 2005]
Westerners glamorizing Japanese Y2K aesthetics are indebted to the curation of the cute and girly done by Tomoko Kawase through what I call her Tommy projects. The ‘80s nu-disco by bedroom-pop geek Tommy February6 settled into TikToks showing off blush pink tops, press-on gems and Sanrio; and the glittered punk by her alter ego Tommy Heavenly6 provided the soundtrack to prep-school rockers in heavy eyeliner. A number of her singles from both concepts were favorites, but “Lonely in Gorgeous” by the former persona in particular plays key to understand how her work fits into the musical landscape of the feed.
The disco grooves of her early releases turn gaudy in “Lonely in Gorgeous” with its brash synths more resembling the brash notes of electroclash. Fading out from the more innocent party-funk of the early ‘80s, the buzzing production carries hints of the harder electro new wave to come, and eventually repurposed in the latter half of the ‘00s into more of the goth variety or more bass-indebted. If the once-colorful beats seem disenchanted, so is Tommy, her Cinderella dreams, now sullied. While the early February6 singles depicted her more as a naive girl with childlike interests, hopelessly in love, “Lonely in Gorgeous” has her sulking in her own misery but still in her own humorous, melodramatic way: catch Kawase in the music video, fake-chugging from a flask as she dances aimlessly in her room. Drunk from her feelings, she captures many of those sharing her music on TikTok—overwhelmed with emotion but still acting as the cutest in the scene.
Listen to it on Spotify / Watch it on TikTok
“When the Moon’s Reaching Out Stars” by Yumi Kawamura [Aniplex, 2006]
Another Japanese trip down Y2K nostalgia led by Westeners were these showcases of tech gadgets popular in the early to mid ‘00s, synced with electronica that evoked the menu-screen BGMs of the era’s video games. A lot of actual SEGA music predictably came up, much from Sonic as well as Soichi Terada’s Ape Escape stuff, as did drum ‘n’ bass instrumentals by no-name track-makers in heavy pastiche of these games. But this zone of Y2K music—if you can call it that—fitting with this subgenre of TikToks covered a surprisingly broad range, making room for, yes, the jazz-fusion R&B of Persona 3 among them. The production of this Yumi Kawamura track seems tailor-made for it in this context with liquid keys glazed over d’n’b percussion. And yet take the video-game connection out, and it starts to sit a bit distant from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 or the jungle revival of Machine Girl. Much of this, it turns out, relies on vibes.
Listen to it on Spotify / Watch it on TikTok
“Kuchuu Buranko” by Plastic Tree [Universal, 2006]
Out of all the Japanese bands that’s been brought to the attention of Westerners via TikTok, the emergence of Plastic Tree has been the most fascinating to see. Outfit of the Day posts by teens in what resembles nu-metal gear in my eyes—baggy clothing, mostly if not all black, with chains and studs—got shared to the tune of the band’s 2006 single, “Kuchuu Buranko.” The song’s slow-burning moodiness, plus its reverb-drenched riff in the chorus, sits well with the heavy, brooding rock music also native in the app, like Deftones and Wisp. Unlike early ‘00s Shibuya-kei, a scene still enjoying a boom on the platform, I’ve yet to really encounter other visual-kei acts while I scroll. That said, I’m still holding out for users to excavate more gold from the genre: absent from streaming sites, “Kuchuu Buranko” had to be uploaded to the app by other means, so I want to say there is a demand there, however small.
Watch it on TikTok
And now… This Side of Japan’s Top 50 TikTok Songs of 2024, with blurbs on the first 10. You can check out this list as a playlist here. If you’re feeling extra chaotic, here is my ongoing (currently 450+ song deep) playlist of songs found on my TikTok.
Welcome to the last issue for 2024 until the big year-end feature! And as you see above, we began the countdown festivities a little early with a silly best-of list at the end of October. A more proper list will definitely be on the way, but until then, please enjoy an album, three songs and a hit from Oricon, exactly 20 years ago!
Happy listening!
Album of the Week
Terminal disease of ASP by ASP [Avex Trax]
*Recommended track: “MAKE A MOVE” | Listen to it on Spotify
Signing to the majors should’ve pushed ASP to play it safe. The idol group and their scuzzy, heart-on-sleeve punk directly descended from BiSH, older siblings in their home company WACK, and their music would’ve easily filled the space left behind by the latter act after their exit last year. Yet since being scooped up by Avex Trax, who also signed BiSH, ASP has been grown radical in style, embracing aggressive brands of electronica like industrial and big beat for their output but also the hooks and attitudes of pop: the idols indulge in tricky rap breakdowns atop cyber-metal riffs and punishing gabber beats in their typical singles.
The electronic twist freshens up ASP’s punk clothing in their first major-label full-length, Terminal disease of ASP. “No Reason,” from 2022, and its head-bashing beats presaged a creative path led by the influence of a nu-metal-industrial hybrid like Mad Capsule Markets. They would go as far as sourcing the music directly from the actual talent, importing the jacked-up drums of The Prodigy in “TOXiC iNVASiON” or recreating rap-metal mayhem with AFJB in “Black Nails.” As nostalgic as they were for the Summer Sonic line-up circa 2000, ASP’s sugary silverware beats also rode on a similar wavelength to the new industrial and electroclash bubbling up on the internet. Emo-punk strums meet pots-and-pans clanking in “Hyper Cracker,” freaking WACK’s school of punk to the style of Sophie to whip up a hyperpop of their own.
While ASP carve out a style that’s a departure from their predecessors, they tap into the same themes explored by other groups from WACK. The deep urge to become something in a life in rock bottom sparked the best drama out of BiSH. Like the latter, idle life is also the worst predicament for ASP, and their attempts to break out of the monotony inspires some thrilling standouts. They spell out their hunger for more in “MAKE A MOVE” through its blast of thrash and its titular hook built on the idols’ very reaction feeling the beast of a beat. From its blown-out guitar riff to its megaphoned titular hook, “TOTSUGEKI!!!!!!” is a batter ram of a punk track. Insecurity still looms despite their loud presence yet it’s less a sulking session than it is a straight dive into a mosh pit in order to jolt emotion back into a heart turned cold.
For how exhilarating their noisy bangers can be, the album’s best song features a more bashful display of vulnerability. Explicitly to the point, “I HATE U” could make for a titular hook that’s aimed straight for the gut. But the idols instead sound worn out and so does the creaky pop-punk music; when they sing “you suck, suck, suck,” they mutter it under their breath as if they can’t muster the confidence to say it straight to their face. Laid against their pointedly rowdy singles, their screams in “I HATE U,” buried until the latter half of the track, feel truly cathartic, like they finally gathered the last bit of energy to fight back.
Cast in whichever mood, ASP provide punk pleasures rooted in blunt music and raw, explicit emotion through an unabashedly dance-pop package: compact hooks, raps and choreography atop a production with a heavy electronic touch. Once one of the biggest mainstream idol groups of the 2010s, BiSH ran through the latter half of that decade with a catchphrase of “a punk band with no instruments.” Comparatively, ASP hardly bothers to masquerade as a rock band, warping their sound but never obscuring their identity. If the novelty behind their previous generation hinged on how unorthodox they can be from the traditional idol mold, Terminal Disease of ASP offers a counter-alternative: idol is punk, rebellious and cutting edge as it is.
Singles Club
“Profane Usurpation” by KRUELTY [Closed Casket Activities]
Brutal, double-time breakdowns occur in quick spurts in “Profane Usurpation,” the title track of KRUELTY’s new upcoming EP, as if the death-metal band is flexing the different methods in which they can cause damage. But while they make for a showy gear-change, sitting with the track’s long simmer is more of the point as the slow, punishing burn of the main pressurized riff bring out the deep fatalism in staring down the abyss from lyrics like “eternal wounds / an endless curse.” “We’re fucking doomed,” vocalist Zuma bellows, and there’s still another half of the song left and a few more breakdowns to wade through, if you can last.
Profane Usurpation EP is out November 22. Listen to the track on Spotify/Bandcamp.
See also: “The Seven Spirit of Victims” by INVICTUS; “Infestation” by TERMINATION
“The October Country” by Poison Girl Friend [PSYCHO PLANET]
Enamored by club music in the U.K. circa 1989, Noriko Sekiguchi brought folk-pop with an inspired blend of post-punk and house for her project Poison Girl Friend and its classic 1992 debut, Melting Moment. These past few years, her ‘90s output has been enjoying a deserved re-evaluation from internet crate-diggers as well as labels like Lights from the Attic, and so if her new single seems nostalgic for those earlier years, it’s for good reason. If anything, “The October Country” resembles an imagined prequel, where the big spark of Melting Moment is just within sight. The pre-trip-hop boom-bap drums defining the latter album is obscured so low in the mix as to not disturb the tender acoustic pop. Sekiguchi, too, sings in hushed tones like she’s trying not to incite tension: “Why did you love me? Why did you leave me? / Why did we even feel… alone again?” She sighs. Posed in 1990 or 2024, it’s a question she gets no closer to getting the answer for.
Listen to it in Spotify.
See also: “ORANGE AIRMAIL” by Natsu Summer
“feel again” by sedai [tomoran]
While the emo band still keep up the hearty volume, sedai cool down the tempo in “feel again” compared to their previous output. Maybe it’s a preview to the feel of their upcoming new album, Underground. Or maybe the band is coming to terms with the fact that they can’t sweat about everything and risk burning out, for this game is for the long haul. Their once-tense post-hardcore loosens into a more breezy indie-rock, and the band also sounds content in not pressing too much to let everything about the current moment matter as if it’s life or death. As they realign their focus to simply continue, you can hear them rev up their motors again to make sure it still runs.
Underground is out in November. Listen to the song on Spotify.
See also:
This Week in 2004…
This section is usually dedicated to the Oricon number ones throughout the chart’s history, but for this issue, I’ll write about a hit that did not make it to the very top.
“GIRL TALK” by Namie Amuro [Avex Trax, 2004]
Highest position at #2 during the week of Oct. 25, 2004 | Listen to it on YouTube
For her seventh album, 2005’s Queen of Hip-Pop, Namie Amuro had to find a new term to articulate the sound behind her hip-hop-oriented dance-pop. Many interviewers at the time probed her about the odd portmanteau of “hip-pop” that she settled with1. But less was discussed about the word that preceded it in the title: queen. The singer herself thought it was slightly audacious from what came before from her2, but the interviews went on as if her status as royalty was all assumed. She had the clout to back it up anyway: She spent the previous decade as the teen superstar ushering a new, modernized sound to the country’s pop scene, and as the singer’s celebrity grew, reaching beyond Japan, her music also expanded in scale. The girl who searched for love at the discotheque had become a leader of an all-out gospel, singing “RESPECT the POWER of LOVE” as J-pop stepped into the new millennium.
The brash, flashy synth production in Queen of Hip-Pop that took cues from crunk3 and bhangra affirmed the bold attitude behind Amuro’s official claim to her throne of J-pop. But the most remembered song from this period of her career is the album’s most down to earth. “No one can step in,” she sings in the chorus of “GIRL TALK” about the treasured gossip-time shared with her circle of BFFs. “Laughing until we cry / blows my stress far, far away / we’re always talking about little secret.” She rides a beat that’s as busy as its preceding tracks: a music-box string loop here, a frothy cluster of space-y Atlanta-bass synths there. Yet the production has a much sleeker finish, settled closer to the club’s dance floors or the private rooms where her and her girlfriends are catching up.
“GIRL TALK” doesn’t feature so much a superstar hanging out at a lower plane than it is full of moments that humanizes the idol as an equal of her listeners. Some of Amuro sounded like a kid trying on adult clothes singing her come-ons and party-starter hooks in 2003's Style, her previous LP and her first formal pitch of “hip-pop.” The casual, conversational lyrical cadence imported from rap works smoother here to form a natural chatty flow as if she’s freestyling her girl-talks straight to the beat. The best hooks appear subtly, burrowed in the verse as it would be in everyday dialogue: “Honey, are you serious?,” Amuro exclaims with shock from her girlfriends being wronged by a man while the strings break down in perfect cadence with the lyrics.
It’s also simply a relief to hear Amuro among company. While she let the listeners in on her inner thoughts in her earlier singles, it was often her against the world. “Just more sighs again today / wandering the city alone,” she opens “SWEET 19 BLUES”; “I don’t know how to sleep / wiz out you, I don’t know,” she sings in the refrain of “How to be a girl,” as in I don’t know how to be a girl. Compared to those private anthems about several years prior, she represents a more settled voice in “GIRL TALK” with comfort afforded now thanks to her circle of like friends.
Amuro would return to the international stage as J-pop royalty, especially during her latter years before she officially retired from music altogether. But her later memorable hits continue to cherish a heart-to-heart with her listeners as the singer does in “GIRL TALK”: about three years later, she’d release another classic, “BABY DON’T CRY,” assuming now the role of the best friend consoling another’s broken heart. Her ’90s is a genre-defining run in its own right, and yet the R&B side of J-pop looks more at the hip-pop girl-talk started by this record. You can hear it in the confessional one-on-ones by late ’00s icon Kana Nishino, for one, but also in today’s R&B girls whose songs resembles the private gossip happening in the DMs. The queen gets to be just a girl in “GIRL TALK,” and she leaves behind a safe space where others can chill out, too.
This Side of Japan has a Ko-Fi as a tip jar if you want to show appreciation. A subscription to This Side of Japan is free, and you don’t have to pay money to access any published content. I appreciate any form of support, but if you want to, you can buy a Coffee to show thanks.
Next issue of This Side of Japan is out December. You can check out previous issues of the newsletter here.
Need to contact? You can find me on Twitter or reach me at thissideofjapan@gmail.com
“At first, it was one of the many songs to choose from for the album,” she told Oricon Style in 2005 about the title track to her then-new LP. “Before I knew it, I was picking songs based off of that title, and its vibe inspired the image of the album, too.”
“I think this is what the queen of hip-pop would look like,” she told Billboard Japan in 2005 about her image on the album cover, like the idol on the cover was an entity wholly separate from the person.
Please enjoy with me the fake Lil Jon screaming “HEYYY!!!” and “YEAAAH!!!” on “My Darling” off of the album.