SM’s Latest’s Debut Music Video

The past couple weeks, Kpop’s biggest label, SM Entertainment, has been teasing us with videos of their newest boy band, EXO.  They’ve shown us dancing, acting, and itsy bitsy snippets of singing with 30-some teasers (it was only 12 you say? pish posh) to get us pumped for EXO’s debut.  So when finally a music video pops up on my subscription feed, I was ecstatic.  The songs from the teasers sounded really catchy and the dancing looked hot.  Oh, and Kai.

Mmmmm, yeah, that one.  Yup, I was excited.  Aaaaaaaaaaaand then I watched it.

Excitement level: dead.

J-Round Up: IDOLING!!!, AKB+Friends, Kikkawa You, After School, Akanishi Jin

I’ve been wanting to review a lot of the latest releases.  Unfortunately, a lot of them aren’t new anymore, but here are the latest one’s I’ve been looking at.  I’m going to hold fast to my resolution to expand my horizons, so today I’m breaking down my barrier and reviewing IDOLING!!! for the first time.  I’m sorry I can’t provide you guys with the actual PVs or lives for most of these; we all know Japanese labels are insane with copyright (although last time I checked, wasn’t the point of a promotional video to promote…?).

Koda Kumi – JAPONESQUE

The latest Japanese singer to get preggers and have a shotgun wedding before the baby drops, Miss Koda Kumi herself, has just released her new album, JAPONESQUE.  I always love her albums, and this one is no exception.  As you could deduce from the title, it has a lot of traditional Japanese influence mixed with Koda’s personal hip hop/r&b style that makes for one exceptionally well-made album.  Unlike most albums, I feel like not a single one of these songs is a throw-away or a filler (except for the two fillers), and it really spared no expense.  If I wasn’t a poor college student and it wasn’t SO EXPENSIVE, I would really pay the extra $20-$30 for the CD+DVD edition because most of the songs on this album have music videos.

TOP! Part 9 – J- and K-Idols

This was requested early last year by qwert.  Sorry it took me this long to get to it.  The ninth installment of my TOP! series (see the page above to learn more about the series) is my top 20 j- and k-idols.  Again, that’s the smallest number I could muster.  I’ll spare you of the honorable mentions, though.  In order to keep the list doable, I kept it to members of idol groups (past and present).  It was also a very hard list, so some of the ones I would have put in here had to be cut.  Also, I only put one member per group to keep the list from being all Super Junior, SHINee, SNSD, or BIG BANG.

Morning Musume’s New Look-A-Like

I’m not going to lie, I haven’t been even slightly interested in either the 9th or 10th generations of Morning Musume.  In fact, I’m pretty disappointed with them.  I’ve talked about it in a previous post, so I won’t  be redundant.  For some really odd reason, I decided to watch an interview Hello! Online posted where a couple 9th Gen and 10th Gen girls promoted that godawful single they just released.

I had to really pay attention because about a minute in I realized I’ve never bothered to learn any of their names.  I don’t even think that I could recognize any of them if you put them in a crowd.  But then one of the girls started to talk, and she caught my eye.  I didn’t recognize her at all.

It took me three watches through the interview to figure out who she was.  See, I didn’t realize she was a 10th Generation member, I thought they were all 9th Generation.  Shows you how much I know.  I couldn’t find an “Ayumi” in any information about 9th Gen.  And then it FINALLY clicked.

Why was I so interested to find out who she was?  When I couldn’t tell you a single other of the 8 new girls’ names?