Ack, my bike is still not in prime shape and I have a 25-mile ride in two days for the Hub on Wheels! I’m hoping the bicycle fairy will fix my gear shift overnight or something. Somehow I doubt that’s going to happen, so tomorrow I’ll be in the basement with a multi-tool and greasy hands. Loads of swearing will follow, I’m sure of it, especially if the bike-related wonkiness is stemming from the derailleur. If anyone has a spare $1k lying around they’d like to donate to the buy-Maria-a-decent-bike fund, please paypal it over.
(more…)
I’m biking for The Hub On Wheels in two weeks and have been preparing for it. I’m only doing the 25-mile route as I have something to do that afternoon (XKCD meetup!), but I was curious if I am physically capable of biking the full 40-ish mile route. So just for kicks a few weeks ago I biked the entire Cape Cod rail trail, which is about 44 miles round-trip. I’m still amazed that I did it. I’ve never been an athletic person so when I shared this news with my family and friends, everybody was pretty impressed. So yes, I’m proud of this and wanted to share it with you all. (And here is the photographic journal of that day!) (more…)
Anybody who knows me moderately well also knows that my favorite artist/musician of all time is the Japanese rock/pop star Gackt (yes, whose name sounds a lot like my cat Patches when she’s struggling with a hairball. )
The usual praise for any major artist certainly apply with this guy: he’s talented, charismatic, and entertainment-biz gold. I enjoy following what he’s up to, be it a TV appearance or a new album, and his antics are usually pretty entertaining. Many people at some point in life latch on to some sort of writer or band to fawn over—for some reason, during my formative years in Ex-urbia, Massachusetts, I found this Japanese rock star.
Now, for the meat of this post: A good friend recently introduced me to IMEEM, a service that allows you to upload music files so you can share and listen to them (streaming!) via a flash player later, kind of like a YouTube for mp3s. IMEEM also allows you to embed the flash player in your blog (again, like YouTube), so it’s made sharing music with friends by blog post really easy.
Just for kicks over lunch today, I looked up one of my favorite songs of Gackt’s, his first from when he went solo in 1999, called “Mizérable.”
In 1999, the band Gackt had just left was a gothic-rock style band called “Malice Mizer,” so I believe the purposeful misspelling of “miserable” is a thumb of his nose at the old band. (In the end, they floundered and broke up while his career continues to flourish, ouch.) So, to me, “Mizérable” is a song about ambition, regret, anticipation, hope, longing—all that lovely melodramatic stuff.
It’s still considered one of Gackt’s best tunes simply because it perfectly encapsulates that feeling of finally striking out on your own, all that anxiety and defiance.
Here’s the original recording of Mizérable, from his very first mini-album, released in 1999.
If you’ve never heard Japanese rock or pop music, this may sound very strange to you, so just listen for 2 minutes if that’s all you can take, haha.
In the summer 2004, five years after Gackt went solo, he released two retrospective albums, playing his classics either acoustically or entirely re-recorded and even re-scored. (Gackt releases at least one album a year with several singles, so even just five years into his career he had a large repertoire to choose from for a “best of” set.) “Mizérable” was one of the songs on the hard rock album called “The Sixth Day.”In this 2004 version, his voice is more mature, the sound is fuller and more polished, the composition more complex:
It’d be deceptive to say that the sophistication of this version is the result of making it big, as Gackt and Malice Mizer were already somewhat “big” when Gackt went solo. But certainly it is worth wondering about what’s lost when an artist goes from big to huge in their music and then re-records some of their old hits.
(And no, I’m not one of those fans who thinks an artist loses “cred” or soul when they go big or sign a major label. Artists need to eat, and nobody joins a band aiming for mediocrity.)
The newly re-recorded “Mizérable” has higher production values and sounds more sophisticated than the original. But if the original “Mizérable” has the spark of defiance in it, what does that defiance become five years into a wildly successful solo career? Gloating? Melancholy?
I’m curious to hear what you think. Does the motivation behind a song matter if it is performed well? Or am I just completely over-thinking this?
Those of us who follow Japanese rock are all a-twitter over the latest news from Yoshiki (the man! the myth! the legendary J-rocker!)
Disclaimer: If you have never heard of Yoshiki or Japanese rock in general, the rest of this post will be utterly confounding. Apologies in advance!
Last year at Otakon in Baltimore Yoshiki announced he was teaming up with Gackt (my favorite J-rock artist). At the recent J-Rock Revolution festival in L.A. (which he produced) he finalized the line-up for his new supergroup S.K.I.N.
Now, not only is Yoshiki producing S.K.I.N., he’s in it. This man has some serious business acumen.
The line-up as we know it thus far is as follows: Yoshiki, the (de-facto?) leader of the band and pianist, much like he was in X Japan. (And perhaps not too coincidentally S.K.I.N.’s new iconography of sorts parallels X Japan’s a lot). Gackt on vocals. Sugizo and Miyavi on guitar. It’s a bit hard to compare or describe how big this is if you’re not already kind of a part of this scene, but this line-up is huge.
For one thing, all four of these men were once in bands and then split off to very successful (and ongoing!) solo careers. And all four of them have rabid legions of fans around the world.
So not only is there enormous name recognition with each of these artists, but there’s major appeal for both “old geezer” J-rock fans like me who have been in the ’scene’ for a long time, as well as younger and newer fans who are still learning about the artists.
(What did I tell you, Yoshiki is a smart, smart man.)
The formal announcement of S.K.I.N.’s first performance was also at (Yoshiki’s) J-Rock Revolution, and this group’s very first show will be at Anime Expo in Long Beach, Calif., which I am attending. And yes, I’m already salivating at the thought of seeing this group live, I admit.
The only taste of their combined musical sound comes from this official promo video, released less than a week ago: (more…)
![[VAR]iable expression: Maria Varmazis' blog](http://mvarmazis.com/mvarmazis_banner.png)
