What a sad old man I have become.

Actually, it’s not so outside the norm for me – bands with singers whose vocal styles almost beg you to hate them if only in the name of having standards.

I see this guy most times I go to Margit Island in the middle of Budapest.  So far, only once have I walked by and been able to decipher what he was playing on his baritone. Although he has a kick drum, it’s never in time with whatever noise he’s making, and so I wonder if the whole point is for you to pay him so he’ll stop making a racket?  It certainly doesn’t compare to this dude.

Visual is not a style of music, much in the same way Butter-Flavored is not a style of film. If you declare your band to be “visual kei”, you’re trying to legitimize as genre convention the act of selling out by placing image ahead of music. Selling out, by the way, is not something to be done ostentatiously, unless you have a very fundamental misunderstanding of what the “Black Album” means in the vernacular of heavy music.

Your fans are adolescent girls so demoralized by society that they refuse to accept anything but a rubber-banded-till-it-falls-off feminized male figure as a fantasy. Grow (or reattach) a pair and reconnect with reality, and hope your fanbase follows suit.

If you watch the video, you can see Scott Ian of Anthrax trying to play one of his own songs on Guitar Hero. Now, while I don’t consider Scott Ian one of the all-time great guitarists, you’ve got to be at least pretty good in order to play rhythm in a thrash band. And while the guitar part he has to play focuses more on the lead guitar, which isn’t what Ian plays, it’s still amusing to watch him utterly and completely fail at it.

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Among the many different signs of Spring in Budapest, beyond the trees becoming green again, the incessant chirping of birds, warmer temperatures and visible thongs, is the return of Andean bands into above ground public areas. During the winter months, they either disappear from the city or the few hardy ones go into the many underpasses that are usually tied to a metro station.

This duo at Fővám tér were rocking their pipes to a bunch of bemused tourists, which is still better than the Andean band at Blaha Lujza tér, who played primarily to people waiting for the bus, drunks and the homeless. You would think these guys have oversaturated the market in Europe, but I come across them so frequently that I guess they haven’t.

Still, I liked the guys who used to blatantly rip off the Gypsy Kings better.

This cover of Madonna’s “Music” has been shown quite frequently on Hungarian MTV, (as in Hungarian Music Television, not Magyar Televizió), and I was just left to wonder: did anyone out there really think that this is what was missing in the world? I’ve not really heard anything else from Roy and Ádám, so I can’t say what their other stuff is like, but it’s not like “Music” was even a good song to begin with. The words “boogie-woogie” don’t work when you’re trying to sing them soulfully.

I can’t say I’m much of a Madonna fan, since I only think Ray of Light was a good album, and maybe half of Music, but even then, I think it was one of the more annoying songs that she put out in the previous decade, or at least among those I’ve heard.

Another thing is how these days, so many “new” songs are just a dance rework of some older song that was actually good. I think one of the worst examples of this was the travesty Mark Ronson committed with his destruction of the Smith’s “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before.” Ronson renamed it “Stop Me.” Someone should have before it was released.

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To a lot of Japanese people, it’s an embarrassing relic of a musical style – something to loudly disown and distance oneself from. Think of the role Country Music plays in Southern California culture, and you’ll be close. I actually see a lot of value in it, though I personally wouldn’t listen to it as long as the choice is mine. You can say something about this that you can’t say about most modern “J-pop” artists, that it’s not just the local next-best-thing to an American act. Actually, even modern “J-pop” artists still carry on part of the Enka legacy: that very exaggerated and fake vibrato you hear here is still very much alive amongst female Japanese balladeers.

Walking through the Deák tér underpass on Sunday, I was surprised to come across this guy. Now, musicians in underpasses is hardly anything new. Occasionally you come across one that can actually play their instrument, but frequently it will be a howling guy with a few strings missing from his guitar producing a sound equivalent to when you accidentally step on your cat’s tail. There’s another guy with a keyboard who always gets some fast beat going before (at least from where I’m walking by) randomly hitting the notes without any attempt at making it sound bearable. It seems their goal is to get you to pay so they’ll stop.

Which leads me to the guy above, who not only did not suck, but was busting out lounge music. Unashamedly. He had the glasses, he had the attitude, and he had people in the underpass busting up with laughter.

It’s been a long time coming, and it’s about time I admitted it – metal doesn’t move me like it used to.

I, always upping the volume and frequency when it comes to the things that I think make me look unique, maintained through my college years a public identity consisting solely of radical politics, metal, vegetarianism, and later Japanophilia – every one, in the paraphrased words of Ian Gillan, trying to be louder than everything else. Now that I have no clueless mainstream to set myself against which I’m not already categorically excluded from, I find playing up each of those parts of me less psychologically rewarding. I still enjoy a few metal bands, probably the only ones I should ever have been listening to, but the days of my impulsively buying Gamma Ray’s back catalog are long gone. There are just a handful I’d still buy new releases from out of anything other than loyalty.

If I could chalk this change up to simple maturity, I’d do it – but I don’t think marathon House, MD sessions are indicative of much emotional growth. Who knows though, it could be Lupus.

2 factors stopping J-rap from being any good:

1: Linguistic restraints:
Japanese has only 1 final consonant (n), 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u), and all verbs always end in the same vowel (u). Not that I’ve tried, but I imagine this makes creative rhymes a bit more difficult. A lot of stuff though is actually even worse than these limitations would suggest, due to:

2: Suckiness of MCs and total lack of creativity:
The Aoyama Teruma (Thelma Aoyama, a name given by parents who apparently wanted to show the world they’re sorry for their miscegenation) single I’ve been hearing in the 100-yen shop nonstop recently features this rhyming craplet courtesy of guest artist Soulja:

んなことよりお前の方は元気か (nna koto yori omae no hou wa genki ka)
ちゃんと飯食ってるか (chanto meshi kutteru ka)
ちくしょう、やっぱ言えねーや (chikushou, yappa ienee ya)
また今度送るよ、俺からのレター (mata kondo okuru yo, ore kara no retaa)

More than dat, how you been?
You eatin right?
Damn it, I just can’t say it.
I’ll send it later, the letter from me.

All 4 lines end in the same vowel, two of them being not only the same phoneme but actually the same lexical unit as well, the questioning particle か (ka). He essentially rhymed a question mark with itself. Perhaps this soulja’s war is against unclearly punctuated sentences.

I’ve only heard J-rap that I liked once – and it was interesting only because the MC was a fluent English and Japanese speaker and used both, sometimes rhyming with each other. Of course, he was limited by format to love songs (rap is basically positive thinking music here) but I was impressed with his verbal dexterity anyway.