You are now a famous rock musician. You’ve taken the world by storm with your awesome vocals and kick ass style. You and your band are just about to wrap up your stellar World Tour with a final concert in Tokyo. As a tribute to your love for japanese music, you’re going to do a set of 5 Japanese rock and/or pop song covers. Which songs do you choose by which artists and why?
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Utada Hikaru – Beautiful World
Holy crap I love this song. I love how passionate it is, I love the piano, I love the marching quality of it, I love/hate that I identify with the lyrics much too easily. It might not be strong enough to be an opening song to the set, but it would be instantly recognizable by the audience not only as a Hikki song, but as the theme for the first new Evangelion movie that recently premiered there. It would definitely let the audience know where I was headed for the next couple songs.
Buck Tick – Gensou hana
How could I not? I really had a hard time picking a Buck Tick song I would cover. I was thinking Jupiter which is a beautiful song, but way too personal to Atsushi. Gensou hana is a better fit. It’s an absolutely gorgeous song, yet still manages to rock. It’s one of those songs that I carry around with me, and can’t imagine that I wouldn’t get emotional with it if I was performing it live. (It’s like a lullaby though, sitting here listening to it still suffering from daylight savings lag, I’m being lulled to sleep by Atsushi’s voice. Ah, heaven.)
Aikawa Nanase – Seven Seas
More than any other artist I was torn in trying to pick a Nanase song. I finally settled on Seven Seas for 5 main reasons; Purana is one of the greatest rock pop albums EVER, I love how upbeat the song is, I was thinking of NO FUTURE but didn’t want to do another song tied to an anime series, Dandelion was a little too mellow for what I had in mind, and finally Seven Seas has some fantastic guitar work in it too, gotta let the rest of the band get their kicks in as well!
Yuki – Hadaka no Taiyo
While Nagai Yume introdiced me to Yuki and made me a fan, it was this 4th track on her album WAVE that made me a devoted fan. I love this song to death, if I had a soundtrack for my life, this song would definitely be on it. I would have to learn some of Yuki’s apparently signature dance moves for the stage for this one (LOL!) I really thought about using this song as the closer to my set list of covers, but wanted to finish with a bang and Hadaka no Taiyo fades into a sort of trance state as it finishes, so for the Slam! Bang! finish I choose……..
Morning Musume – Osaka Koi no Uta
You know, I seriously thought about putting Love Machine here as it would be instantly recognizable by the Japanese public, it’s a fun song and would be a good closer. Problem is it’s been done to death by H!P itself, and I’d want to identify myself as a fan by doing a song that might be recognizable, but not as much as LM. I just adore Osaka Koi no Uta so here it is. Even though the lyrics are kind of sad, the song is sung with undeniable attitude. As an added bonus for myself I would totally dress in one of the white poofy dresses with the huge bow in back and sing into a jeweled microphone, but probably with a goth loli-esque twist.
BONUS ENCORE:
Masami Okui – Rinbu Revolution
I’m going to cheat and put in one more song, and I’m also going to pull a Shokotan here and cover an anime theme song. Honestly, Utena’s first theme song is one of the best anime theme songs ever. It fits anyway as anime was my gateway to Jpop and idoldom, I’m only paying homage to my roots. Plus it freaking ROCKS. For those of you who have never been gifted enough to hear it, here it is. (Abridged TV version).
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Narrowing yourself to only 5 songs to represent and cover the extent of your fandom is pretty damn hard. It took me close to 2 weeks to finalize my picks and get the post written and published. I kept thinking, maybe this song would be better, or maybe going with a more obscure artist would somehow be more appropriate. Maybe I care too much about this kind of thing. LOL! But it definitely wasn’t as easy a post as I sought out to create. In the end I’m satisfied with my choices…. and wish now I really was in a rock band so I could pull this off!