It’s been a dark year for J-pop.

Cocco is no longer with us. Shina Ringo is off breastfeeding. Ryuichi Kawamura is menacing the populace. Hyde looks like a Caucasian woman. Gackt is shooting off his magnum. Tsunku stacked Morning Musume with even more members. Glay moved to New York. Ryuichi Sakamoto made a really boring song about landmines and Princess Di. Utada Hikaru kicked Ma-chan’s ass at Tetris. It made me wonder if there was enough to make my annual year-end list.

Man, I have to tip my hat to both of these groups. Without them, the entire year would’ve been a wash. It’s nice to know that Japan is still capable of producing artists who write good, passionate and interesting music. I was wondering if that were still legal here. I thought government authorized bands of heavily armed idol singers had hunted them down and destroyed them, not unlike the Jedi or something. Fra-Foa are excellent, both in album and live form. Chisako Mikami offered a nice balm to ease the sting of Cocco leaving me at the altar. She needs to marry me and bear my children immediately.

It’s also nice to know that rock ain’t dead yet either. Sads keep the torch burning better than anyone else. They’ve gotten much heavier since Babylon, eschewing their initial 50’s oriented sound for big detuned guitar riffs and lots of bass. In other words, metal baby, BIG ASS HEAVY METAL with enough power to level buildings and annihilate small countries.

Even though he lost some points for his most recent single, my opinion of him has not changed. He’s still an excellent song writer and while Rebirth is not as good as Mars, it definitely grows on you, blowing your clothes off like tissue paper and extending the tentacles of Gackty goodness inside your nether regions.

Though it took awhile, I joined the cult of Final Fun Boy. It’s cutesy, banal, vapid and catchy as hell. I have no idea what a final fun boy is and I’m a native English speaker. Give me ten minutes and I’ll come up with something. This is the best song to come out of a pre-packaged, over-produced girl group that’s not called Morning Musume in a good long while.

For all I know, Nightmare was released last year but I don’t care. Pickings are slim these days. I don’t get it. Bands release singles that get lost in the shuffle when they should very obviously be on their next album. In many cases, they get shoved onto hastily produced best albums, i.e. ELT, Glay, Aikawa Nanase, Tomoyasu Hotei and so on. The unluckier ones get consigned to single oblivion. Nightmare would have fit perfectly on The Rose God Gave Me but it isn’t there, probably because it’s not entirely in English or something. The B-side, Finale is a slower, softer piece of music with a ska/reggae influenced guitar line. I only wish I’d remembered to record it onto an MD before I took it to America and left it there.

Okay, so it took a while for me to get into Youjeen. I remember buying the single for "Hey Jerks" out of devotion towards anyone remotely related to Luna Sea that didn’t have RK works printed on it and because she was a chick. It was decent but didn’t grab me all that much. I then purchased her third single, "Beautiful Days" because I liked the PV. Alas, I then found out that it was already on the album. Guess what I did next? Youjeen’s got a set of pipes on her, J’s got the rock n roll/punk thing going on, they’re a good combination. She’s an excellent addition to the recent explosion of rocking female vocalists in Japanese pop music.

I feel kind of bad for these guys. Here we have a visual group with a legitimately original sound, a talented vocalist and a horde of rabid fans but they still haven’t broken through. These guys are almost legendary in Osaka but unfortunately ended up going major when Visual started becoming less and less commercially viable. They also suffer from Pierrot Syndrome. One guy writes most of the material and as a result, everything starts to sound the same.

Now that I’m done bashing them, let it be duly noted that Z-Hard is one hell of a album and needs to be listened to by people other than me and the entire population of Osaka. It showcases them at their best, fusing visual/metal guitars with keyboards that popped directly out of a Valis game behind the distinctively upper register vocals of Yasu. That and it has Dry?, the sexiest song this side of Vanilla.

Okay, so maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I’m finally reaching that stage in my life where I don’t want to let anything new and exciting into my heart and I’m clutching desperately to the old and the familiar, stating to anyone who will listen how it just ain’t the same anymore and that kids today wouldn’t know music if it walked up and bit them on the ass. Then again, I’m still buying tons of western music.

The musical climate in this country is changing and unfortunately, the temperature is one that I find myself hard pressed to survive in. It used to be that there was always something new and exciting that I absolutely had to own. Now I’m lucky if I buy something Japanese once a month.

2001 was the year that many of the individuals and groups I count on were strangely silent. Sure, we were treated to some new Dir en grey and Pierrot, both of which were excellent but even with that, it all feels sort of empty and meaningless. I think the love affair has hit the skids and I’m not sure if it will ever right itself.

I don’t know Gackt, you’re one talented MF. You got a set of pipes, you’re funny as hell, you play a mean piano, you can do The Matrix thing, you make a mean curry, you have a magnum, you’ve got the love and adulation of thousands of high school age girls, and me, why’d you go and besmirch it all by releasing "Another World"? Look, I still haven’t heard the side-by-side comparison but even so, it’s a generic, simple song with generic simple lyrics and even if you didn’t steal it from a movie nobody saw, it’s still not up to your usual standards.

And now it’s time for the ten singles that I am most definitely not listening to.

Globe "Stop in the name of love"
Actually, I really should say every single they’ve done since "Miss your Body" but I think the fact that TK has stooped to covering a song shows just how far the mighty have fallen. Then again, he tried it with True Kiss Destination but that was different, he was attempting to make an unattractive and untalented woman popular. Globe had something special. Asami Yoshida had nothing except for TK’s kid.

Ayumi Hamasaki "Seasons"
Okay, so I’m not the biggest supporter of Ayu anyway, but this song grated on me when I first heard it and it still grates on me. Does anyone else agree that the guitar line was ripped directly from the Heart song, “Alone?”

Chemistry "Pieces of a Dream"
These two need to be hurt. Actually, the pretty boy does. The other one looks kind of hardcore. Maybe he can be rehabilitated and placed in a nice foster group. It also has the most pretentiously sappy video I have ever had the misfortune of seeing. People using sign language to sing a song makes me want to vomit upon my galoshes.

Dragon Ash "I love Hip Hop"
There’s nothing I like more than a story with a happy ending. A Japanese hip-hop group samples a Joan Jett song and raps badly to it, the company releases it even though they didn’t get permission and they get sued. There is justice in this world!

Bump of Chicken "Tentaikansoku"
Though there was point where I might’ve actually let this song into my heart, it just was not to be. After hearing the rest of their catalogue, especially their new song, Halcyon, I realized that everything by them sounds exactly the same. Same tinny guitars, same chord progressions, same serious need of a good producer, same everything. They’ve got a real racket going. Re-release the same song over and over again and get the populace to buy it over and over again.

Utada Hikaru "Automatic"
You knew this was coming. It could’ve been anything by her but I figured I’d mention the single that started all the pain and suffering. The day anything by her appears in my record collection is the day I paint myself pink, spangle my nipples and claim to be a life sized, living beanie baby.

Misia "Everything"
As long as we’re on the subject, I sometimes sit around and wonder which Japanese female R&B artist I hate more. Adding another overlong love ballad to her repertoire didn’t help Misia’s case too much. It must’ve been a contest. How many times can I say, “You’re everything” before Da Crank snaps and kills his co-workers with an English I textbook covered in tacks? That and her videos have crossed the line into the “I’m trying to be deep and artsy and failing miserably” area.

Every Little Thing "Fragile"
Am I the only one who thinks that all the talent in this group left with Mitsuhiro Igarashi? The only reason to like them aka Kaori Mochida disappeared as Ms. Mochida recently moved from the “really attractive” category into the “really scary, in an burned out obachan who spent her youth prostituting herself for crystal meth” category. This song, sandwiched between Ai no Kakera and Graceful World, spent the longest amount of time at the top of the charts, which puzzles me considering how they were all the same song.

Aucifer "Hyper Sonic Soul"
Oh dear sweet lord Jesus. There are countless visual bands that could be a viable pop phenomenon, yet we still have to deal with this band of no-talent hacks fronted by a idol. I never really attempted to differentiate between their songs because I didn’t care but this song sticks out for the unbelievably swell point Makoto does during the chorus.

The Gospellers "Eien"
I have given a name to my pain and it is The Gospellers. I might’ve actually liked them if their name was something a little more honest like “Five really ugly guys singing in a style that Da Crank thinks needs to be burned out of existence,” but I guess they figured that it would look terrible on a T-shirt, especially if they superimposed my happy smiling face underneath it.

And that, kiddies, is that. Stay tuned for the next exciting installment when Da Crank peers into his crystal ball and predicts what 2002 will hold.
Pull yer cranium out from yer anus.