Song of the Year

Mmm... new Mog features.I really think the addition of the Mog player is really going to make this service take off, although I have to wonder about possible issues. Is it really legal to share music via a website, I'm not so sure...But I'm not going to worry about it for now, because at least for myself, it's really hard to talk about the music if you can't hear it. A lot of friends think it's kind of odd that I listen to J-Pop pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. In fact, all the US music I've heard this year has been solely from the artists who have appeared on Music Station and other Japanese shows.The trick I find useful is to get them to listen to J-Pop without them realizing it. Groups like Ellegarden or singers like Angela Aki or Yuna Ito are good to get them at least a little curious. A dash of some PV's from Ayumi Hamasaki or Tommy Heavenly also helps. I can't tell you how many people stopped and watched 'Lonely in Gorgeous' when it was running as my screensaver (the video is a take-off on a classic Beastie Boys video).Of course, really delving into J-Pop is an acquired taste, so certain groups are hard to introduce to even casual fans. Even anime fans won't often venture far outside of the soundtracks to the shows, which really ends up being restrictive. However, there is the occasional group that either picks up traction through an anime, or introduces fans to their already well-known work through an anime.This happened last year with the group Spitz, with their work being features prominently in the series "Honey and Clover". There are several anime series that I respect both for their story and music, and this is one of them (for the record, "City Hunter" and "Kimagure Orange Road" are two others that spring to mind for having soundtracks that almost overshadow the series). I was surprised to discover that they were far from being a new band, with almost 15 years in the J-pop music scene.After listening to the top 100 Oricon songs of the year, I was really struck with the one problem of the charts. The ability to have a song be highly-ranked for more than a single year. For example, the number one song of last year "Seishun Amigo" is number three this year. It's far from being the only one in the top one hundred. Out of those songs, Mahou no Kotoba (Magic Words) only came in 85th. However, I think it's the best J-Pop song of the year.Take a listen and see what you think.