Playing Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and the Persona games have garnered my audio attention for the Japanese-Pop genre. I really would like to start listening/buying to some J-pop music , but i have know idea where to start or what to look for. If anyone's got some artist/song recommendations shout'em out!!
p.s. I'm Hispanic so i have a tendency to hate Anime, but love them ending credits
J-Pop
Concept »
Japanese pop music, also known as J-Pop, refers to the most popular and mainstream music produced in Japan. It is commonly featured in many rhythm games as well as other genres.
J-Pop Recommendations
I'm posting J-POP hits from the Anime Macross Frontier. I know that you said you don't particularly enjoy Anime but Macross Frontier is a show almost entirely based around music, J-Pop to be exact. It's really about music being able to allow different species (aliens and us) to being able to communicate and find peace. A lovely if trite message. I loved this series even though it was mostly a fanservice tribute to the original Macross (which was essentially the same story with different aliens and had more drama than the entirety of Dallas and Dynasty combined). Still, there's definitely something to be said for any series that manages to put transforming mecha, alien monsters and awesome music into a stew (not a curry) and make it utterly delicious entertainment.
If you like the Kingdom Hearts intro than you will prbly like Hikaru Utada because she is the one who sings it
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dpopular&field-keywords=Hikaru+Utada&x=0&y=0
You should probably just listen to any of the BECK soundtracks. It's more rockish stuff, but it's damn catchy.
Gundam 00 S2 opening theme.
You should also check some of the Hello!Project units like Morning Musume (preferably their older songs) or Hangry&Angry, if you want the J-Poppiest J-Pop there is.
Great bands/artists (besides everything that has been mentioned so far) are also Zwei, Yui, Younha and Uverworld, which are more pop-rock
But yeah, my j-pop tastes begin and end with Utada, and that doesn't fit the traditional mould anyway. I couldn't really find anything meaningful out of anything else. It's all too saccharine for the most part. I do love some bands though. Miki Furukawa is borderline j-pop maybe, but I think of her music just as an extension of late-era Supercar, going even more electronic much like iLL.
Oh actually, I forgot my guilty pleasure of pleasures which is Perfume. 3 girls, completely overproduced, autotuned the fuck out of. Super catchy electropop. So good when you crank the bass up. I may as well include Capsule aswell, but they're going more into straight up electronic as of late.
I like Halicali. I discovered them because they did a song for the anime Eureka 7 ( "Tip Tap Tips" ), and I really liked it. I sought out other works by them and found I their catchy pop harmonies really appealed to me. This isn't deep stuff, but I like it. It's been on my Ipod playlists for a while now.
I've also bought a couple of albums by Puffy Amiyumi (just "Puffy" now I think). I picked up my first album because it had the title track to the Cartoon Network show, Teen Titans. However, I really loved all the other stuff on the album more. I'm not sure how "purist" fans of J-Pop feel about them because several of their hits are in English too, but when it comes to music who can say who is right?
For male performers, I've recently gotten into Inoue Joe. Again, this one was because of a cartoon. In this case, I was watching fansubs of Naruto Shippuden ( "Closer" ) and he did the 4th season title song. So, again, curious I looked around and found more material by him. The stuff I really liked was upbeat and catchy.
I would be remiss if I failed to mention Megumi Hayashibara, also. She was actually the first J-Pop artist that attracted my attention about 15 years ago.
The closest I've ever come in my life to listening to J-Pop is the background music in Giant Bomb's TGS coverage.
If you don't mind "rockier" stuff, too, I recommend Asian Kung-Fu Generation (a la my avatar), Miyavi (tentatively), and HIGH and MIGHTY COLOR.
Some examples of each one:
This is the only video I could find that had one of my favorite HIGH and MIGHTY COLOR songs on it. It's the first song that plays.
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