Ballsack’s J-Pop Midlife Crisis, pt. 24 and final: 長嶋水徳 – serval DOG –
Starting sometime last year, I started really getting into Japanese music. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because I had always thought I hated singing in Japanese. Turns out I don’t! In the night threads for the following week, I’ll write a little about each of my favorite artists that I’ve discovered, and share a streaming album for you to dutifully ignore.
The very last person I’ll cover for this series goes by the cumbersome name Minori Nagashima – serval dog -. I don’t know too much about her, but she came out with her debut album Aloneness at the very end of 2024, and I was impressed by it. It falls pretty well into a sort of industrial rock revival. In 2024 she also came out with 『悦』in September 2024, which seems a bit noisier. Both are quite good.
Wrap Up
Thanks for everyone that’s expressed some appreciation for the picks I’ve chosen here. I tried to highlight a pretty wide variety of music chronologically, though, obviously, I stuck mostly to a broad popular music idiom. And, of course, all of the projects on here are at least fronted by women. I don’t want to say that this really had any ideological bent, as if Japanese women musicians are any more or less known in the US than male musicians. It’s really just my personal interest in constraining my musical explorations mostly to female musicians. Maybe I’ll do another series highlighting artists, maybe from a different country. Maybe not. Maybe when I do that I won’t take up nearly an entire month of night threads. You never know!
I’ve created a playlist of all of the artists’ I’ve featured here. I tried to highlight songs that weren’t on the albums that I chose, though I’m not familiar with some of their wider discographies, so you just get a song I liked from the album that I posted. Seiko Oomori’s 「死神」starts it out: probably my favorite track by her, according to Last.FM anyway.
(Some people requested that I make a Spotify playlist of this. I don’t have Spotify, though I do have a login and can create a playlist. But I didn’t want to. If you’d like to or one for any other streaming site, please feel free. If you let me know, I’ll update the header with it. I may also add more songs to this playlist as time goes on, just because I do use it on occasion for myself to shuffle through).
I also created a Google Sheet as an index. Unfortunately I can’t embed it, so you’ll just have to make do with a couple of links.
Comma separated values if you’re interested in sorting it in your program of choice:
I wanted to give one highlight to compliment the silly screen name I’ve given myself, 絶対女のry Ballsack (Zetai Onna No-ry Ballsack). It comes from the chorus of Seiko Oomori’s song 「絶対彼女」1, this live version features a rousing chorus of it.
And one more thing. January 31st is my birthday. I am now 44.
- The song is 「絶対彼女」 from the similarly titled, but not exactly titled album, 『絶対少女』 ↩︎