BIG IN JAPAN
hitomi
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Wowow |
If there have been more car
accidents on roads in front of Tokyo billboards recently, sultry 24 year-old songstress
hitomi (all in lower case - very "different") must surely take some blame. With
only her long golden locks and the camera angle covering her modesty, the posters have
probably distracted more than a few. Display of her nude form (allegedly 82/59/82 and
167cm tall) has done nothing to harm sales of the product it nominally promotes either:
Her cleverly titled fifth and most recent release Love Life. It has already taken
the number one spot in Japan' Oricon chart and has sold around a million copies.
Not that her success is all down to the packaging. A seven-year musical career, starting
when legendary J-Pop producer and all-around music industry Svengali Tetsuya Komuro
spotted the young model Hitomi Furuya at an audition in '93, has left her with the ability
to make decent albums despite her '99 professional split with Komuro. (Funny how most of
his "discoveries" end up leaving him…) She has come a long way from her
entirely scripted first single (she subsequently wrote her own lyrics) "Let's Play
Winter" in '94, and her Go To The Top '95 album debut is likewise worlds
away from the confident sound of Love Life.
Since the Komuro phenomenon is usually larger than that of the artists he works with, it
came as a surprise to many that the girl from Kanagawa came out of his shadow with both
credibility and popularity intact. More than that, her confidence strengthened, too.
"I am glad I can regain my career direction - from choosing my own makeup, clothes to
writing my own songs." Since Komuro has claimed to favour artist freedom more than
the rest of J-Pop Inc, this says a lot about the musical freedom of the
"artists" that make up the bulk of Japan music.
The first post-Komuro album and her fourth in total, Thermo Plastic (Oct '99)
produced hit singles "Wish" and "By Your Side" and Love Life
looks set to do better again. Seen in this light, the nude CD cover for that
album (a gimmick also recently used by both Misia and Ayumi Hamazaki) seems as much
personal statement as marketing cynicism. Certainly, her hit single from the end of last
year, "Love 2000," picked up a Top Ten Of The Year Award at the Japan Music
Awards on the strength of the CD's ear-catching, not eye-catching, qualities .
The opening to the show on hitomi's recent tour borrowed more than a little from Madonna's
Girlie Show, as she admitted herself on Japanese TV, and it's no coincidence that the
"coolest woman" listing on hitomi's official website is the American pop queen
herself. The similarity does not end there, either, with hitomi's early '99 album release H
(Japanese slang for "sex" because of the similarity with echi -
sex/sleazy) mirroring Madonna's much publicized nude photobook, "Sex." Beating
her own '97 longplayer to the top spot, H proved that as far as hitomi goes, sex
sells.
Simeon Paterson |
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