Back in April, YMO did a collabo with Crystal Kay on this track. Lovely. They performed yesterday at the World Happiness Festival in Tokyo’s Yume no Shima (Dream Island) Public Park Arena. This is a version of it without Kuri.

Someone used Crystal Kay’s “It’s A Crime” for this typographic music video made in flash animation.

M-Flo loves Crystal Kay – “Love Don’t Cry” (c) 2006 Avex

So yeah, I’m back. From outer space. A bit of a new look, and a streamlining of all this video stuff I’m watching. The Sci-Fi generation is visual. I want to reflect that a bit more here.

Utada Hikaru of Japan and BoA of Korea are making attempts to break into the US market. For Hikaru, this is her third shot. While I like both of these artists, and they’ve done some great work, their US albums have all been wrong. Even Utada admits “I’m not surprised my first English album, Exodus, didn’t sell. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would sell. It was a very experimental album.” And that’s sort of the problem. Americans don’t experiment. We stumble on stuff and stick with it. Utada’s “Hikki” era with EMI had singles produced by Jam & Lewis and Darkchild. And they were great singles. It’s the easiest thing in the world to translate the songs into English, tweak the production a little, and boom. Instant pop success.

But they released an “experimental album”. And then another album that, as I recall, they had all the faith in the world in. And it failed.

Clearly, marketing something in Japan is a totally different thought process than marketing something in the US. But I can’t help but look at how people have taken to things that WERE done right here that are Japanese. It was mostly because they didn’t try to make these things American. Nintendo’s ads are very different than Microsoft’s. And with one exception (the Ridgeline, which makes sense because American trucks are superior), Honda ads are different than Ford.

So it would seem to me that if labels are serious about breaking a Japanese artist in America, they would want to bring Japanese artists who have already mastered certain elements that are lacking in American pop culture, but that are also cool. They would want to also stay true to the artists actual direction, and not do albums for the “market”. There are artists who do great records in Asia and language is the only thing holding them back form being hits in the US. A few come to mind as slam dunks if packaged correctly.

They are, in no particular order:

1. Crystal Kay. Crystal is Half Black, Half Japanese, speaks fluent English and Japanese, has a hell of a voice, and, well, she ain’t exactly hard to look at. In addition, you bring Crystal Kay to the states and she comes with Jam & Lewis. It’s like getting Namie Amuro from the early 90′s, only she’s Black and isn’t attached to one producer.

Here’s a video for Konna ni Chikaku de.

2. m-flo. Let’s be honest, Pharell Williams and Kanye West owe more to m-flo as style influences than anybody else. Verbal speaks so many languages he can’t stick to one in one song. And Taku can get down in any musical style. The advantage of bringing m-flo over is that pop becomes fun again, and that you will actually get REMIXES of pop songs if you let Taku loose.

This is a video for “Dopamine”.

3. Do As Infinity. If we’re serious about this, you have to bring a rock band that isn’t afraid to tour, can write songs, and an act that has spin-off potential. Tomiko and Ryo have already done solo projects, And Van has a voice that holds up well on tour.

DAI has just reunited after a short absence, and performed on MTV in January. Here’s that performance.

again, one of the things you sort of have to consider is that if you don’t speak Japanese, this is all jibber jabber. But, if you don’t speak Japanese and can look past that to see star potential, you may find that we have more to learn from these artists than we realize.