Conventional Wisdom: My First Japanese CDs - "Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi"

Okay, several blogs back, I joked about remembering The Goode Olde Days when L’arc-en-Ciel were the biggest thing ever, but that is NOTHING compared to the excitement of when Puffy was gonna take over the world. The level of mainstream, normal people recognition that Ami Onuki and Yumi Yoshimura attained in the mid-00s was absolutely unheard of for a Japanese act. They did the super memorable theme to Teen Titans, they got their OWN show on Cartoon Network, they were appearing on late night TV like real regular pop stars, they were even in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade! Surely lip synching in a street in New York while your giant balloon doppelgangers wobble behind you means you’ve made it, right?  I mean, this was the first of these Japanese CDs that I DIDN'T have to go to a convention or some import store to buy!  It was right there on a normal music store rack, just like a REAL album! This was the start of the Puffy domination of the American charts, and J-Pop’s full-on invasion of the Western cultural scene, right? Us nerds were finally cool now, right? RIGHT?

Well… no. While they were definitely fared better than any previous Pop exports (insert Pink Lady reference here) Puffy AmiYumi did not, in fact, bring about the dawn of a new age of J-Pop in the West. Actually, a strong case could be made that The West ended up ruining Puffy, because Lord knows the albums they put out post-Cartoon Network aren’t anywhere near as good as the stuff they recorded at the dawn of their career. But that warrants some unpacking, since we need to understand what made Puffy good in the first place to understand why anyone would say they fell off later. And intentionally or not, Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi: Music From The Series makes for a great comparison point between the Puffy that was and the Puffy that would be.

Actually, I seriously contemplated making this blog another multi-CD one, since I wound up buying three Puffy AmiYumi albums in very rapid succession: Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, which we shall discuss here, An Illustrated History, an earlier greatest hits compilation covering their earlier career, and Nice, their first new album to be released with any push in the West. I thought I could use An Illustrated History as a summary of early Puffy, Nice as a case study of where things went wrong, and Hi Hi as the sort of pivot point in the middle. There is some overlap in songs between all three albums, so you COULD string all three into a single work this way. But the thing is… that sounds like a lot of work, and the FLCL blog really wore me out already, so I’m just gonna focus on the first CD I bought: Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi. So now that we’ve established that I won’t be talking about any other albums, let’s talk about some other albums…

Yumi Yoshimura and Ami Onuki debuted in 1995 and immediately established a unique identity built upon immaculate recreations of old school Pop genres. Which genres? Well, all of ‘em, basically. From Classic Rock to Disco to Swing to Bubblegum to Garage Rock and all points in between, Puffy was all over the map as they lovingly-crafted recreated of past forms of Pop/Rock. And I don’t mean “recreate” in the sense of a retro/revivalist act, Puffy somehow managed to avoid any sense of being an anachronistic gimmick. It might be that they always kept their VISUAL presentation modern, sticking to contemporary fashion instead of a kitschy dress-up version of whatever era their latest single was influenced by, or just the fact that they never stuck with one recreating one genre long enough to be defined by it. They weren’t that group who sounded like The Buggles or that group who sounded like The Who or any of the other things they’d indeed sounded like over the years, they were just Puffy AmiYumi.

Of course, the key to all of that was having songs that were actually good, and for that Puffy had a secret weapon: composer and producer Andy Sturmer. Formerly of the similarly multifaceted genre-hoppers Jellyfish, Sturmer arguably hit a career highlight in working with Puffy AmiYumi, cranking out an imposing body of compositions that effortlessly walk that difficult line of sounding like other songs without QUITE ripping anything off. It’s like those genre parodies Weird Al does, except done completely straight-faced. They work as clever musical in-jokes if you know where the reference is coming from, but also stand on their own as their own musical statements. That’s probably why Puffy worked so well for me beyond just being a Japanese group, they appealed as much to the Classic Rock upbringing of my past as my newfound weeb-ness. Puffy was a perfect storm of my musical interests.

…and then they weren’t.

Even listening to Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi on its own, it sounds a bit like the work of two separate artists. Right around the time Puffy started getting involved with Cartoon Network, their output began to rapidly drift away from the intricate re-engineering of past Pop trends and towards a much more contemporary Pop/Punk sound reminiscent of Green Day or *shudder* Avril Lavigne. Heck, Lavigne would eventually write some songs for Puffy. At the time, I blamed this on American execs meddling with the Puffy formula and trying to make them sound more acceptable to mainstream Western audiences. While there might have indeed been some of that going on, I’ve since discovered that Avril Lavigne is actually a lot more popular in Japan than over here, so it may have legitimately been an attempt at giving the audience what they thought they wanted. Either way, the REAL problem was Andy Sturmer stepping away from the group to focus on working on more Cartoon Network shows. (If you ever thought to yourself that the Ben 10 theme sounds an awful lot like Teen Titans, well, now you know why) Try as they might, the various talents roped in to contribute new material for subsequent albums (or their attempts to write for themselves) just couldn’t manage to replicate the mysterious stylistic alchemy that Sturmer concocted on Puffy’s previous albums.

Nice is solid enough, and still has a sizable Sturmer influence, but it’s nevertheless a noticeably less compelling album than the likes of Spike or Jet-CD. And the follow-up Splurge is just disappointing, the first Puffy album with songs that are straight-up bad (well, aside from that remix collection), bad enough to make America stop caring altogether. The cartoon was canceled the same year, which MIGHT have been an unfortunate coincidence, but the fact that the next album, Honeycreeper, never got released in the States at all probably isn’t. There’s still some decent J-Pop songs in the Puffy discography after this point, but that’s all it is: decent J-Pop, that honestly doesn’t sound all that different from any other Japanese Pop artist of their time. For as much as early Puffy borrowed from other sources, one could never accuse them of sounding like everybody else. With that exceptional uniqueness gone, it became pretty hard to care about Puffy. They haven’t released a new album since 2011’s Thank You, and while they supposedly put out a new single in 2020, I’ve yet to see any trace that the world noticed it. What I’m saying is, I don’t think the Puffy AmiYumi float is coming back to the Thanksgiving Parade anytime soon.

And the sad thing is, Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi proves the whole contemporary Pop/Punk thing COULD have worked. As much as I blamed the departure of Andy Sturmer and the influence of Avril Lavigne for Puffy’s decline, the stylistic shift evident in their later work was already evident while Sturmer was still at the helm for Hi Hi, and the songs here still manage to stand out from the J-Pop crowd. And while they don’t exactly mesh stylistically with the older songs, there’s still a consistent level of quality that later albums are sorely lacking. So yeah, let’s finally talk about that album we’re SUPPOSED to be talking about.

Let’s start at the beginning, the LITERAL beginning: Puffy’s debut single “Asia no Junshin.” Everything I’ve said about the best Puffy AmiYumi songs being retrofitted from parts of other songs is demonstrated here, since “Asia no Junshin” is the most Electric Light orchestra song that Jeff Lynne never wrote. The whole ELO formula is here: it’s like if the beat from “Don’t Bring Me Down” got in a transporter accident with the synths from “Twilight” and the strings from “Sweet Talking Woman” and that vocorder that’s from too many places to count. And yet, while all the pieces are clearly traceable back to their points of origin, the end result is inescapably unique. Points no doubt go to composer Tamio Okuda for coming up with a melody that manages to avoid directly sounding too much like any of the songs (and I just realized I owe him an apology for implying Sturmer was the only creative force behind Puffy this whole time), but there’s also the all-important factor of the vocals. As much as Puffy AmiYumi songs might have sounded like other songs, Ami and Yumi’s distinctive presence at the front of it all never failed to tie all these disparate songs into a unified whole while also infusing them all with a unique personality. I mean, nobody’s going to confuse Jeff Lynne for two Japanese ladies. Incidentally, “Asia no Junshin” is one of the biggest complains I have against An Illustrated History, as while Hi Hi rightly features the original, the earlier compilation boasts a highly ill-advised English re-recording. There’s more wrong with this than just me wanting to have the original, but I’ll get into that later.

The next oldest song TECHNICALLY isn’t a Puffy song at all, but the Yumi Yoshimura solo track “V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N.” It’s still SORT of a Puffy song, though, because it was released on the Solo Solo collection: two solo EPs by each of the girls released together… so exactly what you’d think a release by a duo titled “Solo Solo” would be. It’s probably the most “old fashioned” song on all on Hi Hi, a throwback to 60s Yé-Yé music. This is the exact sort of thing all the Shibuya-kei acts loved to mine for inspiration. In fact, if you buried this song under a few more layers of ironic detachment, I could totally see Pizzicato Five recording it. The difference, of course, is that Yumi actually sounds like she’s having fun, which automatically makes “V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N” stand out from most of those terminally cool show-offs. This is probably the one song on all of Hi Hi that most sounds like it belongs in a cartoon show, and I mean that as a compliment.

Continuing on with the older songs featured on Hi Hi, we have “Kore ga Watashi no Ikirumichi” off of Jet-CD, which is a blatant Beatles/Merseybeat tribute, so of course I love it (anybody who actually pays attention to those Far Out There character soundtracks saw me slip this one in with the legit Beatles songs on May’s soundtrack) I mean, this one is so blatant, they actually sneak the riffs to “Please Please Me” and “I Feel Fine” in, just to flaunt how much the actual melody AVOIDS sounding too much like any Beatles songs. Spike contributes three very different sounding tracks, “Into The Beach,” “December,” and “Boogie-Woogie no. 5.” “Into The Beach” is a good example of what I mean about how the latter day Puffy sound COULD have worked, as it’s a loud guitar driven rock song just like many of their later singles. And yet, it also doesn’t sound ANYTHING like those later songs, boasting an old school swagger that sounds less like Green Day and more like The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks. “December,” on the other hand, is a pretty, harmony-driven piano tune recalling “Your Mother Should Know,” “The Fool On The Hill” and other Paul McCartney Beatles compositions. And technically speaking, no, it isn’t a Christmas song, although it does contain jingling bells and a mention of snow, so that might be enough for it to count in some circles. Then there’s “Boogie-Woogie no. 5,” a historically important song because it was producer Sam Register seeing the video for the song that got Puffy the job on Teen Titans in the first place. This fact baffles me a bit, since it’s probably my least favorite song on Hi Hi and one of the few early Puffy singles in general I’m iffy on. I mean, the song itself is decent enough Swing Revival collaboration with The Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, but the melody is waaay to repetitive for most of the run time, only throwing in what SHOULD be the middle eight right at the very end. Worse though, Ami and Yumi’s vocals are a rare weak point here, repeatedly going off-key on big notes. And “Boogie-Woogie no. 5” is, like, %50 big notes, so you can’t un-hear it once you notice. At least I can’t.

Actually, Spike technically contributes one more track to Hi Hi, but it’s the point where we start to spill over into “new” Puffy material. See, the Spike song “Violet” received an English re-write courtesy of Sturmer and was re-recorded as “Love So Pure.” It’s the same song aside from the lyrics, and a nice one at that, sort of like what might have happened if Phil Spector had produced an album by Jangle Pop maestros Teenage Fanclub. But those English lyrics… I think one of the reasons I like Japanese Pop music is because I don’t speak Japanese, so even if a Pop song as stupid Pop song lyrics, I can’t understand any of it. I CAN understand “Love So Pure,” though… and it’s stupid Pop song lyrics. What’s more, Yumi and Ami are noticeably less confident singing in another language for the first time, and while they get a BIT sturdier in later English songs, their performances never feel as strong as when they sing in their native tongue. I can’t imagine ANYBODY likes trying to perform while also faking their way through a language they don’t speak, and it really comes through on a lot of the tracks where they try it here.

Speaking of which, let’s get to the songs that had just come out on Nice. The big kickoff song on the US version of Nice is “Planet Tokyo,” an English rewrite of the Japanese “Akai Buranko.” It’s the same backing track, just new lyrics, but they make a BIG difference. Sturmer’s lyrics are markedly improved over the ones he did for “Love So Pure,” in the since that they’re still pretty goofy but it’s obvious on purpose this time. I mean, it’s called “Planet Tokyo” for crying out loud, the attempt to tap into the whole “Japan=Novelty” idea is pretty blatant, and give the whole thing an air of kitsch. That’s probably not the BEST direction to take, but at least it has a clear identity. Unfortunately, the vocals are also noticeably lacking confidence, despite Ami and Yumi totally owning “Akai Buranko.” This is especially unfortunate since, in either version, “Planet Tokyo” is a powerful rocker with an obvious Andrew W.K. influence. That’s not the sort of song you can sing and not sound like you know what you’re saying. Andrew W.K. absolutely believes in partying, and you’d better believe just as hard in the planet of Tokyo, ladies. Snark aside, it is a really good, fun rocker, which does have a sense of identity to it. In fact, I could almost have seen THIS being the theme to their cartoon rather than the actual theme. Almost.

Strangely, another English version of a Nice song actually wasn’t included on Nice, “Friends Forever” originally came out as “Invisible Tomorrow”, and has MOSTLY the same backing track (the differences are pretty minor changes to the intro) but reverts pretty hard back to the stupid lyrics. No song called “Friends Forever” is going to be very deep, you know? The vocals are pretty shaky again, and it might actually be a bigger problem here than on “Planet Tokyo.” Where that was a reasonably strong song damaged by unsure vocals, “Friends Forever” is a fairly weak song that needs a strong performance up front to save it. “Invisible Tomorrow” isn’t one of the better songs on Nice, but it does rank higher than “Friends Forever” does on Hi Hi. This sounds like the sort of song a Disney Channel star would record.

Moving on to songs recorded for 59, the Japanese album that came out at the same time that Hi Hi came out in the States… even though Hi Hi was ALSO released in Japan, despite having many of the same tracks, which makes no sense, and where was I? Oh yeah, 59. The body of tracks recorded for Hi Hi/59 seem to be the last time Andy Sturmer was a major contributor to Puffy AmiYumi, and the shared tracks are kind of all over the place stylistically, as they should be. “Sunrise” was the big single in Japan, and is the most “J-Pop” sounding track on Hi Hi. Really, it’s another Pop/Punk song at heart, and would probably sound a lot like Blink 182 if it was just guitars and drums. However, there’s also a thick layer of big, shrill, loud synth keyboards on top of everything that change the entire complexion of the song. It’s not “Techno” in any acceptable sense, but it’s not New Wave either… despite sounding a lot like something Polysics would record. Actually, now that I listen to it again, “Sunrise” reminds me a bit of some of the stuff Gacharic Spin would go on to do, or at the very least, the keyboard settings they use. I’m a bit surprised no anime ever tapped “Sunrise” as a theme song, it’s just the kind of bright, energetic Pop tune I’d think would work great in that context. As it is, “Sunrise” is a really fun song… that I can only listen to once every so often. Between the high speed, high energy , and high high SCREACHINGLY high keyboards, it wears my ears out pretty fast. I’m not a young man anymore, okay? Sometimes I need songs to be a bit more gentle with me!

Speaking of more gentle, we have “Forever,” which immediately forces me to question the wisdom of including “Friends Forever” on the same CD as another song with “Forever” as the title. And there’s only two tracks between them, too. Spread that stuff out a bit more, guys! But yeah, “Forever” is neck and neck with “December” for gentlest song on Hi Hi, which is to say they’re the only two slow songs at all. A jangly, reverb-drenched pastiche of The Troggs’ “With A Girl Like You,” right down to the “ba ba ba”s, “Forever” is the one song on Hi Hi that has a mixture of English and Japanese lyrics, which works a lot better than the entirely English songs. Then again, “Forever” is also a song that’s simple to the point of innocence, so the usual complains about the lyrics sounding a bit stupid or the vocals feeling awkward actually work in the song’s favor for once. This whole thing sounds like a song written and performed by nervous fourteen year olds… in a way that charming, not cringy.

The polar opposite of “Forever’s” innocent simplicity, then, would be “Joining A Fan Club,” easily the best song on the disc. “Joining A Fan Club” is, as far as I know, the only time Andy Sturmer resurrected an old Jellyfish song for Puffy, and their version DESTROYS the original. Jellyfish’s version of “Fan Club” sounds like an attempt to reproduce the pomposity of Queen through the lenses of what would soon become known as Grunge, but the results just sound sluggish and weighed down. Puffy’s version, on the other hand, rejiggers the whole thing to sound more like No Doubt’s “Just A Girl.” This version is leaner, bouncier, faster, and a million times more energetic. Unlike “Sunshine” or “Planet Tokyo,” though, it also careens through a full range of dynamics, from the Ska verses to the Punk verses to the Boogie middle eight to the nearly Thrash instrumental, this song goes all over the place, yet somehow managed to hang together. Not only does this keep “Fan Club” from getting tiring like those other songs, it actually makes the fast bits hit harder than the theoretically louder songs. The words are the least corny English lyrics on all of Hi Hi, in fact a case could be made that the nasty look at celebrity idolizing might be a bit TOO nasty for a band like Puffy, though compared to some of the dreary stuff they’d release later, “Fan Club” acquits itself by virtue of just being too darn good mess with. Admittedly, this is another song where the vocals are a weak spot, with one getting the feeling that these ladies don’t fully understand the biting words they’re rushing through, but this time the performance is frantic enough that there’s still SOME kind of energy to match the music. More than anything else, “Joining A Fan Club” is what I mean when I say that a Puffy AmiYumi that ditched the encyclopedic recreations of Pop’s past COULD have still been just as good, so long as the contemporary-minded material kept that same meticulous attention to detail. Sadly, Puffy would go on to record whole albums with fewer ideas than “Joining A Fan Club” has in its four minutes of run time.

And that just leaves the two songs everybody ACTUALLY bought Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi for: the theme songs to Teen Titans and their own show. I’m not sure if there’s even anything I need to say about “Teen Titans Theme,” or even if there’s anything I COULD say at this point. You know how it goes, if you heard it once, it’ll be embedded in your brain until at least ten years after you die. This Farfsa organ driven Garage Rock tune somehow manages to capture the exact spirit of both the old Batman theme and also Scooby Doo despite not actually sounding anything like either of them. If anything, it sounds more like a cover of the Sailor Moon theme. Ironically, this song might actually have the goofiest lyrics and shakiest vocals of any track on Hi Hi, but like “Forever,” it sort of turns that into a virtue. Right from the opening organ cue, through all the James Bond/Surf guitar licks, to the Bay City Rollers chant to spell out the title, “Teen Titans Theme” is pure kitschy cheese from beginning to end. The presence of near-Engrish vocals on a song like this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Admit it, that squeaky “TEEN TITAH!” at the end wouldn’t be half as charming if it was shouted with a stronger grasp of English phonetics.

And then there’s the other theme, “Hi Hi,” which is leaving me a bit torn. Objective speaking, “Teen Titans Theme” is more memorable and iconic than “Hi Hi” …and yet I am unshakably convinced that “Hi Hi” is better. Like, as a song rather than a theme. As a comparison that only Digimon fans will understand, “Butter-Fly” is a better song than the Saban theme, but it’s not as good of a THEME. There’s a different set of goals to be accomplished, and song can be less good at one while still being better at the other. “Hi Hi” will never have the same cultural relevance to a generation of Cartoon Network watchers as “Teen Titans Theme,” and not just because Teen Titans was a bigger show than Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, but I still say it’s a better song. It’s fast, it’s catchy, it’s energetic, and it’s got a LOT more going on than “Teen Titans” does. Little snatches of dialog, the counting down in other languages, the minor tweaks of the lyrics in the final chorus, this is another example of how the Pop/Punk Puffy experiment SHOULD have worked. The lyrics are kind of goofy again, but it’s back to the “Planet Tokyo” formula of clearly being intentional, and I can tolerate smartly stupid a lot better than genuinely stupid. Also, Ami and Yumi have the same confidence here that they do on “Joining A Fan Club,” with carries them through both the goofier lines and any awkward pronunciations on their part.  And to be honest, I just love when bands have their own theme song, or at least an explicit “this is the start of the set” number. The obvious precedent is “(Theme From) The Monkees,” which has a fairly clear influence on “Hi Hi,” but I think the bigger musical influence here is Cheap Trick’s “Hello There.” Again, “Hi Hi” is careful to not ACTUALLY sound too much like “Hello There,” and it has way more hooks and memorable moments going on that Cheap Tricks’ one-verse wonder, but they serve the same purpose and have the same energy. And best of all, “Hi Hi” finished up my inviting me to make myself comfortable. My days of bouncing around on my feet in a cramped, sweaty rock show audience are long behind me, I appreciate a concert opening that assures me it’s fine to sit down in the back where it’s more relaxing. A little consideration goes a long way!

Okay, you see why I decided against trying to talk about THREE CDs in this blog? We’d be here all day. Suffice it to say, I still really like Puffy AmiYumi, even if it was a bit depressing to look back and remember how forgettable their later output got. I mean, they released a Christmas single in 2010 and I think it sucks. Do you have any idea how hard it is to make a Christmas song that I can’t enjoy?  On a happier note, writing this did remind me of just how much I do enjoy their early work. I actually spent more time listening to the rest of Jet-CD, Fever Fever, and Spike while writing this blog than the album it’s supposed to be about. I’m still surprised they didn’t include songs like “Stray Cats Fever,” “Jet Keisatsu,” or “Puffy no Rule” on Hi Hi, especially since I’m pretty sure I remember “Puffy no Rule” actually being on used on the show. I guarantee any one of those would have held up better than “Friends Forever.” Looking back over these albums again, it’s no wonder my weebish belief in Japan as the Wondrous Land of Only Good Things lasted as long as it did. Puffy filled me with a false hope that even they ultimately couldn’t life up to.  Still, that run of early albums is amazing. Honestly, I’d say your better off getting those than Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi. I mean, definitely download “Hi Hi” and “Teen Titans Theme,” but other than that, there’s really no reason to only have this compilation and not the whole albums. There’s a LOT of weird, varied genre experiments on those early disks that Hi Hi left off to focus on the Pop/Punk stuff, and you need more of it in your life.

Believe it or not, I’m not QUITE done with this series of blogs, despite being demonstrably past my actual “first Japanese CDs.” There’s still at least two more blogs to write… but we’re not going to get to them for a bit. To the surprise of nobody who knows me, I’ve got a LOT of Christmas content coming next month, so these blogs will go on a bit of a break while I indulge in all of those… he said, as if these music blogs aren’t already an exercise in self-indulgence. But yeah, that’s what's happening over December, regular activity will be back in January. Brace yourself for excessive amounts of merriment!