Conventional WIsdom: My First Japanese CDs (intro)

So I just finished going on about how I couldn’t come up with any more ideas for blog posts, and immediately afterwards I had an idea for a whole series of blog posts. Then again, the only blogs I HAVE been consistently making lately were music related, so I guess this is just a variation on a theme. I like music, in case you haven’t noticed, and it bleeds over pretty heavily into the other stuff I like, such as anime. There’s a reason I try to squeeze at least one Japanese song into as many of those Far Out There character soundtracks as possible. My getting into Japanese music was a fairly natural byproduct of my deep dive into otakudom as a whole, as it is with most budding weebs. But the thought recently occurred that this process looked a LOT different for me than it probably does for current young anime fans.

You see, children, I grew up in what historians now refer to as “The Dark Ages” when media was tediously hand-carved onto things called “physical media” and sold in mysterious eldritch locations known as “stores.” Back in that bygone era, minor details like being from the other side of the planet, separated by a vast ocean, and having a massive barrier of language and culture were actual impediments to a work becoming available in America. I know, right? These days, any burgeoning fan of Japanese music can access just about any artist’s full library with just a few clicks of the mouse on any legitimate music service… and if it’s not there, then they just need to make a few MORE clicks on a less-legitimate one. Basically, there’s no excuse not to have whatever media you want if you care enough to look for it. But back in MY day? We didn’t have it so easy back when the dinosaurs roamed. We only got Japanese music over here when somebody actually went through the trouble of physically lugging the disks themselves across the Pacific, and even then you had to know where to get them and be willing to pay the exorbitant asking price. You know, like a SAVAGE.

Well, okay, that wasn’t the ONLY way. Even way back in My Day, downloads were already a thing, and otaku had a particular vibrant file sharing community specifically BECAUSE the real thing was so hard to obtain. But I was living out in the boonies with crap internet at the time. I wasn’t about to go torrenting any albums on my pathetic dial-up, and porridge-quality 1st generation YouTube videos were no substitute for an actual CD. Thus, when I first started going to conventions and saw whole tables COVERED in anime soundtracks and JRock albums, it was a big deal. I actually OWNED some of this stuff now, and could listen to it whenever I wanted in glorious Not-YouTube quality. I felt like a REAL fan now!

So I thought it’d be fun to go back and revisit some of those first few Japanese albums I bought back in the day, reflect on what they meant at the time, and see how they stack up for me today. Some of these I still listen to regularly all these years later, others I barely even remembered until I dug the disks out again, and still others I THOUGHT I remembered only to discover that time had blotted out whole chunks of their tracklists to be re-discovered anew. Let’s see what’s cringe and what stands the test of time! Heck, with the way Kids These Days move on to the shiny new thing and don’t bother with what came before, there’s a very real possibility that somebody out there might have never even heard of some of these, or at least never sat down and listened to the whole thing.

For the most part I’m sticking to one CD per blog post, though there’s going to be a little bit that I have to lump together for thematic purposes. Also, these won’t necessarily be in chronological order, either in terms of when they originally came out or I bought them. Basically, it’s just the order in which I remembered they were things that happened.  Like everything else right now, I don't know how often these will actually be coming out, but I'm gonna try REALLY REALLY HARD to make sure these don't start squeeking out once at the end of the month like everything else.