Sunday, October 24, 2004

Wind's path

This weekend, since my wife's aunt is in town for a week's visit, we brought her to Yosemite, Monterey & Carmel (my wife will write about it later.). On our way home, we stopped by Mitsuwa supermarket in San Jose and I bought a CD from Kinokuniya Bookstore. I finally got Rimi Natsukawa's new CD "Kaze no Michi (Wind's path)".

After I listened to all her songs, I felt confused. How do they want to put her in the market? Do they want her classified as just one of the J-POP singer(J-POP:Japanese Pop Music) or an Okinawan singer? I liked her last album "Okinawa no Kaze(Okinawa's wind)".


I thought...oh this is the one.. As long as they put her in this market, she will be a success. But I felt they brought her back to J-POP in this new CD. I might misunderstand..so I listened to them again. Now I can feel the wind. I can visualize the winds going around the world thru these songs. So now I realized this is not J-POP. This is not Okinawa music either. They tried to put her in a whole new market. I think their main concept is Asia. But it sounds like more than Asia. I can imagine a wind passing thru the world, specially by ocean, mountain, and river. They will be able to make a good music video too, I guess.

In conclusion, I say I can give this album a 4.5 out of a 5 stars. why did I reduce it by 0.5 star? Actually when I listened to it once, my rate was just 3 of 5. But when I listened twice, my rate increased to 4.5 stars. The reason is that I realized they put her in a new concept and so it feels more comfortable now. So why not a perfect rating of 5 stars? because this is still a risky challenge and because it took me a while to realize what they were trying to do. They may try to put her in Asian market in addition to Japanese market. Last year, she made Asian cradle song album.


Pregnant ladies liked this album and I think she did a concert for these ladies. Also I knew she did a concert in Taiwan and did well, too. It's not a rare case right now. But when I was learning how the music business worked before I went to college, this was my plan. If I own a music production company,I wanted to find and train artists. Then produce them in Asian market. Interesting.. how will she open up the market...