Music video: Thelma Aoyama - Happy


Thelma Aoyama released her fourth studio album in August and it featured a cover of Pharrell Williams' "Happy". But recently Thelma shot and released a short music video for it, possibly in a bid to try and salvage the dismal chart performance of her album. "Happy" is so over-saturated, recent and still running rampant on YouTube in the form of covers and searches after all of these weeks and months, that I can only deduce that Thelma's label thought it would be a good idea for her to upload a video of her cover to YouTube to capitalize on the "Happy" phenomenon for hits, because nobody has been caring about Thelma Aoyama since 2008's "Soba ni iru ne". Given her latest album Lonely angel charted on the ORICON weekly at 183, nobody in Japan even knows who this girl is.

Thelma's cover of Pharrell's mammoth hit is pretty bog standard. There are only so many ways you can cover this song and each one makes me as sick to death of this song as the last. I used to love this song. Not any more.

I had high hopes for Thelma Aoyama when she released her debut album Diary back in 2009 and she showed potential with her follow up Emotions. But all she has done since then is fall off; losing sight of her sound and image, showing an inability to make anything stick. Her latest album isn't completely terrible, but there's nothing about it which really says anything. This would be fine if the album was from some talentless idol, but Thelma is more to her to be putting out such mediocre albums.

Comments