Playback: Mirei Toyama - Hysteric girl

Mirei Toyama - Hysteric girl | Random J Pop

Mirei Toyama is only 15 years old, but we know well enough by now that age ain't a young age is nothing to immediately turn a nose up at when it comes to music. We have had enough young artists come up around this age with legitimate hits and classics to have a margin for acceptance. Aaliyah, Destiny's child and JoJo to name a few of the more credible artists who started snatching wigs at a young age.

Another name we can not leave out of this is or course Hikaru Utada, who didn't just snatch at the age of 15. She left an entire nation bald, broke and hungry, and dropped one of the best selling albums in Asian history as a result. 

Hikaru Utada is significant here. Not just because she is the absolute shit, but because her scent lingers all over Mirei Toyama's song "Hysteric girl" like she cocked her leg over it.

The first thing that struck me about "Hysteric girl" was how much it reminded me of Hikaru Utada in her First love phase. More specifically, "Automatic". The music, the way Mirei rides sections of the song; it's...AU-TO-MAAAAAATIC. As much as I love Hikaru Utada, Mirei's vocals are much stronger and stable here than Hikaru's were at the age of 15. (Let us not forget that horrid note at 4:39 when she tries to go in on a vocal ad-lib.

♪ Tell my wwhh-hyyy *voice crack. Note goes off key* Ooooooo-yeaaaaaaaa-eeee-yeah! ♪ 

Never forget.

Mirei Toyama has been drifting in limbo for a short while. She did a stint at some BET thing and released a new song and video to YouTube last month, but generally all has been pretty quiet,  with no sign of an album or EP in sight. She just...does stuff once in a blue moon. When you're 15, in Japan and want to break into the music, talent isn't what will get you national exposure and a record deal. at least not any more.  Signing your life away to a 10 year contract of never being able to date, wearing school girl uniforms, Lolita outfits and boots which lace way too far up a leg for a 15 year old is how you go about it in 2014.

Mirei doesn't have much of a presence in music yet, which is a shame because it's nice to have a young girl come into the J-music game at such a young age with such a good voice and a love for R&B. But she's riding solo in a lane that nobody is really paying a great deal of attention to. She's not tantalisingly cute enough, her socks aren't high enough and none of her songs sound like Eurobeat from 20 years ago which could be put into a DDR or Sega Saturn rhythm game. But I will be keeping a tab on her in the meantime before she fades completely into obscurity.

Comments

  1. I also wasn't old enough to live on my own, drink, smoke, have sex and pay rent when those other artists first came out.

    Age does matter when the gap is this wide. I'm not fifteen anymore.

    Can't pay attention.

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  2. Maybe soon there will be a throwback to the late 90's, pre-Utada J-pop that was influenced by R&B and still entrenched in Engrish/katakana-English so that this kind of song can make its way into the collective conscious. It sounds like something only a talented 15 year old can make, like there is a youth and innocence to her voice that will likely just naturally disappear as she gets older. I hope she makes more J-pop with Japanese lyrics and lays lower on the covering English-language pop music front, which is what her YouTube videos are mostly about.

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  3. While Hikki is Locks of Love's number one enemy due to all the wigs she's snatched, she's not Asia's best-selling artist.

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  4. I think he was just referring to the First Love era.

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  5. Technically, the stuff Utada puts out and sells is the best. So she is the best selling artist because she sells the best things. :)

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  6. It's a shame that no one is really paying her any mind. I listened to a couple of songs by her, and she's definitely talented, and seems to have a lock on her sound that most singers her age don't have. Musically, she reminds me of Bright: pop with an R&B twist.

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