Flashback Friday: MiChi - All about the girls ~Iijanka party people~ | The bop that was forgot

In 2010 the perfect pop single made its way into the world and literally nobody knew it existed. It's unsurprising, given that the singer of the song was still relatively unknown and that she'd also released one of 2009's best pop albums unbeknown to literally everybody.

Everything about the release of this song was tragic. From the black hole of promotion, lack of live performances and the general lack of acknowledgement of its existence at the time at which it was released, to the horrendous video it had gotten.

There were so few fucks given for this song, that it didn't even pop and gain online notoriety for how bad its music video was. And this shit was bad.

I don't know what in Dreamcast demo hell this music video was. But for Sony to give MiChi a pile of rubbish for a budget and have her dance in it for the music video for all types of disrespect. One can only assume that all of the Yen was spent on clearing the Scatman sample.

A song this good did not deserve a video this bad. A song like this didn't deserve to get slept on. But here we are. With this forgotten about classic in the void and MiChi taking now taking art classes in Brooklyn, having fully given up on her music career.

But what was even more tragic about "All about the girls" was that it signalled the start of the end for MiChi. Despite being an A-side release and being the perfect bridge between her first and second albums, it would also be the last song we'd hear from MiChi which adopted the style that she became largely known for.

MiChi and her secret weapon of a producer Tomokazu Matsuzawa's approach to pop seemed to be working in reverse of the industry. They were celebrating pop years before everybody else got the invite that it was cool again. But once the pop comeback hit its apex and the artists who had turned their backs on it started to embrace it again, MiChi began to let it go. MiChi's brand of pop went from bold and genre-bending to boring, strummy and generic. The artist who seemed so hell bent on being different, disruptive and a little anarchic was becoming pedestrian. It seemed like MiChi no longer cared.

MiChi going against the current was a very MiChi move, but it came at a cost. Her music and the erasure of her short lived legacy that was her amazing debut. The general mediocrity of MiChi's second and third studio albums sought to almost overshadow her debut as though it was something to be ashamed of in a bid to hide it out of existence. "All about the girls ~Iijanka party people~" being left off of her second studio album was a telling sign.

Whilst MiChi and her record label may have rejected, regretted and confined "All about the girls" to the confines of 'those songs we never speak of', I still play the shit out of it. It remains as a reminder of MiChi at a time when she was not just embracing pop, but having fun with it at a time when artists were still treating it like a leper. It was also an early adopter of how broad pop can be, should be and is now as a genre. MiChi was shape-shifting pop and bending it at her will with her forward-thinking debut Up to you and with Tomokazu Matsuzawa she continued to yaw it further with "All about the girls". It's a shame the journey didn't go any further. But it's nice to be reminded of what they made of it whilst it lasted.