Riri is really out here making this independent thing work y'all. It's only been a couple of months since "Wheel of Fortune ~Unmei no Wa~", she's already hitting us with a follow up "Luv Dejavu", a nice lil' J-R&B Summer bop.This video is cute. Being sat at home undressed with the fan on just vibing is real mood for me, as the UK is going through this nasty-ass heatwave. But I really need Riri to stop giving these bangers music videos where she's just sitting or standing around. Bitch. GIVE US CHOREOGRAPHY. We know your ass can dance. There are so few chicks in Japan doing R&B as good as Riri. And even when there was, none of them could move the way she can. So Riri could really stand out in Japan if she danced hard to these songs, because so few female acts and groups in Japan do. It'd also allow her to do TikTok challenges, which love it or hate it, has become a key part in the promotion of music. Serving fly choreography would also put her on US radars too, at a time where there is also only a small select number of girls in R&B who be dancing out. And a good dance routine in a music video will have everybody doing reaction videos and running your shit up on the YouTube algorithm.
I'm not gonna police Japanese music and say that it should all be in Japanese, even though that's an expectation that many would understandably have. But I don't know what the deal is with Riri releasing so many songs in English. It just makes no sense to me for an artist who is primarily still trying to breakthrough in Japan. Riri's last EP masquerading as an album was really good. But I felt that it would have been better if all of the songs were in Japanese. With Namie Amuro, I didn't get why she was so hell bent on singing songs in English, aside from her wanting to fulfil a desire and feel her global pop star fantasy. I never bought the whole 'The songs just flowed better in English, so I kept them in English' reasoning, when on certain songs she was fucking up the English to a point where I couldn't even understand it and she may as well had been singing in Japanese anyway. And in extreme cases to mask Namie's not great English, we got so much autotune and vocal processing that you couldn't make out anything and it ruined songs (i.e "Stranger" and "B Who I Want 2 B"). There was many an instance where the songs in Japanese would have and DID work better (i.e "Yeah-Oh).
💿 Album review: Riri's second studio album, Neo
I'm not gonna police Japanese music and say that it should all be in Japanese, even though that's an expectation that many would understandably have. But I don't know what the deal is with Riri releasing so many songs in English. It just makes no sense to me for an artist who is primarily still trying to breakthrough in Japan. Riri's last EP masquerading as an album was really good. But I felt that it would have been better if all of the songs were in Japanese. With Namie Amuro, I didn't get why she was so hell bent on singing songs in English, aside from her wanting to fulfil a desire and feel her global pop star fantasy. I never bought the whole 'The songs just flowed better in English, so I kept them in English' reasoning, when on certain songs she was fucking up the English to a point where I couldn't even understand it and she may as well had been singing in Japanese anyway. And in extreme cases to mask Namie's not great English, we got so much autotune and vocal processing that you couldn't make out anything and it ruined songs (i.e "Stranger" and "B Who I Want 2 B"). There was many an instance where the songs in Japanese would have and DID work better (i.e "Yeah-Oh).But to bring the conversation back to Riri, Namie at least had a large established fanbase and had the general public buying her music, so she could do what she wanted. Riri isn't a new artist, but she's not the household name Namie was, and she is still trying to build a large fanbase. But she's in Japan, releasing whole songs in English. It feels backwards to me, but whatever. Maybe she'll release "Luv DejaVu" in Japanese too, just as she did "Wheel of Fortune ~Unmei no Wa~" . I say all of this to say that Riri is really talented and deserves to be bigger. But these odd decisions she's making with her image and her songs is going to hinder her chances.
💿 Album review: Riri's second studio album, Neo
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