J-Pop Supa' Stars Puffy Ami Yumi Make Cover of America hip-sheet "Paper"

Paper magazine, the recently redesigned New York-based art-culture-fashion-lifestyle bi-monthly, is featuring Japanese pop supa' dupa' stars Puffy on the cover of its June-July issue. The J-pop duo are better known Stateside as Puffy Amiyumi because, as the profile by Jonathan Durbin notes, hip-hop mogul P. Diddy, formerly Puffy, and his legal team might object to the use of the name. The Amiyumi appendage is a compound of the first names of the members of this Japanese female pop duo -- Ami and Yumiko.

Though the Japanese Puffy have spent the better part of the past decade churning out J-pop hits in their homeland, it's only recently that they've started getting attention here in the US, which is in and of itself unusual for a mainstream Japanese pop group that sings almost exclusively in Japanese.

But the American fanfare has little to do with Puffy's music and is largely a result of a surpise hit half-hour animated program on Cartoon Network. The show is called Hi, Hi Puffy Amiyumi and is based on the singing duo and their real-life manager Kaz. It's standard Saturday-morning type of cartoon fare, though with a stylized animated aesthetic that could appeal to the mature Adult Swim crowd. The show's plotlines have little if anything to do with the real lives of either Ami or Yumi or even their collective musical persona Puffy other than the names and the fact that the duo are a pop group.

Posted by Supercore at May 31, 2005 11:33 PM