A Brief History of Puffy Amiyumi

True story: Three summers ago we received a newly released Puffy Amiyumi CD as a birthday present from some work colleagues who knew that we were music headz and that we had had spent some time living in Japan and doing a short music journalism stint.

We were, of course, already familiar with Puffy (as Puffy Amiyumi are known in Japan) as a J-pop force. We even knew some of their hit songs from Japanese radio airplay, countless karaoke sessions with Japanese friends and television, on which they appeared regularly throughout the late 1990's. We even liked a couple of their tunes, even though their music was brazenly derivative (but derivative of some of the very best pop, disco and rock music that had ever been recorded up till that time).

But "fans" we were not.

The CD was called "An Illustrated History of Puffy Amiyumi" and as the duo's first official US album debut, it was largely a compilation of their greatest hits and then some. A couple of tunes, we recall, which had been originally sung in Japanese, contained new vocal tracks with whole verses sung completely in English, a nod that would appeal to what would hopefully be a new found American audience. That audience, not surprisingly, was a niche market of Japanophiles and the kind of "otaku" teens and twenty-somethings that tended to also be huge manga comic book and Japanese anime fans, the same "kidz" that could be found at annual anime conventions in major cities nationwide.

New Jersey-based indie label Bar-None released "An Illustrated History" and, in hindsight, perhaps the record company really was on to something big in light of the success of the Hi, Hi Puffy Amiyumi animated series on Cartoon Network. Shortly after Bar-None released "Illustrated," Puffy Amiyumi were asked to provide the theme song to another Cartoon Network animated program called Tenn Titans, which itself became a hit. Between Teen Titans and the present, Hi, Hi Puffy Amiyumi was conceived and brought to life as the Adult Swim hit it has become.

Reading about Puffy Amiyumi in Jonathan Durbin's Paper magazine article recently led us to pop "An Illustrated Histry" onto our iPod and revisit the album. "Illustrated" is much as we remembered it -- a few gems amid lots of filler, some of it pure, unblinking kitsch. The parts sung in English make us cringe. But the gem -- mostly the bigger its, including their breakout single "Asia No Junshin" -- are solid well-crafted pop tunes written by a professional songwriter-producer of several of the band's best albums.

Check out the CD if your a true fan or if your musically curious or culturally adventurous. And check out the "Brief History of Puffy Amiyumi" profile on the Bar-None records website. There's a link to the profile after the "More" jump below.

Posted by Supercore at June 3, 2005 12:14 AM