The J-Pop Scene, an introduction

For the past 2 years, I've had a great passion for Asian music (principally J-Pop and K-Pop) and nowadays, I tend to listen to 50% J-Pop and 50% Western music. Although the Japanese music scene is largely dominated by teenage girl groups and boy bands aimed for the kawaii and excitable teenage girls, I'm far more interested in the female singers of the J-Pop scene. A handful of female Japanese singers have been ruling the Japanese charts for the past decade now, namely Ayumi Hamasaki (the best selling Japanese female of all-time), Utada Hikaru (who released the best selling Japanese album of all-time), Namie Amuro (debuting in the early 90s yet still managed to pick the World Music Award for best selling Asian act of 2010), Koda Kumi (a hugely successful singer who is perhaps the most western of all), BoA (Korean superstar who has seen huge success in both Korea and Japan), Anna Tsuchiya (Japanese Rock star) and Miliyah Kato (R&B star who scored her first #1 album last month), as well as a handful of other successful stars. The artists I've listed here are my favourites.

BoA

The beginning of this month (August 2010) saw the return of BoA to the Korean music scene. BoA has been concentrating on her Japanese music career as well as the release of her debut American album (2009's "BoA") and subsequently hasn't release a Korean album since 2005's "Girls on Top".

However on August 5th, BoA released "Hurricane Venus" (the inspiration for my blog's name, as it happens!) and returned to Korea as if she never left. The forward-thinking and choreography-heavy music video for lead single "Hurricane Venus" (which has also been filmed in 3D technology) is an astonishing music video which easily rival the latest video from Beyoncé, Ciara and Lady GaGa in terms of style and amazing dancing.

In fact, BoA's dancing is perhaps her biggest appeal. I don't just rank BoA a fantastic dancer of the Asian music scene, but of the entire world. She easily outshines the Britney's, the GaGa's, the Ciara's and the Beyoncé's of the world - and in my completely honest opinion, she's easily up there with the likes of Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson (two of my favourite ever performers) in terms of fast-paced and innovative choreography, mind-boggling steps and fluidity.

Check out this raw video footage of BoA rehearsing the choreography to her English-language song "Look Who's Talking", which was incidently co-written by Britney Spears. Whilst just a rehearsal and seemingly lack of effort from BoA herself, she simply outshines her back up dancers and shows how incredible gifted she is.