I find myself sinking into despondency and depression when I hear any J-pop band playing, and it gets worse when I see people actually listening to it and thinking they are listening to music. It’s like having your ears raped.
And Japanese TV seems like mindless garbage.
I don’t suffer from any kind of depression, but J-pop and Japanese TV make me lose all hope for humanity.
Is this some kind of deficiency of mine, or am I objectively correct here?
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Honestly, we only watch the morning news and baseball if it is on network TV. Streaming services are all we have watched the past 5 years. I feel you.
Yeah j pop is borderline garbage. J rock on the other hand is pretty good. As for tv, its just a loop of reaction videos with absurd sound effects and reactions. I don’t really watch tv here. But whenever i get too. Its always about some how a dog spends his day.
I’ve become more convinced that you’re not actually supposed to watch Japanese TV, they’re just made to have on in the background. Occasionally, you can pretend to watch it if someone else in the house, like a family member, tries to start a conversation with you.
Tv is god awful and japanese acting in general isn’t v good. J pop is as bad as any countries pop imo. Generic, appeals to the masses. There’s good japanese music you just have to search around for artists you like.
I don’t enjoy it but J-pop can have some really interesting arrangements tbh compared to what’s being produced by western pop writers.
Japanese television is okay as a novelty when you don’t live here I guess but when you do. Every show is the same. 4-5 people sitting and commenting on random videos. It’s like YouTube videos but on TV.
The drama can be fun but I don’t really have time to watch it.
I think the ones where they go and try different restaurants are pretty good. I honestly don’t mind Japanese tv at all. I probably watch Japanese tv more than I watched Canadian tv back home.
I’d get disowned so hard if I said this irl to my friends I’ll say it here: J pop is mindless garbage and is very much inferior to Western musics and K-pop.
The thing about J-pop is that’s is a massive industry monopoly designed to keep Japanese fans in line with society. Its not made to be passionate for the sake of it, its more a system of control. Its not made to be competitive with K-pop or Western songs, in the slightest. Conversely, J-pop fans tend to not have a good sense of foreign musics in general or they are too deeply invested to get out, so they stay loyal.
I think this monopoly will diminish slowly because the mastermind behind it all is gone, (ジャニーズ).
By god, the quality of 99% of J-pop lyrics is so manufactured, and generic. Its so bad. Mostly all written by Akihata and friends. Its basically just there to be loaded onto TV so its soul-less and repetitive (think about it, why do you think all songs come fresh off the stove with a “TV size” lyric set?). 60% love songs, 40% feel good melancholic nonsense that tries to play it off deep but really isn’t. Format is always A melo-B melo-intermisson-A-melo. End. So boring.
Without international competition, Japan can really just diminish its music industry to these kinds of uninspired things and the only gems you see are in subculture and artists that are repressed by the Idol industry monopoly.
But I am a diehard Hinata-zaka fan, lifelong Hatsune Miku and ani-song enjoyer so take my bias with a fistful of salt.
go r/citypop and hopefully you will find sth
I hate J music in general. The lyrics and theme are. pretty much the same for all top chart music and they’re just aiming to become a hit in karaoke to get a constant income stream.
Day time TV is mostly just promotion videos for products so it’s not something that should be watched for entertainment. But I do love the comedy though. The sketch shows and manzai are pretty funny. The game shows (or バラエティ番組) used to be pretty crazy and funny, but less so now due to rules around them becoming tighter.
I equal hate J-POP K-pop and what ever you call western pop. Tv wise I only watch nhk or BS premium everything else is pretty miss most of the time
J pop can occasionally be good, for example the song “神山 羊 – YELLOW”, but Japanese TV…. is just like Chinese TV, really fucking bad. And I say this as someone who has watched a lot of it the past 5 years (for language learning purposes), there are a few ok ones in between like ミステリと言う勿れ but Jesus Christ, apart from anime…. such awful acting, so cringe, such bad cinematography… It’s like watching movies from the 90s lol. Even a Japanese native told me (without me asking) about how bad Japanese TV is hahah… This is how I ended up learning Korean. Every time I would look for a good Japanese or Chinese TV series, I ended up watching Korean movie after Korean movies after Korean movie. God, the gold the Koreans spit out. The **quality**. The contrast is SO stark. I did not want to learn Korean. Here I am, after five years of watching Korean series and telling myself NOT to learn three languages, I gave up and I’m writing goddamn Hangeul now and going to South Korea in a couple of weeks lmao.
No, it’s not just you. Both are rubbish.
I’ve been moved by some of the children’s programming on NHK. Not necessarily the relentless singing bits, but the artistic animated shorts. It can be absurdist and great, or deep in the way fairy tales and nursery rhymes can be deep. And don’t forget the minimalist genius of ピタゴラスイッチ
Childhood is the only time in a Japanese person’s life when they can actively watch TV, before the rush of life pushes it into the background.
Some artists must find a home in children’s programming. There was a singer Kyari Pamyu Pamyu who was popular a decade ago and had an unusually trippy aesthetic. I thought her music had the potential to mature into something interesting but was surprised to find that she started appearing on NHK children’s programs and her aesthetic had taken over the music writing for a few segments. That in essence is Japanese TV culture.
NHK has a lot of shows that I like tbh (not the dramas). The documentaries are well-made, and I love fun shows like JUJU’s Sekai Hoshiimono, Gretel no Kamado and Ishihara Satomi’s Torisetsu Show.
Also really like Bura-Tamori (probably my fave) and Tsurube’s Kazoku ni Kanpai because you get to see all different places all over Japan :)) and those two always make me laugh haha. I also love Tsurube and Tamori’s crossover episodes!
I don’t really watch other channels, but sometimes enjoy Matsuko Deluxe’s talk show.
It’s easy to focus on the inane vapid talent reaction tv shows but actually imo there are plenty of interesting things to watch on Japanese tv :))
I like J-POP but goddamn I’d rather watch paint dry than watch Japanese tv shows
I listen to JPop, mainly from some Johnny’s groups and other groups as well.
There’s this one time when I watched Kouhaku with my friends, and we were quite shocked upon listening to various Japanese singers in a short amount of time.
I can’t properly explain it cause I’m not well-versed with musical terms, but I’ll try anyway. I feel like most Japanese singers use their speaking voice in singing and a lot of them like to strain their voices, too. It’s either they strain or modify their voices that give them a high pitch.
There are bands like UVERworld where the vocalist seems to actually use his singing voice, but I guess that style is not popular. EXILE has good vocalists, too.
It’s a special level of bad, so much so that I actually enjoy it now as a way to turn the brain off.
Every damn J-pop song these days has that silly little jazzy progression that gets repetitive and annoying. That *dun-dun-dun-dun da dun dun-dun* bullshit
Indie/math rock, on the other hand… Not mainstream, but looked up by musicians in other countries.
Also, Zutomayo probably counts as J-pop, but the arrangement is just crazy.
I’d rather watch a Japanese variety show over a American “reality” show any day, so while bad, I don’t think it’s the worst. But I watch neither.
Reminds me of this absolute gem….
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/1q5wl9/japanese_tv_rant/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
They used to use really loud metal music for torture in military prisons, but a few years back they switched to j-pop. The high pitched, yet slightly off-key sounds of Japanese female singers hits a part of the central cortex unbearable to western people.
I assumed k-pop would be just as bad but they can actually sing! Their English is also really good.
J-pop is garbage and Japanese tv seems like a constant advertisement. However I do like programs that host local businesses and restaurants!
I’m not into Jpop at all, and only like Japanese TV sometimes but I think asking if you’re ‘objectively right’ makes no sense.
Sounds more like being jaded or not, not saying you are tho. If it bugs you so much, have you considered.. just watching/listening to things you enjoy? Or do what I do and bite the bullet if it’s for the sake of connecting with your students/clients who are mega into it 😅😅😭😭
Bro is comparing music genre and saying one is shit one is good lol. Isn’t that pretty much braindead comparison
I’ve got the answer. This isn’t opinion but FACT.
J-pop is SHIT.
Western pop is a million times higher quality.
I hate k-pop but it’s so obvious that even k-pop is MUCH better quality.
Japanese tv is shit.
Japanese acting in general is over the top and equates to ‘the louder you scream and more hysterical you get the better actor you are’.
Again, western tv is the best, Korean dramas are annoying as hell but much higher quality than Japanese dramas.
‘Japanese tv’ 9 times out of 10 is someone cooking something in a pan, a stupidly close close-up of the food on a spoon with the heat bursting off it, hand shaking it’s so close, then eating it and reacting as if they’ve just eaten the greatest thing in the world, when it’s probably just bacon, cheese and some weird mushroom.
However…
Absolutely of course an a absolute abundance of amazing MUSIC and other art has come out of Japan.
It is a wonderful country but like anywhere has good and bad.
J-pop and tv, are bad. Very bad.
Just to note some of the most beautiful, moving music I’ve ever heard is Japanese.
Japanese TV is made that way on purpose.
Up until recently Japan has been a pretty emotionally repressed society, so watching all this repetitive nonsense of people overreacting to things, is basically living vicariously through other people who are able to freely express themselves.
However, as Japan moves more toward communicating openly, these kind of shows are starting to lose popularity. Even over the past 10 years the number of my junior high school students who watch variety shows is decreasing massively.
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As far as music goes, pop music in any country is more or less the same. I like most music in general, so I don’t mind J-pop, some of it is great, a vast majority of it is forgettable, some of it is trash. Same as any other country.
But I go through phases, I’ll have a year where I desperately want to listen to nothing but Japanese music, then I won’t listen to a single song in Japanese for a year.
Lately, I have been getting into 歌い手and cover artists on Youtube, because they are Japanese people who take a pop song, and make a version of it that is 10,000 times better, and way more emotional. It’s much more satisfying to listen to.
There’s been some legitimately great J-pop in the past, but it’s kind of been washed away by K-pop and EDM these days.
Agreed on Japanese TV, although it is great as a language learning resource.
Yawn …
You are correct.
Have you just stepped off the plane?
Japanese TV has sucked for a lot longer than the 30+ years I have been here, as has J-pop. At least late night Japanese TV used to have soft-core porn, it was great in the pre-public-internet days.
We need more big brother…
I like a lot of J-pop, but Japanese TV … 95% is even worse than other countries, which are already pretty bad.
I feel embarrassed when I see much better stuff coming out of Korea…