Depicted above is an image of JYONGRI promoting “Hop, Step, Jump!”. Why did I choose this particular picture instead of, say, the very pretty one of her promoting her latest single (which I’m going to actually discuss in this entry)? I have no idea. :) I think it may be because her neck looks twice as thick as it really is due to the wrong shoulder at the wrong time. Or her hair looks nice.

Now, I originally didn’t intend to write about “Lullaby For You” or JYONGRI at all, despite having the song and its two c/ws. But when I took a cursory glance at the other blogs who have written about her, all they had to say was mostly negative. I wanted to shed some decent light on JYONGRI.

Truth be told, I already liked her when I found out she was bilingual. Something about bilingual singers is so unbelievably awesome, it has enough awesome to sink the island nation of Japan. Thankfully, neither Utada nor JYONGRI are vicious enough to do that. Or the other bilingual singers I don’t know of.

Why are they so awesome? I attribute it to the fact that it’s a very trendy thing to throw in random English words in Japanese music lately, and usually they’re poorly-pronounced and end up sounding just like Japanese (okay, that’s an exaggeration). So when a singer is fluent in both languages, they have no problem pronouncing English in their songs and they know where it should go in the song. Instead of having a typical Hello! Project song go like “ALL THE NIGHT LOVE DO NOW ME LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE RABU RABU RABU RABU TAKE OUT ME NIGHT DANCE”, or perhaps Perfume’s “tiny tiny HEART VIRUS 2:30AM”, we have “may tomorrow be wonderful, too”.

Don’t take this for me hating on H!P or Perfume. I love them both. It’s just, Engrish is really glaringly obvious to a native speaker and I guess they don’t exactly consider that they might have an overseas audience when they compose the songs, so the need to hire a native speaker to rectify any English isn’t necessary. And sometimes, even the Engrish is endearing.

JYONGRI, to me, feels like Utada Hikaru Lite. Sadly, JYONGRI has nowhere near the insta-fame Utada had (and still does have), no matter how fresh-sounding her music is. She’s not signed to H!P, she’s not trying to be a Jpop idol in a dying genre, so I can’t think of any other reasons for her lack of success other than that she just hasn’t caught on, or people don’t like her voice. Perhaps JYONGRI just hasn’t had her big break yet.

Still, I have to say, “Lullaby For You” sounds marginally better than “Odore! Soran Parapara”, where I just want to kick Neko Hiroshi in the balls during his solo part. But I don’t think Soran Happies ever caught on either, so.

“Lovers DRIVE” might have done better as the A-side to this single, perhaps. Ballads don’t tend to do well on the Oricon charts, if they chart at all.