So sorry I never responded to your comment! I originally had a long comment with a bunch of links and stuff, but my computer crashed before I could post it and I lost the comment, which was demoralizing. But I left this comment marked unread so that I wouldn’t forget to give you a reply, and here I am two weeks later.

I’m not going to try to write a whole long comment again [editor’s note: well, I didn’t intend to…], but I’ve gone through a few different phases. As a kid, I just listened to Top 40 plus my parents’ music (R&B, soul, smooth jazz, salsa, merengue). As an adolescent, I got really into rock and metal, running the gamut from classic rock (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, AC/DC) on through NWoBHM (Iron Maiden, Judas Priest) and into thrash and death metal (Metallica/Megadeth/Slayer/Anthrax, Amon Amarth, Carcass, The Faceless). Around uni, I went through a K-Pop phase (Girls’ Generation, f(x), SHINee, KARA). And these days, I’ve regressed to the default nerd music sources: video game, anime, and VTuber music (although I do listen to and play some jazz as well).

J-Pop and jazz might seem like strange bedfellows, but they’re both full of harmonic complexity (i.e. interesting chord progressions), which is something I really love to listen to but also analyze and play. Actually, one of the many tabs I have open is an academic text called Music in the Making of Modern Japan which has chapters that touch on idol culture (‘Manufacturing Identity: Femininity, Discourse and Representation in Japanese Popular Music’) and jazz (‘The Flow of Jazz in Japan: Why Jazz Resonates so Far from Home’) that I’m interested to read. I’ve always found it fascinating that there’s barely any trace of jazz remaining in the pop music of the US, its birthplace, but it’s absolutely bursting from the seams of Japanese pop music, and I’m hoping this chapter will help elucidate that mystery.

also don’t worry I don’t actually expect you to listen to (let alone comment on!) a dozen different songs, I just got carried away

Oh, also, I’ve been recording my progress in the comment you replied to—things are coming along swimmingly! Wrote about my mentality a bit more in this comment. I should probably also make a post in the weekly threads; maybe I can just post that week’s progress so as not to take up too much space and then point back to my original comment.