I’ve had a couple Japanese/Korean girl pop ideas floating around this week and now a third demands I put them all in a post. First off, The Wondergirls released a new single this week and in my humble opinion  it’s pretty great. Catchy song, a good, kinda funny video (MV) and even the dance is kind of cool.

I recently said in a comment on Brian’s site  I think the Wondergirls were the one Korean pop group that could conceivably  break into  the U.S. market, as Rain desperately tried to in recent years. Now  Boa is apparently giving it a whirl as well.  I don’t think this Wondergirls song will be the one, because there’s just too much Korean singing for a wide American audience to accept it, but a breakthrough on this album seems plausible.  

Perez Hilton featured them on his blog, which in terms of breaking through to a U.S. audience seems like a big step. Not that I really have much idea who Perez Hilton is, but I’ve seen his name on Yahoo!’s top stories. Plus  and he has pink hair and looks extreme.  

Not only does it expose the group to a wide target audience, it also shows someone somewhere is pulling some powerful strings to get them into the Perez Hilton realm. That shit doesn’t just happen, folks. Either JYP paid for it outright or someone owed someone a favor. Either way it bodes well for the group.

For those not familiar with JYP, that’s Park Jin-young, who is kind of Korea’s version of Motown’s Barry Gordy. Although Korea hasn’t produced anything worthy of a comparison to Motown, it’s fair to say Park is to Korean pop music what Gordy was to Motown — the entrepreneur, the producer, the choreographer, and actually, unlike Gordy, usually  the songwriter. Interestingly, this new Wondergirls video is all about him. The girls are  so heavily  made up it’s hard to tell who is who, but Park features prominently and is the clear focus of the movie aspect of the MV. It makes me think he’s going to give this a big push, possibly to ride whatever wave comes about.      

I was thinking about Boa’s song and video teaser  earlier in the week and I constructed the crude rationalization that the only way Boa could breakthrough into the U.S. market was if she jacked her sex appeal up to 100. Became an Asian sex kitten — like if she made a sex video or something.  But that would destroy her reputation at home and won’t happen. The music itself has always been somewhat lacking in my opinion.

Then today on Japundit I came across this, a video by G3 Princess, a group that features ex Japan AV star Nao Oikawa.

This can’t happen in Korea. First of all, making porn is illegal here, so if she did she’d be arrested when she came back like this teacher who studied in Canada that made a porn  was. I suppose she could “unknowingly” make a sex video, as Baek Ji-young did, but then she’d be relegated to  the nightclub circuit  if  Korea was eventually ok with the whole thing.  That would be a long route to success.

For the curious, here’s a NSFW clip from Oikawa’s  pre G3 career.

Lastly, I really liked this post, also from Japundit, about a 60s Japanese duo  called The Peanuts who will release a 50th anniversary album to mark their debut album released in 1959. This YouTube reel  is a compilation of several songs. I especially like the last one.

I’d never heard of the Peanuts prior to listening to this, but as I’ve said in the past, I have a soft spot in my heart for this kind of well-produced,  60s/70s, exotica, Asian girl pop.