Tiny Money Land

J-Pop: I just latched on to J-pop superstar Hikaru Utada after I realized she was the one singing the song in the Kingdom Hearts ads that were all over TV earlier in the year. The name of the song is "Simple and Clean", and listening to the full version, she sings the hell out of the song without overdoing it (for overdoing, see any of the early American Idol singers who were voted off). It's a gorgeous song gorgeously sung, which would be enough in most cases, but then I saw the video for the Japanese language version ("Hikari") and that pretty much sealed the deal. The videos for songs from our dance-pop divas would take a propulsive track like this and make overblown, obnoxious production numbers, and I won't deny that J-pop and J-rock videos lean in that direction quite a bit. So I was preparing myself for anything, and still got something I didn't expect. Hikki and her people took her song and set it to an anchored-down shot of her washing dishes. She even walks out of the shot for a few lines of the bridge to get more dirty dishes. So I sez to myself: is this an anti-video, like the Replacements' "Bastards of Young," where the video was an extremely slow zoom-out on a stereo turned up to 11? Or the promo shoot in 1966 where the Beatles "illustrated" Day Tripper by sitting on the floor of the studio and eating fish and chips?

And then it hit me...it's a simple video, and those dishes are definitely clean now. Can't get more straightforward than that. Her latest video is a bit more traditionally MTV, but I'm still sold.