As part of my Japanese study I've been watching the Japanese TV shows shown on the international channel on Sundays. Recently they started showing another pop music show, "PopJapan.tv," in addition to "Hey!Hey!Hey! Music Champ," much to my delight.

Needless to say most of the music shown on both of these shows is pretty crappy, although the novelty of it being Japanese and often ridiculous in one way or another keeps me entertained. But one artist who has been featured on both shows caught my eye. Her name is Tommy February⁶. After catching her last week on PopJapan.tv, I realized that she is the coolest. Consider the facts:

-Her name has an exponent in it.

-She dresses like a White Stripe crossed with a schoolgirl (see picture).

-She sings into a microphone that's full of candy.
Corollary: She has a song called "Candy Pop In Love"

-She has a full-time backing cheerleader section that appears in all of her videos.

-She has an alter-ego named Tommy Heavenly⁶.

-In at least two of her videos she interrupts her dancing and singing to drink from a flask for some reason.

-She used to be in a band called the Brilliant Green (BuriGuri), which besides being one of the only non-unintentionally funny Japanese band names I've heard, rhymes with FuriKuri.

But there's something strange going on. Despite her apparent pop superstar status, information on the web about her is rather scarce, consisting mostly of an interview and several generic lyrics sites. More bizarrely, the best picture I could find of her from the official Sony Records site was this one:

Also strange, the episode of PopJapan.tv that I saw her video on seemed to be from around May of last year, and it turns out that the show is owned by...Sony Records. Is it all a big scam engineered to make her popular? Probably it partly is, but it seems like the whole thing is too disorganized to be a successful scam.

For some reason, although her music is straight up J Pop with lots of 80s synths and beats, and her alter-ego's music is pseudo-hard rock, I find it fascinating. The melodies aren't bad, and she actually does a decent job of the weaving together of English and Japanese lyrics, a staple of every single Japanese pop song. It almost seems that she 'gets it' and has a larger sense of the style as something not to be taken seriously. For her most over-the-top and intricate song check out "Love is Forever."