Summer 2019, Cute or Not

SageM said:
The final episode of the anime heavily implies that the Narrator is actually [Shamiko's dad].

Since it cuts away what Seiko was going to tell Yuko about what her father used to say, but then the Narrator finishes it.

This implies that the narrators voice is actually her husband Joshua.

While [Taylor] Swift's pop ambitions lead her to use technology to achieve ethereal, pristine, technical flawlessness, [Ryan] Adams works firmly within rock 'n' roll's more purely populist vision that treats imperfection as a virtue. Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, Lou Reed, Carole King, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, Michael Stipe, Tori Amos, Bob Mould, Aimee Mann, Kurt Cobain — these and many other rock artists produced music sung and performed by regular, flawed, broken human beings. Its beauty, its power, its passion grew out of and was embedded in its imperfection. The music was the sound of an ordinary man or woman roused by joy, anger, or pain to break out in song as an expression of authenticity and in search of a chance at catharsis, if not redemption.

For one example among thousands, take a listen to one of the best album tracks of the grunge era: Pearl Jam's "Better Man." When I first heard it, in 1994, still a few years before the Auto-Tune revolution, I noticed that Eddie Vedder's voice was off-key for much of the song. But I didn't care. It's a song of anger, hopelessness, and regret, and the raw edge of the vocals seemed to enhance the intensity of the feeling.

But today? With ears trained to expect digitized perfection from vocalists, it's become impossible to listen to the song without wincing. It would never be released today. The band would be laughed out of the offices of Sony Music. Vedder wouldn't make it past first-cut auditions for The Voice.

No one wants to hear bad music. Great technical performances have always been appreciated and rewarded. But there are other standards, too. Leonard Cohen, another undeniably imperfect singer, expressed one of them quite beautifully in "Anthem" from 1992:

Those lines once could have served as the motto for a genuinely populist form of pop music. Now they stand as its epitaph.

In the world we can hear coming into being in Taylor Swift's music, there will be no cracks in anything at all.

How will the light get in?

It doesn't matter nearly as much if the idol has any real singing or dancing ability - in fact, it may be better if they're kind of mediocre. They don't need to have flawless complexions and necklines etched by God himself, because they're not supposed to be this perfect, inaccessible thing. They're supposed to be The One For You.

kajia said:
[Moe is] an extreme kind of sweetness, the kind you get from gorging yourself on the icing from a cake, the kind of sweetness that makes your tooth ache and your stomach churn. I can't stand this kind of sweetness because it's artificial, arising from a cynical, calculated attempt on the makers part(...)

Damon Linker said:
1989 is a bucketful of Skittles, gum drops, and candy corn dipped in chocolate and wrapped in cotton candy.

"The whole band was instructed by Tuomas to play artificially simple music, to attract masses and gain 100x more fans than Nightwish could have if Tuomas stayed with good music." "Emppu can't show his guitar skills, because he has to play just simple rhythm and stupid solos. No real, metal riffs on this album. Jukka plays drums like... Well no comment needed. Just compare drums from Wishmaster to drums from Once."

Mishukax said:
[Summer 2019 best] character: Dale