I have yet to post in this thread, so here goes. There are a couple of things that came together to lead me to Shiina. First, there was the start of my interest in Japanese music. Mine did not come via anime or video games or anything like that. Rather, a friend was into the Pillows and had collected the majority of their music and gave me the whole set of mp3s. I'd say that for two years or so I would listen to the occassional song by them but that was it. Eventually, slowly, their music sank in and I began listening to them quite a bit. Since I liked their music more than contemporary American music, I started to search out other Japanese acts, although focusing on male singers. Most of the female singers I saw on YouTube seemed to be cutesy J-Pop fare, which is fine for some, but not really my style.
At the same time I was becoming very proficient at tracking down mp3s and, being a Beatles nut, was searching for a lot of Beatles and solo Beatles music. I collect Beatles records, but records didn't transfer to my new (at the time) iPod easily. (It's not too difficult either, but with the logistics of moving my stereo equipment close to my computer and then paying for software to make the transfer process smoother, it was a better option to just find the counterparts to my vinyl already on the internet.) Anyway, my Ringo Starr searches kept pulling up Shiina Ringo, but for the longest time I never even gave her a listen because I assumed she would be more of the cutesy J-Pop. Poor sad Digdad.
Enter Tokyo Jihen. I don't even remember how, but I came across the OSCA video on YouTube and thought it was refreshing in how out there it was. Finding rocking jazzy funk in Japanese was just what the doctor ordered. I looked up a bit about the band and was surprised to find out it was Shiina Ringo. The same Shiina Ringo I wrote off so quickly before. Again, poor sad Digdad. I also found out that she had done a Beatles and a John Lennon cover. Not only that, but the Beatles cover was not a typical love song, oh no, it was Yer Blues. Done and sold. So I quickly began tracking down her material via YouTube and mp3 sites. While my initial introduction to her was OSCA, the first music of hers that I really began to listen to extensively and get incredibly hooked on were first Shouso Strip and then Muzai Moratorium. It was only later after several listens that KSK began to sink into my psyche and overtake her other albums as my favorite.
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