The Private Canon: "Ride on Shooting Star" and "White Ash"

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Looking back over a life of music listening, I can identify what I think of as apertures—moments when, for whatever reason, I throw myself open to and/or actively seek out new music to enjoy. After what I recognize was a halcyon period of inundation and absorption, roughly junior high through my mid-20s, these periods of active listening have been notably random and sporadic, as if my musical taste were a fully staffed company that only posts job openings every few years or so. Every once in a while a friend may press a new artist on me, or one has sent an influential mix CD. But I have found that if I'm not in this mysterious, hard-to-predict right frame of mind, I'm just less inclined to pursue new interests.

Earlier this year I had a fresh spate of new-music craving, as I belatedly put Spotify on my phone and reactivated an old Pandora station; that's how I found my way to such new favorites as Jain, Bowerbirds, and Faye Webster, while also exploring a few more widely known artists I'd heard about but had put off diving into (Billie Eilish, Rosalía, Lorde). Among countless other examples, I remember that the great radio show/podcast Sound Opinions turned me onto Beach House—well, mainly their epic "Zebra"—and a few months ago on the same show, during my most recent ears-open phase, I happened to hear about the great Minneapolis rapper Dua Saleh. The classical podcast Sticky Notes has also sent me to back the virtual shelves on occasion to stock up on Schubert and Shostakovich.

I can trace one of the odder and more singular such apertures to a single Slate article from 2007, in which writer Paul Collins railed at the way iTunes's international licensing limitations prevented U.S. listeners from tuning into a virtual Renaissance of Japanese pop/rock. I'm not sure why this particular cause resonated with me—I was a card-carrying fan of Shonen Knife and Pizzicato Five, but wasn't out looking for more in that vein. But Collins was such a cheerleader ("There are thousands of Japanese bands that play circles around ours," he breathlessly wrote) that his enthusiasm must have won me over. Also, I'll admit, there was the thrill of the illicit about it: I didn't use his suggested workarounds to make iTunes cough up the goods (fake Japanese addresses with prepaid cards? no thanks), and YouTube, then in its infancy, was not the vast library it is now. So I went to LimeWire (mea maxima culpa) and typed in a few band names from Collins's story: Triceratops, Radwimps, and the Pillows. He was definitely onto something.

I especially gravitated to the big-guitar sound of the Pillows, who I guess I analogized to such then-hot Western bands as the Killers or Franz Ferdinand, but who had a punk/pop energy all their own. It turns out that most of the music of theirs that I loved was made for an anime series called in Japan Furi Kuri, which aired on Adult Swim in the U.S. as FLCL. Over its closing credits, apparently, ran the utterly beguiling banger "Ride on Shooting Star," with its stabbing main riff and a catchy chorus distinguished by a head-clearing major-third leap, a G to a B much like the one in "The Air That I Breathe,"only faster and more amped up. Except for the title line, the song is entirely in Japanese (and Google translate isn't much help: "Like a shotgun with a voice in my heart continued to sing"), but I don't need to literally know what it's about to feel this one.

Considering another particular favorite: I am sure the deliciously nasty drum-and-distortion groove of "White Ash" has some Western correlatives (it sounds a bit like this Pete Thomas/Elvis Costello groove, come to think of it), but to my ears it's entirely fresh and distinctive. As far as this sound is concerned, no one can touch the Pillows:

I am grateful, in short, for the brief but intense opening of this particular portal. I've sometimes wondered if I ought to be more intentional about my musical diet, follow music and artists with more consistency and loyalty. But something tells me that if I'd been doing exactly that, I may never have stumbled into this delicious wormhole of early-mid-aughts J-Rock.