{"id":1346,"date":"2016-12-19T09:04:58","date_gmt":"2016-12-19T15:04:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intlwota.com\/happydisco\/?p=1346"},"modified":"2016-12-19T09:04:58","modified_gmt":"2016-12-19T15:04:58","slug":"my-top-25-songs-of-2016-honorable-mentions-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mescallado.com\/happydisco\/index.php\/2016\/12\/19\/my-top-25-songs-of-2016-honorable-mentions-pt-2\/","title":{"rendered":"My Top 25 Songs of 2016 &#8211; Honorable Mentions pt 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here we go, the second honorable mentions post! While the first post was covers and two songs that would never make it onto my top 25, here are some songs I really liked from this year but just missed the cut.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Negicco &#8211; Mujun, Hajimemashita<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5VQdcvnSZMM\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I feel like if I&#8217;m going to regret putting any song on my honorable mentions rather than in my top 25 it&#8217;s going to be Negicco&#8217;s Mujun, Hajimemashita. I&#8217;ve known of Negicco for years but I&#8217;ve never paid them all that much attention, but Mujun Hajimemashita is lovely. It has a great classic, retro idol sound that reminds me a lot of classic Vanilla Beans sound. I&#8217;ve wondered if I should put this on my top 25 for me, but the biggest thing that&#8217;s kept it from a spot on that list is because it&#8217;s not all that memorable, excepting the chorus. Every song on the Top 25 is one that I&#8217;ve been unable to get out of my head, and Mujun Hajimemashita isn&#8217;t quite there.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Rhymeberry &#8211; Hiking<br \/>\n<\/strong><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/MUAsV9WO9rc\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Hiking is another one that I feel like could go on my Top 25 list, but since I&#8217;ve been pretty lax in actually buying Rhymeberry stuff I have no idea if they actually released it as a single or if it&#8217;s just a PV hanging out on their YouTube Channel. Rhymeberry&#8217;s gone through a lot of changes over the past couple of years, only keeping one original member (MC Miri) and leaving T-Palette Records. In many ways this change wasn&#8217;t a bad one. While I liked every member of the original Rhymeberry, Miri is the absolute talent of the group, and lately she&#8217;s been doing more work that&#8217;s pure hip hop, not hip hop idol. But one of the things I miss about the group is the sillier stuff, like my favorite Rhymeberry song &#8220;Sekaichuu ni I Love You.&#8221; Well, Hiking is silly. It&#8217;s VERY silly. It also is Miri and Misaki at their best, and it&#8217;s definitely one of the highlights of the year, showing that Rhymeberry can continue to have some of the bright silliness that they&#8217;ve had in the past while also being a showcase for Miri as a hip hop MC.<\/p>\n<p><strong>AOP &#8211; Cotona Mode<\/strong><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/CQbW0lYo4G8\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This is effectively #26 on the list, and the one I debated most heavily. Do I go with putting more experimental, interesting, and flat out better songs on my top 25 list, or do I put the songs I listened to more? Cotona Mode isn&#8217;t particularly interesting &#8211; it&#8217;s a pretty typical, cutesy, anison type of JPop song &#8211; which makes sense, considering it&#8217;s the opening theme for an anime. It&#8217;s not particularly original or interesting. That said, it&#8217;s so bubbly, so over the top cute that I listened to this quite a bit this year. I couldn&#8217;t justify putting Cotona Mode on my Top 25 list when I knew there were better songs out there. That said, Cotona Mode is an addiction and put AOP on the map for me.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Happiness &#8211; Ordinary Girls<\/strong><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/S_jNtbF7dHg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>About this time every year I think &#8220;Oh, what did E-Girls and the other groups do?&#8221; and usually find one or two songs I love. This year, there was nothing I really loved from E-Girls proper &#8211; Pink Champagne was fine (probably my favorite E-Girls song of the year), I loved Dream Ami&#8217;s cover of Lovefool. But Happiness had another great song this year by the name of Ordinary Girls.<\/p>\n<p>Ordinary Girls is probably the most KPop I&#8217;ve seen an E-Girls group get. It&#8217;s VERY Kpop \/ Western pop inspired, so much so that it would not feel out of place to see a group like Girls Generation or another KPop girl group. At points it has a very dark beat and that&#8217;s where the song excels. It&#8217;s not something I&#8217;m going to listen to on a very regular basis &#8211; it&#8217;s not my type of music. However, if you occasionally like this sort of thing, Happiness is a good group for you to check out. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Babymetal &#8211; The One <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TZRvO0S-TLU\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>And the &#8220;the song that should really be better&#8221; award goes to Babymetal&#8217;s The One. I haven&#8217;t listened to Babymetal&#8217;s Metal Resistance album as much as I&#8217;ve listened to their singles and their self-titled album, but it&#8217;s solid. I think my issue with following Babymetal is that for the most part they&#8217;ve focused on touring and live concerts rather than music, and their music has moved away from idol into metal. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s a bad move for Babymetal necessarily, but I&#8217;m not a huge metal fan &#8211; I only really like it with a heavy dose of idol music.<\/p>\n<p>The One is long, ending Metal Resistance with a 6:30 runtime. And man, it really feels its length. Some longer idol songs (Momoiro Clover Z&#8217;s Hai to Diamond comes to mind) fly by. However, The One drags by at times, which is disappointing. It&#8217;s a song that has a lot of beauty to it, especially due to lead singer Sumetal&#8217;s powerful vocals. The biggest issue, I&#8217;d say, is that while it has a good base for a song like this, it doesn&#8217;t sufficiently build over the course of the song. The tempo remains pretty static, which is unfortunate when it&#8217;s at a pretty steady mid-tempo throughout the song. The One sometimes feels like it&#8217;s building to nothing, which is just disappointing. <\/p>\n<p>With Suzuka&#8217;s beautiful vocals, the piano, and metal sound we&#8217;ve come to expect from Babymetal, The One could have been something special, which is why I&#8217;m putting it here. It&#8217;s the song that, every time I listen to it, I think that it should be a lot better than it is. It&#8217;s one of the songs with the most promise from 2016 which makes it, sadly, one of the most disappointing songs of 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here we go, the second honorable mentions post! While the first post was covers and two songs that would never make it onto my top 25, here are some songs I really liked from this year but just missed the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mescallado.com\/happydisco\/index.php\/2016\/12\/19\/my-top-25-songs-of-2016-honorable-mentions-pt-2\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-top-25-songs-of-2016"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mescallado.com\/happydisco\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mescallado.com\/happydisco\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mescallado.com\/happydisco\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mescallado.com\/happydisco\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mescallado.com\/happydisco\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mescallado.com\/happydisco\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mescallado.com\/happydisco\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mescallado.com\/happydisco\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mescallado.com\/happydisco\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}