help with finding music, please

[EvanT]

Hi guys and gals. I have a request.

Whenever I learn a language I like to listen to music to fill in the gaps when I'm not actively studying the language and keep in touch with the language at all times. The problem is that I don't have any meaningful experience with Japanese Music and no easy access to it (excluding the internet). While I have found japanese singers I like, I'm still shooting blind-folded here, looking up artists' names on lists and getting songs I think I might like (90% of them have ended up in the recycle bin).

So... can someone point out some decent Japanese artists whose music I might like? I know how vague the question is, so I should state that I hate "meowing vocals" and "kawaii sqeaky voices". Also here's a list of artists I've found agreeable so far:

Angela Aki
Onitsuka Chihiro (鬼束ちひろ）
Garnet Crow
Sakamoto Maaya (坂本真綾)
Shimokawa Mikuni (下川みくに）　(a bit on the sqeaky side, but still agreeable)

Any suggestion would be really helpful.

Edit: How could I forget to put a thread title?!

[Adriano]

it´s in portuguese, but one of the bests :p
http://a-nation.org/
がんばって！

[Adriano]

ごめんね！
I thought you were looking for a good site to download j-pop o_o （急ぎ読みしたらダメだ〜）
First of all, what kind of music do you like?
If you don´t know and just want to try some musics, download the top musics
http://www.oricon.co.jp/rank/

[EvanT]

If you don´t know and just want to try some musics, download the top musics

I did that for a time and... well... I ended up with a recycle bin full of useless megabytes. I must have gone through 1000 songs more or less and ended up putting aside around 50 songs by the aforementioned artists. *sigh*

First of all, what kind of music do you like?

I hoped posting that artist list would address that issue, but for clarity's sake:
I like New World music (my favourite artist is Loreena McKennitt)
I enjoy Lyrical Rock/Metal (i wonder if Nightwish's new singer is as good as the Tarjia Turunen)
I really like 80s-90s rock and pop music (so, I'm a bit old, what can I do? )
I really like Italian music (namely Eros Ramazzotti, Laura Pausini, Jovanotti to name a few)
And since you're Portuguese-speaking, I also like Madredeus.

[inuinu]

hope you like some.
also hope this not sqeaky.
(since i'm unsure about accurate sense of word sqeaky.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvygGyJQhy8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INCAlPn1dnA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcBZiooTfu4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58AJBOtJbQk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYx91mkYKjc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0g0VYrEEGk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IfjTvcm0nI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrMKxMHPFpU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYo4XvAyK9k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEMSj6Ad9Pc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM0itSX2DcE

[Kagemaru]

Anyone down for the ギャランドゥ?

[LustBaka]

Try Utada Hikaru and Namie Amuro. Neither of them have sqeaky kawaii voices:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=SvmyyE7l01I (Utada)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SvmyyE7l01I (Namie)

[AJBryant]

These are some of my favorites.

Nagabuchi Tsuyoshi singing "Tonbo"
Horiuchi Takao singing "Itoshiki Hibi" (which I can never listen to without tearing up due to its use as the theme of a tearjerker period drama many years ago)
[url]Shiina Megumi singing one of my favorites -- "Love is All"[/url]

For the enka fans:
Yoshi Ikuzo singing "Yukiguni"
Yoshi Ikuzo singing "Sake yo"
Kitajima Saburo singing "Matsuri"
Sabu-chan singing "Hakodate no Onna"

If you don't know Misora Hibari, it's like coming to America and not knowing who Sinatra was.
Misora Hibari doing "Kawa no nagare no you ni"
Misora Hibari singing the classic "Yawara"
Something different: Misora singing "Ave Maria" (!)

Tanimura Shinji singing the tearjerker "Subaru" (which I can never seem to listen to without tearing up, even though it's a war-era song)

I had a major crush on Sakamoto Fuyumi when I was in Japan. Here she sings "Noto wa iran kai ne"
Sakamoto Fuyumi singing "Abare Daiko"

And old classic: Oka Tarô singing "Akogare Hawaii no Koro"

"Areno no Hateni" from "Hissatsu Shigotonin"

The Tigers sing "Mona Lisa no Hohoemi"
The Tigers and "Aoi tori"

Tony

[Gundaetiapo]

I only know of one good J Pop song.

[EvanT]

Thanks for you input guys. I really appreciate it. I'll make sure to check these out.

@Kagemaru: Re patrioti, tipota pio prosfato den eixes na proteineis? LOL

[saraLynne]

Internet radio.

Shoutcast -- Just run a search for japanese, jpop, or jrock

Japan-A-Radio -- My favorite J-music station. Good mix, good uptime (never had an outage, though I haven't actually listened to them in a long time...

IMHO, listening to radio stations like this is the best way to find music you like. I prefer Japan-A-Radio because it's not 100% anime music, which a lot of internet j-pop stations are.

EDIT: Japan-A-Radio appears to no longer be free. Pity... well, I'm sure you can find others.

[ss]

My mother loves these songs:
ひとり旅　美空ひばり
りんご追分 美空ひばり
潮来笠 橋幸夫

I like these:
ひとり上手　美雪中島
長い間　kokoro
爱的迷恋　魅せられて
涙そうそう 夏川りみ

[Adriano]

I really like 80s-90s rock and pop music

そうならKYOSUKE HIMURO is the best

[LustBaka]

AJBryant wrote:
These are some of my favorites.

Nagabuchi Tsuyoshi singing "Tonbo"
Horiuchi Takao singing "Itoshiki Hibi" (which I can never listen to without tearing up due to its use as the theme of a tearjerker period drama many years ago)
Tony

i love listening to Itoshiki hibi. It's been played like 500 times on my iPod.

[saraLynne]

Just a fix, Japan-A-Radio can still be listened to for free. If the public server slots fill up, though, you get kicked off after 60 minutes. However, I've had it on all day today without getting booted even once.

And for an interesting side note, they just played an Enka song.
Kaori Mizumori - mushiroshitsugen

If you play the stream through a Winamp playlist, you get the title and artist of every track. Normally I use Windows Media Player for all my audio, but I can't get it to list track and artist on internet streams. Bleh.