Monthly Archives: February 2012

Update… We Were Hacked!

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To make a long story short:

Friday afternoon, ex-Romeo Void singer Debora Iyall had discovered my overview of It’s a Condition and posted the link to it on her Facebook page. Since I’ve been Facebook friends with her for awhile and had participated in her Kickstarter campaign for her new EP, I knew about it because she had linked to my personal Facebook page in her status update about the post. I hadn’t told her about the post (I didn’t want to be spamming her page or whatnot) so I was happy that she had found it and was giving me props right back for giving her old band props.

For whatever reason (a bit of ego, maybe?), I went to click through the link on my iPhone (I was at dinner with my mother at the time) and found myself getting rerouted to a .ru page that was basically dead. What?

Thinking it was some odd Facebook quirk, once I got home I got on my computer and checked the link. Through Chrome, I got the same dead page. Through Firefox, I got a fake virus scan site that (thankfully) Norton had cockblocked before any damage could be done.

Yep – some fuckers — probably Russian hackers — had somehow gotten into the account that holds all of my music blogs (The Groove Music Life, Music Is Like Oxygen, my Reina Tanaka worship blog So Hot She Shits Fire) as well as the blog for Resonant Blue and a blog for a friend’s charitable work (Sounds For Scoliosis, a series of benefit shows in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area booked and promoted by my friend Lucia Peregrim). Going directly to the main sites was fine… but anyone clicking through a link from just about anywhere (Google, Bing, Facebook, whatever) was getting redirected to some Russian pecker’s malware festival instead – and making me look bad. So bad that one of Debora Iyall’s friend had gotten hit with that shit, forcing the link to be removed.

So, after a few phone calls to my hosting provider, here’s what happened – the hackers had gotten into a file called .htaccess that, in the case of these blogs, works within WordPress installations and makes sure whoever visits one of my blogs is seeing one of my blogs. The hackers had replaced it with their own version that, within its hardly-complicated code, tricks links from search engines and social networking sites into taking people’s browsers into the Russian assholes’s virus playground instead.

Thankfully, a little Google research – a few seconds worth, more than most Tea Party members do – turned up how to fix this shit, using only Notepad and an FTP program. But I had to do it for every WordPress installation on my account – a minor pain in the ass, but it had to be done. Now all links should be fine.

Now, I don’t know if this kind of thing can affect the “free” WordPress blogs hosted on their own server farm, but if you’re independently hosting your own WordPress blog elsewhere, here’s what you should do to make sure these hacker motherfuckers aren’t messing with your hard work. With your FTP program (like Filezilla), check the size of the .htaccess file on your server. If it’s a little more than 200 bytes, you’re fine. If it’s bigger than that – the hacker’s version was over three thousand bytes – delete it immediately, Google for “.htaccess wordpress” and you’ll find a proper code to get your blog back to normal. Boot up Notepad, cut and paste (or type it up) it exact, and use your FTP program to upload it to your server. Note that you can’t simply just upload the clean version over the dirtied one – some of their code in the dirtied one prevents that, so you have to delete just that file.

My apologies to anyone who had been affect by visiting one of my blogs – in fact, at the time of this writing there was still a malware alert for So Hot She Shits Fire, which I’ve already applied for a correction on with Google. (Right now a direct search in Google warns that the site might harm people’s computers, especially if they don’t have something like Norton installed.) Everything on all of my blogs should be safe.

VAN HALEN “A Different Kind of Truth”

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VAN HALEN
A Different Kind of Truth
(Interscope)

I really don’t need to tell anyone about this album… anything I could have said in a review was already said by the authors of this review which said everything I could have said here or at TGML.

Speaking of TGML, however, another review by a less attentive “writer” (translation: jaded hack) here led me to again reconsider the nature of reviewing records, a couple of years after I first ruminated it. That post should be up on TGML in the next day or two.

W “Duo U&U”

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W
Duo U&U
(Zetima)

I don’t know what the exact intentions behind this first album from Morning Musume members Ai Kago and Nozomi Tsuji were, outside of having them do some duo-oriented Showa-period kayokyoku classic hits, but I can tell you one thing they hadn’t counted on that this CD did – it got me even more interested in older Japanese pop music.

See, I knew of Pink Lady because of their short-lived American TV show and their “Kiss In The Dark” single, but I knew very little about what came in Japanese pop before Morning Musume, Whiteberry, Mai Kuraki, and Chihiro Onitsuka. The fifteen covers that Aibon and Nono did on this album – The Peanuts’s “Koi No Vacance” and “Passion Flower”, Pink Lady’s “Southpaw” and “Nagisa no Sinbad”, Amin’s “Matsu Wa”, Wink’s “Samishii Nettaigyo” – ended up being my introduction to all that.

In the months after this album became a frequent visitor to my CD player and a permanent resident in my iPod, I would find myself doing as much research as possible into the original artists that were represented and covered by Aibon and Nono here, to the point where I was buying anthologies from The Peanuts, Wink, and Amin as well as snagging mp3s of the original versions of other songs that W had covered from a LiveJournal trading community. When I got a turntable at the end of 2007, I found myself searching out Japanese vinyl on eBay, scoring albums from Akina Nakamori, Hiromi Iwasaki, and other kayokyoku icons as well as a slew of enka singles that put me on the path to the Japanese balladry known as enka.

That is not to say that Aibon and Nono’s performances on Duo U&U are lackluster – they aren’t. This album and the rest of their output as W remain their finest hours as vocalists, with their almost telepathic harmonies and a rapidly maturing range. These aren’t note-for-note copies of the originals – tempos get taken up a few notches throughout (W’s version of “Koi no Vacance” shows some serious punk influence compared to the original recording’s fox-trot tempo). and compared to the originals W and their in-studio collaborators took a few other liberties with the arrangements. If they hadn’t taken such an investment in these recordings, who is to say that I  wouldn’t have been interested in checking out the original recordings in the first place?

By now, quite frankly, we should be on our sixth or seventh W album by now. But some of Ai Kago’s indiscrections just as their third album W3: Faithful was about to head for the mastering studio held up their collective careers considerably. A year after that, Kago would be released from her contract with Up Front Works, her agency since her Morning Musume days, for a similar indiscretion, while Tsuji would find herself becoming a premature Morning MILF several months after that. While Tsuji found some stability, Kago’s own life was full of ups and downs; even though she did record a pop-rock single in 2009 and a jazz album the year afterward, her personal life hit several potholes until, after a severe low point, she settled down and announced that she was going to be following her fellow ex-W into Morning Motherhood.

TOMMY FEBRUARY6 “Tommy Airline”

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TOMMY FEBRUARY6
Tommy Airline
(DefStar/Sony Japan)

Tomoko Kawase is reviving her  Tommy February6 alter ego after several years hiatus where she concentrated primarily on her Tommy Heavenly6 persona instead up until a couple of years ago when she reformed her old band The Brilliant Green for an album and tour.. only her first release back as February6 is one where she’s sharing space with her Heavenly6 persona. Barring her old band, which I really haven’t been able to get into for some reason at this point, there’s the matter of Ms. Kawase’s two personas. Tommy February6 makes music dominated by or consisting entirely of synthesisers, while Tommy Heavenly6 is more guitar oriented. Given the occasion of her new release and of her birthday (which is also the origin of her first alter-ego’s stage name), a good look at the first album I bought of hers was in order.

Tommy Airline is Kawase’s second album under her original solo persona, and it would be the last long-playing effort she would do under her persona until this year. As Tommy February6, Ms. Kawase collaborates with one pseudonymously named collaborator, Malibu Convertible (not much is known about this guy – although it’s also likely the name is that of a production team rather than one person), the music is heavily synth-oriented, save for piano and an electric lead guitar on “I Still Love You Boy”. Most of Tommy’s lyrics are a mix of Japanese and English – although it should be noted that Ms. Kawase wlll write her English lyrics despite a serious lack of experience with the language, utilizing more bilingual friends to help proofread her text.

Having been interested in synth-pop since I had my first earfuls of Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, and Human League back in the early 80′s, it is probably no surprise that this has been a favorite album of mine for years since it was first recommended to me; I’ve followed Ms. Kawase’s solo exploits since then. A few highlights:

“Magic In Your Eyes” – one of the singles from the album. There’s a severe clash of decades on this one – a severe Motown feel (60′s) being played almost entirely on synthesizers (80′s) save for one rhythm guitar part, gives a strangely timeless feel to the song.

“Choose Me or Die” – Major key music a-la early Madonna gives way to a rather foreboding lyric during the bridge that would foretell the darker Tommy Heavenly6 persona (“If you don’t say you love me, I’ll kill you”) before that morphs into Tommy singing an almost angelic “Loooove you” over Human League-ish synth arpeggios.

The aforementioned “I Still Love You Boy”, an excellent power ballad.

And my favorite track on the album, “Sweet Dream”, a very haunting little ballad with lots of atmospheric keyboards, multi-tracked harmonies from Ms. Kawase, and a predominantly English-language vocal (the choruses are in her native tongue.)

This one is definitely worth searching out.