seiyuupop (n): a genre of J-pop specifically utilizing anime voice-acting talent, often born from said vocal talent recording a theme or image song for anime. Example: "Boy, this seiyuupop CD sure is shitty! No wonder it was only $3!"

Seiyuupop is an interesting monster, borne from the ultimate of traditions: the product tie-in. Sometimes, it's subtle, like when Maaya Sakamoto branched out from anime themes and released an actual album. Other times, you have monsters like Megumi Hayashibara's CDs, which are basically compilations of anime themes she's done compiled with B-sides from the singles of those themes.

You have to hand it to the person who realized they could sell CDs of bad and often ugly singers to desperate lunatic otaku if said singer happened to voice their favorite masturbatory-fantasy anime girl. Forget American Idol - the Japanese are and always have been years ahead of us in the creation of imaginary mass-marketed pop-idols. Seiyuupop notwithstanding, even mainstream-whores like Ayumi Hamasaki and Namie Amuro are expertly created from dust and wind and a helluva lot of pitch-fixed, computer-generated media. However, don't believe for a SECOND that seiyuupop vocalists qualify as mainstream music in Japan. You might see a Megumi Hayashibara CD at the store, buried in the stacks of the world's second-largest record industry, but you'll be hard-pressed to find a regular Japanese rocker whose heard of her.

Which makes Mari Iijima all that much more of a tragic tale and enigma in herself. Here's a woman who probably has MORE musical training than most voice-actress/singer hybrids, who actually went to a conservatory, and whose only claim to fame is voicing a vapid, soulless, immature, manufactured pop-star bitch: Minmay from Superdimensional Fortress Macross. Her singing career was a child of Minmay's, who sang crappy 80s songs like "My Boyfriend is a Pilot" and "Zero-G Love!" Ms. Iijima, on the other hand, had a chance to prove herself with the 1984 Macross movie, when she not only sang but WROTE Minmay's title song: "Do You Remember Love?"

"I DID NOT KNOW I AM SO POPULAH!!! Do you want to hear my English song? No? But I learned new language to sing to my fans!"

One might think that her career ended there. They'd be basically right. Except she went on to release FIFTEEN(!) records with Warner Music Japan. My theory is they forgot she was on staff until they tried to track down the source of massive revenue loss and - voila! By the time they noticed, she had put out 15 albums in as many years. One disastrous marriage, a couple of kids, and a move to LA to be a super-star later, one might think Mari is fairly jaded from having lived what I assume is the fate of every 80s starlet. But she wasn't discouraged; she just started a website and kept releasing albums, this time as an indie artist in Los Angeles. (She also got a brief role on the short-lived beach-drama series Pacific Blue; the show was cancelled immediately after her episode.)

No Limit is the first of these indie albums, and listening to it, it's easy to see why Mari Iijima is as big a name to 20 or 30 people worldwide today as she was back in 1983. For starters, she makes a bold attempt to write and sing songs in her second language. Her english is better than, say, Yoshie Nakano's, but not quite as good as Fidel Castro. More importantly, while she might have the nuances of the spoken language down (which gives me less patience for her lyrics), they simply prove how vapid and shallow her poetry can be.

Add that to the modus operandi of sorrow, regret, and probable alcoholism that accompanies the washed-up starlet lifestyle plus the seiyuupop "everything is groovy" happy-pappy crap and you have a wonderful cornucopia of alternating attempts to express sorrow and optimism from someone who, even if her English was absolutely fantastic, lacks the poetic ability in either language to express herself higher than a 5th grade level. A good lyrical example: "It's so sad. Isn't it so sad? (It's really so sad.)"

Last but not least (in fact, most importantly), the 80s never ended for Mari Iijima. The most depressing or optimistic messages are utterly watered down by a bland, soulless, upbeat, weather-channel kind of pop, with earnest, unironic guitar licks, high-end mixes, and unintentionally-vintage-but-not-in-a-cool-way synth strings and pads. This album could've been made anywhere between 1983 and 1993. The fact that she was selling this at anime convention concerts in 1999 (autographed copy here!) is what makes it truly wonderful in the endless sea of regrettable music purchases. Remember that her 3 subsequent albums also follow this mid-80s trend, to the extent that she even went out and got TOTO to record one of them!!! UNIRONICALLY!

Thankfully, the album is out of print. However, you can still buy it on iTunes, so let's go over the highlights of some of the tracks on the CD, just in case you have $10 a month set aside for shitty music purchases*.

* I also highly recommend "LAX" from some other album if you are in fact purchasing shitty Mari Iijima music on iTunes. It's a song about being at LAX. Seriously.

AUTOGRAPHED FUCKING COPY!!!

Track 1 - Us: This song announced Mari's entrance on the washed-up-seiyuupop-cum-indie-rocker scene. In a way, it tells the story of what happened between Macross and 1999 by being about Mari's divorce. ALL RIGHT! In addition to sounding like the theme song from some 80s drama which escapes me, this showcases some of Mari's lyrical talent, like the aforementioned "It's so sad. Isn't it so sad? (It's really so sad.)" It opens the album with a carefully worded "If you had a change of heart, I could never blame on you." And who could forget "'Til death do us part / we won't be apart / I made a vow to be with you." The overly-flanged guitar solo that brings us back to the "Oh baby" is really the icing on the cake with this one.

Track 2 - Everybody's Lonely: A sort of Mari Iijima: Unplugged sound, with a nice acoustic guitar riff that distracts you from the fact that she's singing about sleeping with and being in love with a married man. The nice guitar accompaniment gives way to an overly-echoed drum kit groove, as Mari was clearly worried the track might otherwise have a timeless feel to it. We can't have it not sounding like 1983!

Track 3 - No Limit: The flanged drum intro and (actually inadvertantly cool) opening synth let us know why this track is the title track of this album. Unlike the songs about divorce and adultery on this album, the optimistic message of this song talks about how the blue sky "dried my tears away" and how "you can make your dream come true." That dream, being of course, releasing an unbroken chain of shitty 80s pop albums well into the 21st century. This song really does rock POSITIVE: it teaches us all that "your future has no limit / just like the way the sky is / if you want to make it happen / you'll see what your power does." A bit trite, maybe, but I'm just a sentimentalist, I guess. And you might be glad to know that Mari will "be always there for you." She's like a Japanese Cyndi Lauper, really. No matter how many bad concerts make her cry and how many fans scream "SING YOUR MACROSS SONGS, YOU FUCKING BITCH!" she doesn't let it get the best of her. This is, sadly, the best song on the album.

Track 4 - Stop Keeping in Touch: I didn't intend to write about every track on the album, mind you, it's just that the first 4 are so good. Mari takes a page from the Berklee College of Music Professors' Shitty Album Handbook, and decides to kick it up a notch with some synth-brass-laden FUNK. That's right. FUNK. In this song, which is roughly about as bad-ass as the Weather Channel's Local on the 8's, she calls out her man's new lover (Cindy) before telling him (with her chorused-Mari posse) to "Stop Keepin' in Touch." This also features a GROOVALICIOUS BASS SOLO.

Track 5 - More Than Yesterday is some latin-ish laid-back love song ("I like you more than yesterday") that would probably be a rip-off of Shiina Ringo's B-side Aozora if only Mari listened to music from after 1990, while Track 6 - Sudden Kiss could be a Kimagure Orange RoadMarmalade Boy song if only it was in Japanese. Track 7 - "D" electro-funks it into 1988, and is forgettably blase.

Track 8 - Irony of Fate is where the album gets hilarious again. Mari takes a little bit of a country riff and tries futilely to sound a little bit like Melissa Etheridge - if Melissa Etheridge was singing about falling in love with a married man over the internet, then cockblocking him when he was single. Oh, and if Melissa Etheridge was also a stupid bitch. Of course. "What's up with you / you said in your mail / I have the flu / and I look so pale / sometimes we do enjoy telling our tales." and "I fell for you / a long while ago / you liked me too / you were married though." You can figure out where this is going, right? "It's like an irony of fate," whines Mari, not entirely sure how either word should be used. Perhaps she's borrowing Alanis Morisette's dictionary.

Track 9 - For a Little While demonstrates what I assume is Mari helping her then-second-grade son with his poetry homework, with lyrics like "I don't want to talk to you / I don't want to walk with you / for a little while." Track 10 - Vacation finishes off this sonic abortion by sounding like, at least to my ears, a fusion of bad island music and the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Be warned - that description makes this song sound a lot cooler than it actually is.

The summary: The message of Mari's music is whitewashed and diluted, not by her limited English, but by the limitations of her musical language. If you're a fan of bad 80s music, her albums are not to be missed! For the rest of us, this is truly an album that sucks, although it does it so tremendously that it becomes genuinely entertaining.

~Chiriko