Celebrity of the Week: Koda Kumi

This is OFFICIALLY catching up for like, the last few month's "Celebrity of the Week"s because I missed it one week and then spent every week afterwards doing it for "the week before", but here we are - CAUGHT UP. Since I did BoA, a mainly K-Pop (Korean Pop) artist I'll also do Koda Kumi, a J-Pop artist. Figure that one out yourself if you're that stupid. I discovered Koda the same way I discovered what has so far been the greatest musical impact upon my life. Sweetbox aka. Jade Valerie aka. ETERNITY∞ aka. Jamie Pineda aka. Saint Vox - in that order. ;) I discovered them through the Playstation 2 game "Final Fantasy X" where, as she was known at the time, "Jade from Sweetbox" was the main singer. The theme songs were "real Emotion" (yes, with a little 'r') and "1000 Words" - one a really upbeat pop song & another a moving ballad. Jade's voice was IMPECCABLE but after searching around Sweetbox, I realised it was originally planned for Koda Kumi to sing the theme songs, because Final Fantasy is a Japanese franchise. Unfortunately her English was and never has been, well, let's face it's pretty shit. So that is why Jade sung it for the English version & Koda sung the Japanese version.

So from then on I fell in love with Koda Kumi also - my favourite J-Pop artist! (Closely ties with Utada with Ayumi not far behind!) The first full album of Koda Kumi's I ever got was "Black Cherry" and I loved it! I'll never know why I like Asian pop music, I don't even know what they're singing - but from the music, tone and mood of the song it's usually easy enough to get a feeling for what the song's about. After that I got the album "Kingdom", which was a really amazing album as every song off the album had been released and every track had a music video (PV) for it. Pretty unheard of in my book! Except for like 2 or 3 videos, all were high budget, high production videos. I LOVE THEM! Anyway then I got the album "TRICK", which even featured Fergie (from the Black Eyed Peas) in it. Not the best song though...

The music, similar to like Lady Gaga, isn't all what it's about. Koda is EXTREMELY hott & sexy and always looks amazing. All of her albums have a theme which I really like, like Black Cherry had... well actually I'm not sure as it wasn't as obvious. However Kingdom's theme of royalty was cool, as was Trick's circus theme. Her latest album "UNIVERSE" is combined with Koda's third "Best of..." (forgot it's name exactly) album and it also has a really neat throwback to the previous best of albums on the cover. CBF'd explaining, if you're a fan you'll know. Otherwise you probably won't care. Anyway I've rambled, but I just wanted to get my point across... I love KUMI-SAN!! (Two images because I love "Kingdom" and "Trick" album promotional photos so much!)