Yoko Watanabe & The Blog of Death

I like to listen to music while I work.

Also, I am a nat­ur­ally curi­ous per­son and enjoy tak­ing advant­age of this music blog phe­nomen­on that intro­duces us all to so much good, new music.

I like to share the cul­tur­al wealth I see around me with every­one who I think will appre­ci­ate it. [Yes, I plead guilty to pro­mot­ing music and, frankly, I do it bet­ter and more effi­ciently than I ever did when I was killing time between the ads for ZMFM. Enthusiasm for the music is the mes­sage: the music itself just comes along for the ride.] 

In my home/office iTunes is per­petu­ally on ran­dom: it’s like a radio sta­tion full of my own favour­ite music. Or a radio sta­tion where the pro­gramme dir­ect­or’s cat walks freely across the key­board 27–4.

Which might explain why I found myself listen­ing to Yoko Watanabe’s J‑Pop ver­sion of Wham!‘s “Last Christmas” about half an hour ago. Being a bor­der­line Asperger’s per­son­al­ity I was then obliged to try and give the mp3 a date and find some cov­er art.

In my research I find that Yoko Watanabe was a legendary opera sing­er who died of can­cer at the begin­ning of 2004. Evidently, she was the Cio-cio San of our gen­er­a­tion, and per­formed all over the world to great acclaim.

But I still don’t know why she sang “Last Christmas” or when, or why.

And, much more alarm­ingly: why is there such a thing as “The Blog of Death” and what pur­pose does it serve?

OK: without delving too deeply in to the site, or obli­ging you (dear read­er) to do like­wise it seems like a death-fixated, obituary-focused (respect­ably thor­ough), macabre out­post of the back­woods of the Internets. My night got even weirder when at their front page I found myself read­ing about the sur­geon who single-handedly turned Trinidad, Colorado into the sex-change cap­it­al of the world.

If, and when, you down­load “Last Christmas” please think fondly of Yoko Watanabe while you listen…