#akiko urasaki

[insiderweird]

[93hyena]

[himi-wiz]

HOLY CRAP WAIT SHE'S GONNA TALK WAIT WAIT WAIT

THE QUEEN IS HERE AND IT'S NOT A DRILL I CANT WAIT AAAHHHH

Btw is no one talking about this on tumblr but Verbal Justice has been out for a week ago and I was waiting for a post to scream about it but no one made a post and I couldn't stand not talking about Nemu, Ichijiku and Otome-sama.

Immaculate vibes! Gosh the rhyming especially Otome's bars, I am worshipping. So. Hard.

Here are some thoughts on favourite parts and screenshot with gorgeous visuals.

NEMU. BELOVED. MY GORGEOUS DARLING YOU ARE STUNNING IN THIS. TELL THOSE BOYS TO BUZZ OFF YES. 🥺💀🌹💕

Gosh her flower motive always gets me, such a beautiful world she strives for especially in comparison to her brother Samatoki's work as a Mafia Boss which is like, a life full of death, darkness and corruption.

ICHIJIKU <3333 PLEASE STEP-- I mean, please continue to tell us how you'll wreck wretched men and put them in their place, yes ma'am. Lash out at the despicable patriarchal system you despise with all your heart's content, I'll support your ventures. Muah. 🥰❤💖💖

THEY REALLY MADE OTOME A GOD AND I CAN'T I AM ON MY KNEES HELP-- Sorry Dice, your mom's way too powerful. Good luck, dude.😔

Jokes aside the visual editing for this is crazy good, especially how she's both coated in shadows and the amber glow of the sun while rapping about her rise to power? What a Queen. Urgh. 🧎‍♀️🙏🌅���🔥✨

Admittedly Verbal Justice is not my fave melody line, the verses slap but the chorus is a bit slow with a haunting mantra-like repetition that can get grating unlike Femme Fatale. I understand it's intentional considering like saviour/path to God references though and it was fun though not something I'll slap onto a playlist I'll listen everyday unlike Magic Transistor or Hoodstars. Also Giga-P's never known for having a bad chorus so tough competition to beat there.

BUT YOU KNOW THE CRAZIEST THING ABOUT THIS.

THE SONG WRITER. THE LYRICS COMPOSER IS THE QUEEN OF J-HIPHOP HERSELF URASAKI AKIKO AKA AWICH. AND CHAKI ZULU IS ALSO ONE OF HER TOP PRODUCERS SHE WORKS WITH.

I'M SO DAMN IN LOVE AAAHHH

KING RECORDS ALWAYS PICK SUCH GOOD CHOICES FOR COMPOSERS, CREEPY NUTS, GIGA-P & REOL, TEDDYLOID, SHO KIRYUIN.

If only I can figure out how to access the other composers too. Invisible manners for example are tad hard to find in English but they do have a tumblr and twitter updates at least.

Awich's recommended discography:

Queendom is an autobiographical song about Awich's life story here and it's well worth a watch, phenomenal storytelling and I adore it so much.

And so it's like doubly amazing they got the Queen herself to make lyrics for Otome who's in a similar position of climbing to power with her own smarts, resolve and words for a better world in her homeplace like Awich returning to Japan where she moves hearts with her voice too. But well, there are clear differences there storyline wise when Otome is set up to be one of the top villains/antagonists. Very understandable sentiment tho.

And speaking of origin stories, Awich did do a collab with some Oikinawan youths, SugLawd Familiar and CHICO CARLITO called Longiness Remix. comments say they're (I think SugLawd Familiar in particular) in high school? Seriously?? And it's a jam!

(Here's the full song MV, no eng subs yet tho.)

And an article briefly explaining the video details!

I might do a couple of explanation posts on hypmic producers I adore sometime.

With that I'm out, cheers and stan women with amazing music hehe~

[sha-balabada]

avatars  *:･ﾟ✧ akiko urasaki (awich)

((CREDIT IF YOU USE))

[spectralwonder]

UMUI ft Koja Misako // Awich (Akiko Urasaki)

As a huge fan of Misako Koja (Nenes), there was no way I was going to overlook this song when I came across her name in the track list, or the artist who featured her. What a way to be introduced to Okinawan rapper, Awich (Akiko Urasaki). 

I hope to listen to the other songs in her latest album, 8, which is available on iTunes.

[japanesehiphop]

Female rapper Awich (Akiko Urasaki) from Okinawa released WHORU with Hip-hop crew ANARCHY on 07.21.17

[herecomesthepolyglot]

Langblr Secret Santa 2021

Hello @nihilistens-luftslott​, I’m your @langblrsecretsanta2021​! Merry Christmas, メリークリスマス, God Jul, Wesołych Świąt! Hope you enjoy the little gift :)

Since you mentioned you’d like to know more about art and culture-related stuff, I focused on that. For Japanese, there’s a list of a few interesting artists and for Swedish - some resources that might spark your interest.

Japanese Artists

- Matsuo Bashō was the most famous poet of the Edo era. Nowadays, he remains known as the master of haiku, in his times called hokku. Bashō’s poetry is short, simple and often inspired by the years he spent wandering around the country. Here’s an example:

年暮ぬ笠きて草鞋はきながら toshi kurenu / kasa kite waraji / hakinagara  another year is gone / a traveler's shade on my head, / straw sandals at my feet [1685]

- Tsukioka Yoshitoshi was a printmaker who witnessed two eras: Edo and the Meiji restoration. With the rapid westernization and technological advancement, he remained the last great master of ukiyo-e (woodblock printing and painting). He gained a lot of popularity in 1860s thanks to graphic depictions of violence but he also painted kabuki actors, beautiful women and the highly popular series “One Hundred Aspects of the Moon”.

- Takashi Murakami is a contemporary artists who uses various media such as sculpture, painting or animation. He is sometimes compared to Andy Warhol as he also blurrs the boundaries between the fine and commercial art. He founded the postmodern art movement “superflat” which makes use of various flattened forms of Japanese art.

- Nahoko Kojima is a paper cut artist who makes use of the Japanese paper cutting technique known as Kirie. She has mastered the art of applying intricate designs on her works - you can check them out here. Her most famous piece is a 32-meter long blue whale.

- Akiko Urasaki, also known as Awich (which short for Asian wish child) ia a hip-hop artist born in Naha, Okinawa. Music and American influence have been present in her life since childhood. In 2017, she entered Yentown, a Japanese hip-hop collcective, as the only woman and soon became a big name in the industry. She’s absolutely fabulous - I’d most recommend songs like  “ 洗脳 “, “GILA GILA“ or “Revenge”.

P. S. You mentioned you like 80s music too and I happen to have a playlist with some old Japanese songs ;)

Swedish resources

Swedish Pod 101 - youtube channel with soooo many useful videos; practice for different language levels and some cultural insights

List of the best Swedish movies to search for inspiration

SVT Play offers some tv shows and movies

8 Sidor, Dagen, Metro - news sites

Swedish radio

arte.tv - cool documentaries

and a few playlists: Christmas music, Swedish pop, Swedish rap, and some indie rock

Happy Holidays!

[wearejapanese]

By Dan Buyanovsky

Ask Awich about any frame of humanity and she’ll tell you it’s a construct. Nationality, gender, race, musical genre; they’re all boxes made to codify and control us, and she’s sick of them. “It’s just fiction,” she says over a video call from her apartment in Okinawa. “It’s something that we decided to see, but it’s not there. It’s not a tangible thing.”

The 33-year-old rapper, born Akiko Urasaki, thought about those constructs a lot as she put the finishing touches on her latest EP, “Partition”; questioning the ideas she was told to believe, holding opposing realities in her head as she created her own truth.

“I always had this weird ability to see myself as a story,” she says. As a young girl, she would stay up all night, scribbling in her notebook about themes she was too young to fully understand. “My earliest poetry was like fictional love stories,” she says. “Breaking up with somebody, somebody hurting my heart or I’m hurting somebody. Being a bad girl, stuff like that.” Twenty years later, her latest tracks touch on some of the same topics, but she has lived expansively since then. She’s been abroad, had a baby, seen beauty and agony; her experiences peek through on every record.

Growing up in Naha taught her about contradicting realities, too. From a young age, Awich knew how special her hometown was. She fell in love with the locals; their joviality filled her spirit with warmth. She spent most of her childhood outside, exploring her island’s beaches, jungles and woods. But she was also aware of the darker parts of Okinawa’s history. She went to marches that protested the presence of the U.S. military base. Her father, who had her at 45, was born on the same day as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The stories he and his sister told Awich were visceral, giving her an appreciation of the way people relay information to one another

“I always loved hearing about the war,” she says. “End-of-the-world, movie type of stories. My dad barely remembers the actual Battle of Okinawa, but his big sister does, and they would always tell me these scary, tragic stories. And funny stories about the postwar era, too. They would laugh and cry, and I was so fascinated by it.”

The stories also helped cultivate Awich’s interest in America. She studied English by listening to rapper Tupac and she had friends who would travel to the States and return with captivating reports of “big pizza, big ice cream, big everything.” The contradictions in the stories she heard about the U.S. had a profound effect on her. “As you grow up, you start to understand that these are conflicting ideas,” she says, “the American Dream and the tragedy of war.” Eventually, her curiosity with the U.S. won out, and in 2006, she moved to attend university in Atlanta, which she says was “exactly” like she imagined. “It almost felt like I was in a movie or in a music video,” she says. The Southern city happened to be the mecca of American hip-hop at the time, and while there, Awich gained a broader understanding of the genre’s diverse sounds. The elements she discovered there became a part of her musical DNA as she developed her career as a recording artist, releasing her first album, “Asia Wish Child,” in 2007.

When Awich later returned to Japan, she connected with producer Chaki Zulu and released albums and EPs that put her influences and paradoxes on full display: Here was a poet who was as interested in love stories as she was in power dynamics; and where her singing voice was delicate, her rap flow was vicious. Her duality was laid bare on a pair of 2018 EPs, “Heart” and “Beat.” One was filled with bouncy, emotive melodies about love and loss while the other felt fierce and dangerous, like a four-song-long shoving match. (It’s not hard to guess which one is which.)

Those releases and a string of guest appearances on tracks with the label 88rising’s August 08 and international artists Tymek and Krawk eventually landed Awich a major record deal with Universal Music, the label behind her latest project, “Partition.” After years of toiling as an independent creative who relied on organic collaborations, she feels lucky to have the support of a label behind her. “It wasn’t about going major,” she says of the decision, “it was because (Universal) likes what I do, the way I think and the way I live. I appreciate the fact that they want to help.

For Awich, the EP is part of an ongoing effort to show her many layers and rail against the confines of a patriarchal music industry. “There are boxes around what a woman is supposed to be, what a man is supposed to be, or what an artist or rapper is supposed to be,” she says. “But all of these ideas are void. I want to do everything I feel and be true to the moment of when I wrote the song and the emotion I felt. I don’t know what is true or what is wrong, but I know that the box is fiction, so I don’t abide by that.”

Read more...

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2020/09/04/music/okinawan-rapper-awich/

[gbnewslog]

Beaches, bases, battles: The seven-decade fight for Okinawa

Ginowan, Japan (CNN)Akiko Urasaki knows what it's like to grow up with the specter of war. Until Japan annexed Okinawa in the late 19th century, it was an independent state called the Ryukyu Kingdom.

via cnn.com - top stories

[18mr]

“Okinawan songs are so hip-hop to me. They talk about struggle, they talk about the blues.” -Akiko Urasaki, aka Awich

Urasaki uses hip hop to channel Okinawan pride and to fuel the independence and anti-US military base movement!

-JS

[93hyena]

[93hyena]

[93hyena]

[93hyena]

[himi-wiz]

Btw is no one talking about this on tumblr but Verbal Justice has been out for a week ago and I was waiting for a post to scream about it but no one made a post and I couldn't stand not talking about Nemu, Ichijiku and Otome-sama.

Immaculate vibes! Gosh the rhyming especially Otome's bars, I am worshipping. So. Hard.

Here are some thoughts on favourite parts and screenshot with gorgeous visuals.

NEMU. BELOVED. MY GORGEOUS DARLING YOU ARE STUNNING IN THIS. TELL THOSE BOYS TO BUZZ OFF YES. 🥺💀🌹💕

Gosh her flower motive always gets me, such a beautiful world she strives for especially in comparison to her brother Samatoki's work as a Mafia Boss which is like, a life full of death, darkness and corruption.

ICHIJIKU <3333 PLEASE STEP-- I mean, please continue to tell us how you'll wreck wretched men and put them in their place, yes ma'am. Lash out at the despicable patriarchal system you despise with all your heart's content, I'll support your ventures. Muah. 🥰❤💖💖

THEY REALLY MADE OTOME A GOD AND I CAN'T I AM ON MY KNEES HELP-- Sorry Dice, your mom's way too powerful. Good luck, dude.😔

Jokes aside the visual editing for this is crazy good, especially how she's both coated in shadows and the amber glow of the sun while rapping about her rise to power? What a Queen. Urgh. 🧎‍♀️🙏🌅🔥🔥✨

Admittedly Verbal Justice is not my fave melody line, the verses slap but the chorus is a bit slow with a haunting mantra-like repetition that can get grating unlike Femme Fatale. I understand it's intentional considering like saviour/path to God references though and it was fun though not something I'll slap onto a playlist I'll listen everyday unlike Magic Transistor or Hoodstars. Also Giga-P's never known for having a bad chorus so tough competition to beat there.

BUT YOU KNOW THE CRAZIEST THING ABOUT THIS.

THE SONG WRITER. THE LYRICS COMPOSER IS THE QUEEN OF J-HIPHOP HERSELF URASAKI AKIKO AKA AWICH. AND CHAKI ZULU IS ALSO ONE OF HER TOP PRODUCERS SHE WORKS WITH.

I'M SO DAMN IN LOVE AAAHHH

KING RECORDS ALWAYS PICK SUCH GOOD CHOICES FOR COMPOSERS, CREEPY NUTS, GIGA-P & REOL, TEDDYLOID, SHO KIRYUIN.

If only I can figure out how to access the other composers too. Invisible manners for example are tad hard to find in English but they do have a tumblr and twitter updates at least.

Awich's recommended discography:

Queendom is an autobiographical song about Awich's life story here and it's well worth a watch, phenomenal storytelling and I adore it so much.

And so it's like doubly amazing they got the Queen herself to make lyrics for Otome who's in a similar position of climbing to power with her own smarts, resolve and words for a better world in her homeplace like Awich returning to Japan where she moves hearts with her voice too. But well, there are clear differences there storyline wise when Otome is set up to be one of the top villains/antagonists. Very understandable sentiment tho.

And speaking of origin stories, Awich did do a collab with some Oikinawan youths, SugLawd Familiar and CHICO CARLITO called Longiness Remix. comments say they're (I think SugLawd Familiar in particular) in high school? Seriously?? And it's a jam!

(Here's the full song MV, no eng subs yet tho.)

And an article briefly explaining the video details!

I might do a couple of explanation posts on hypmic producers I adore sometime.

With that I'm out, cheers and stan women with amazing music hehe~