Japanese Music

BeForU is an all female J-Pop group who performed music primarily for the Bemani series of rhythm games. BeForU debuted in 2000 with their song DIVE, which was notable as being the first J-POP song in the Dance Dance Revolution series. BeForU was produced by Naoki Maeda, one of the lead Konami musical producers. In 2006, the group made their major label debut under Avex tracks.

B’z is a Japanese hard rock duo, comprising Tak Matsumoto (composition, guitar) and Koshi Inaba (lyrics, vocals). They have released 41 consecutive #1 singles, 23 #1 albums, and sold more than 77 million records in Japan alone. B’z were the first artists from Asia to have their handprints and signatures put up in the Hollywood’s RockWalk.

Crazy Ken Band (クレイジーケンバンド) is a popular Japanese musical group formed in 1997. HMV Japan ranked them at #98 in their Top 100 Japanese Pop Artists.

℃-ute is an all-female Japanese pop group within Hello! Project. The character “℃” (degree Celsius) is substituted for C in notation for the purpose of expressing ardor—the hyphen does not have any meaning in particular. The proper pronunciation for this group in Japanese is kyūto (キュート, kyūto^?) with pitch accents on both “ū” and “o”.