New Obsession #1: the Blue Hearts

This past weekend, I watched the film Linda Linda Linda -- a wonderful, pretty recent Japanese film about a group of high school girls who decide to start a band, to perform at their school's summer festival. Since their former band is no longer, and they don't have time to write any original material, the girls decide that their band will perform covers of another Japanese band: the Blue Hearts.
There's a bit more to it than that (reconciling friendships, overcoming language/communication problems with music [the singer of the girls' band being a recently transplanted Korean], etc.), but that's a different entry all together. For now, let's focus on the music...

As mentioned, the girls' band is a Blue Hearts cover band, which means that the music of the Blue Hearts is present throughout -- from the title of the movie (referencing the ubiquitous single, "Linda Linda), to the finale of the girls' performance. I found the music to be interesting and catchy and fun, so I dug a bit into the story of the Blue Hearts (not to mention, dug around bit torrent and ended up with a wealth of material that would probably cost me around $40/disc to wrangle up physically).

Seen as the Japanese equivalents to the Ramones, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols, the Blue Hearts were pretty notorious in their day, and their legacy seems to remain a notorious one. Spitting into the camera during a televised performance (and subsequently getting banned from television for a year), using the taboo/unutterable word for "insane," being a full-formed independent rock band thriving amidst a pop-idol-centric Japanese music industry. They were one of a kind, it seems.