A favorite expedient of music-writer types is to write about a given city's "sound," lumping all the music that comes out of the city under one neat, convenient heading. We then explain what constitutes that sound and why it is The Next Big Thing, in an effort to establish ourselves as arbiters of what's hip and cool and new on the scene, man.

Billboard is occasionally guilty of this. For example, when Beck broke through big-time a few years back, Billboard starting talking about the thriving music scene in Silver Lake, the Los Angeles suburb that spawned him. Trouble is, we music journos tend to do this after someone from a given local music scene has made it big. I don't think there were too many stories about the fab music scene in Liverpool before The Beatles made it. After The Beatles became megastars, there was no shortage of media coverage of the Merseybeat scene.

So let me say at the outset that I don't pretend to have made an earth-shattering discovery by saying that Fukuoka has one of Japan's liveliest local music scenes. That's a truism that any dedicated J-pop fan is well aware of. Said Kyushu burg has produced a disproportionate number of very popular and/or very talented musical acts: Sheena and the Rokkets, Number Girl, Ringo Shina, Misia, Ayumi Hamasaki -- the list goes on.