Waking Up to You

I just got up and found my last post on Alex Kerr completely disparaged by members of the pro-Japan community. Here are some clarifications so that my writing no longer gets compared to a "fascist dictator."

1) Some kind of Absolutism is necessary to talk about culture in Japan. Besides some brief periods of innovation, Japanese popular music is terrible and getting worse. The American music scene is also getting a lot worse, but I would argue that innovative songs like "Hey Ya" or interesting producers like the Neptunes do get airplay. This is no longer true in Japan. Do Japanese people know that anything on Zetima is complete and utter garbage? Yes, but the whole media system is structured so that no one can say this outloud.

Daft Punk is enormous, and Air is a lot bigger than any Japanese act operating worldwide. Are all European artists really selling worse in the West than all Japanese artists in Asia? Interesting idea. Let's get some figures.

2) The Japanese media industry has worse collusion and corruption than any other post-Industrial state. There is no debating this. I don't understand how you can apologize for it either.

3) Japanese cellphones are the great red herring, because their spread has singlehandedly killed off music and fashion consumption, plus blocked the rise of the computer-based Internet. In the mid-90s, all the elites in Japan panicked: the Internet is free to use and has no restrictions on content! So they moved the entire operation over to the phones, where all content is corporately-mediated. No computers means no mp3s, no iPods, no blogs, and, thank Christ, no independent media sources. Japan is finally starting to get into the worldwide web, but its arrival is extremely slow for a country famous for its fascination with electronic gadgets.

4) Marketing is both a business tool and way to view culture, and I am only interested in the latter. By targeting consumers more efficiently, culture-producing and mediating companies become way more profitable. However, this semi-control of the volatile culture markets is bad for culture in general, because organizations are now a lot more hesitant to put out television shows and music on the cutting edge. No one in 2004 is going to let David Lynch have a TV show.

5) The overground power lines are a terrible eyesore. Accidental mistakes and imperfections are fun. Poorly planned aesthetic disasters are not.

6) Of the Japanese cultural products that sell overseas, how much is not regarded as kitsch or marketed towards children? That show on Spike TV is not a sign of interest in Japan. Is it just a language barrier that keeps Japanese culture from US shores? Is that why Utada didn't sell?

7) There is a five-year lag between the creation of Japanese cultural products and when they hit the states. The current Japan Boom in the US is mostly related to Japan's cultural apex of the late 90s. My message is always that if people saw what was going on in music and street fashion at the moment, they would see how everything is going to come crashing down.

8) Momus mentions the "fantastic availability of records, best-stocked record shops in the world". That is why I moved here, but I find that Amazon.com is totally erasing the need for physical spaces with great selection. And the closing of shops like Maximum Joy etc seem to suggest that the Japanese feel the same way.

9) I am not the only one who feels the cultural crash here. I would not be that confident talking about it, were it not for the Japanese themselves telling me the same thing. I'm just the harbinger.

Posted by marxy at November 10, 2004 10:42 AM