someplace else is always better. i think it was last summer.. around then, when "everyone" was moving to berlin. people got me believeing it was so great. and as fast as that. the word started spreading that berlin was now lame, because so many artist flooded there, that it was over saturated.. and everyone who moved there was branded a follower, and un-original. and so people started talking about barcelona. i don't personally get it. so no one liked nyc to start with? it was just cool?

After several years of gushing articles on the Shibuya-kei and Ura-Harajuku rat packs, the Western media now "gets" Tokyo and will not be 'round until a new, seemingly-vital group of creators emerges.

Well, hey, Tokyo is so far ahead of New York that Vice puts Hiromix on its cover! New York 2005 is Tokyo 1998! What's more, the editor of Vice just told me he'll be in Tokyo in March, so expect coverage of some new, seemingly-vital group of creators soon! If he doesn't find any, perhaps he'll make some up!

Ha ha. Maybe so. I had no idea that Hiromix and Terry were an item at one point! How dirty!

I feel that if most "elite" culture is educated people wanking their massive vocabularies of obscure references and capital-letter nouns, Vice is a bunch of dirty, dirty, talentless men (and the founders were all men, no?) trying to annoint talentless dirtyness. Like Hitler using the language of Modernism to justify pre-Modernist pogromism. Momus, are you our generation's Ezra Pound?

Excuse the shocking hyperbole... I picked that up somewhere.

I say talent-less because VICE always shows much disdain for any artistic endeavour requiring time, talent, knowledge, thought, or planning. Everything must be spontaneous and dirty and accidental.

I'm sure Gavin can find a whole slew of Japanese acts who fit this bill. Hiromix seems to be perfect. Imagine the heresy of actually learning to use a camera once you've become a professional. Is this not a different breed of Rockism?

Whether VICE is "right" or not, they are definitely trying to steal the hearts and minds of the people and as someone on the otherside of the battle, I feel like I should offer some resistance - whether they are more "modern" or "politically correct" or "cooler" or "better" than I am.

I think the discussion on this--if discussion there be--will probably hinge on this question of the absolutism versus instrumentalism. Marxy is a self-professed 'absolutist': he believes that cities, like albums, have objective worth. (A city, unlike an album, though, can change its worth over time, am I right?) I'm probably more happy to accept that there's a fictional element to the hyping of cities -- not that that makes their value any less real, but it means it's intersubjective, not absolute. There was never any golden age of Tokyo, but if enough magazine articles trumpeted it and enough people believed it, it became reality de facto. Creative kids, wanting to mingle with their kin and join in, moved there. It because a self-fulfilling prophecy, a virtuous circle. Now, some of these kids, either through snobbism or genuine disappointment, started saying 'It's not so great'. And that too became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a vicious circle. The more people said it, the more it became true. People left for the next Nirvana, the next Mahagonny. This is why I think it's always better to do positive hype than negative hype. You may just get what you wish for.

(Sorry, I cross-posted with you there, and referred to you in the third person. The 'this' I'm referring to is not Vice, but city hype.)

Momus, aren't we saying the same thing about the media image of cities? You just seem to think that I think the media is right.

Are we saying the same thing? Grrr, can't have that, the conversation will run out of steam!

I agree with some of what you're saying. Let's go through it.

the somewhat clique-y, "naturally-occuring" aesthetic bundle of LES/Brooklyn 2001 has become completely codified and predictable.

I'm confused about what you're saying here. 'Cliquey' makes us think you don't like the LES-WBRG scene. You propose it as 'natural' in 2001, but put inverted commas around 'natural' to make it clear you question that notion. But then you seem, contradictorily, to be proposing LES-WBRG 2001 as better than what followed, the codified version. So you don't quite set it up as a Golden Age, but you imply it as something approaching that.

I feel a bit sorry for those who need to be hanger-ons of a well-recognized community of aesthes to enjoy their lives.

I don't think scenes should be denigrated. They're lots of fun. Could Candy Darling et al have been superstars locked up at home?

Cities are conglomerations of individuals, and unlike an individual, cannot up and change their style once the trend cycle has run its course.

Why on earth not? Cities change their style all the time. One minute they're dangerous, the next safe. One minute they're happening, the next dead. This is what you tell us about Tokyo!

Tokyo today carries essentially the same stylistic bundle it did in its "heyday" of the late 90s.

Again, you're doing this thing of really saying Tokyo had a heyday, and putting commas around it just so you can distance yourself from Golden Ageism. Which is it?

On the aggregate, New York may not change year to year, but when viewed through trend-colored crystal spectacles, you can see when people are having their fun.

I'm not quite clear what you're saying. Are you being Platonic and telling us that these trend-spectacles are illusions, shadows on the cave wall, and that the reality is unchanging, and elsewhere? (In the lives of individuals, perhaps?) I think you and I know that trends are very important and perfectly real. They make all the difference to our individual lives.

You propose it as 'natural' in 2001, but put inverted commas around 'natural' to make it clear you question that notion.

There was a pre-codified taste period around 2001, which seems natural although most trends seem to manifest in a pre-determined, antithetical pattern.

I don't think scenes should be denigrated. They're lots of fun.

Scenes are fun, but they should not be one's sole criteria of location.

Cities and Trend lives

I should have been more clear: cities also have trend lives, but they are much slower than an individual's ability to change gears. There are establishments that have to fade away.

Again, you're doing this thing of really saying Tokyo had a heyday, and putting commas around it just so you can distance yourself from Golden Ageism. Which is it?

I'm trying to play both sides. I believe that late 90s was a Golden Age, but I'm also not convinced that I am right. I have the delusion, but I also understand I am deluded.

I think you and I know that trends are very important and perfectly real. They make all the difference to our individual lives.

Sure, I think trends are important in a way that we see our lives and our communities, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the cities on the whole respond to these very fringe movements.

I was also quoting Donovan, poorly.

I'm trying to play both sides. I believe that late 90s was a Golden Age, but I'm also not convinced that I am right. I have the delusion, but I also understand I am deluded.

Ha, very Zen! I like that!

one funny thing is that new york draws the creme de la creme (AND the dregs) of cool to it from the four corners of the world. whereas usually folks who are from tokyo and who are thought of as 'cool' by the rest of the world wind up MOVING to another country (ok...i mean paris or nyc). the dregs remain. and also the 'national cool'.

so this is why when someone who is nationally cool like utada hikaru tries to take her album sales 'over there' it is a flop. cool (in the eyes of the mass media) is a one way street. sure, she is going to columbia, doing a collab with everybody and his brother, and trying to 'fit in' but it is a whole different echelon of cool that is at play in america.

should have stayed in tokyo and capitalized on her home field advantage.

man, was that album ever embarrasing. japanesy? well nyc my not be cool anymore. the japanese sure seem to find it cool. st. mark's is officialy japanese. and the N/W train to astoria, 1/2 japanese it seems. but maybe i'm hyper aware? scene's are important as far as marketing. but beyond that, i don't think they have anything more then a temporary effect, and barely leave an echo. i don't think nyc is as scene based as the media will have everyone believe. it may seem more scene based because there are more of us per square foot then most other places. i'm sure if there was an mathmatical equation to work out the scene per capita [??], that it would be the same everywhere.

Here are the covers of the current editions of New York mags Index and Vice:

http://www.indexmagazine.com/images/Yoshimi_cover.jpg
http://viceland.com/issues/v12n1/htdocs/cover.jpg

Don't you feel like you're in Tokyo, 1998?

momus: be careful, you have veered very close to enlightenment logic at various points in this thread. Your pomo street cred will wear thin if you keep this up.

Has anyone mentioned here that most of the scene media are just parasites in and of themselves? The people who declare a place happening/dead/whatever are pretty much never the ones who do anything interesting to begin with.

I'm spending to much time reading this, time to go make some more music.

A simple question, to all: do you really believe putting Hiromix on cover of such a very simple medium (both in term of contents and philosophy), IN 2005 (!!), is interesting / cool / cutting edge or whatever ?

please wake up. There are things happening outside this pseudo cool hype international circle. And we ARE in 2005, NOT 1998 !!!

Hiromix is 1998, New York is New York, Berlin is Berlin, and Tokyo is Tokyo, for the best AND the worst. I'm tired of the 'hoooo Tokyo is sooooo much better than NY' thing (and the 'Paris is such an avant gardiste music scene' thing too). Boring, boring, boring. Back to work.

A simple question, to all: do you really believe putting Hiromix on cover of such a very simple medium (both in term of contents and philosophy), IN 2005 (!!), is interesting / cool / cutting edge or whatever ?

No. Is it okay with everyone for me to be openly anti-Hiromix? She a photographer famous for being a bad photographer.

I'm not anti Hiromix, I'm just feeling she's SO 1998 (no big evolution in her work since then?)

the real question being do artists have a two years peremption notice or are they allowed to produce art a little longer than that? it is the same with cities. it goes up and down, who cares... i'm so happy to be living in a city that is, has always been, will always be, five years behind.

Ha, well if Paris is five years behind, I'm a liar for writing last month in Index that YOU, odot, along with some others there, have put the city five years ahead!

I think in a sense we're all singing from the same hymn sheet here. Tokyo circa 1998 has inspired us all, and I think it has every right to continue being celebrated by itself (the Shibuya-kei revival, for instance) and by other cities (currently New York). There comes a point, though, where such myths become a dull orthodoxy and a certain amount of axe-work is called for, a certain amount of pruning, to clear a space for new talent. I did that in my article about Shobo Shobo by contrasting it with French Touch, which is perhaps the French equivalent of Shibuya-kei, and saying that groups like Air and Phoenix were now tired and dull and uninspiring. I did that partly because a recent edition of Index had featured Roman Coppola interviewing his friends in Phoenix, and it just seemed like the right moment to inform the magazine that this was NOT the fresh young sound of Paris any more, that there was a new and very talented generation appearing with a very different approach to pop music.

I do think certain talented and versatile artists can survive the 'massacre of generations' that happens (and should happen) every five years or so. They can walk away from the 'massacre', the 'pruning' that happens when their early hype starts to become a tedious lie. Picasso was a prime example. The Boredoms are perhaps another. I'm not sure if Hiromix is, though.

I dont care about hype. I dont care about who's five years ahead. I don't care who's such a loser he's so behind ah ah. I don't care if what I'm listening is seen as uncool, untrendy, unfashionable. Yes, I like Daft Punk, and yes it's 2005. Yes I love Hypo and find his music super inspiring. But I dont need magazines to tell me who's cool and who's not. Paris is OK, Tokyo is too. Waking up in Paris doesn't worry me at all. I will never worry about styles. Sorry if I sound full of BS but I have my own agenda, I do set it.

i don:t care about hype, but do care a lot about hypo as well.
kisses,
r.

>I'm spending to much time reading this, time to go make some more music.

but, hmmm. yes, fuck words. they are for losers. lets music. i bet i can do it best.

I complain about Tokyo not progressing, but to be honest, I live in such a time-warped, archivist Bubble anyway that it doesn't really matter to me. I instinctively long for "truth in the media" but that's a losing fight to get hung up on.

But I do disagree with the idea that "it doesn't matter who the media hypes." Whether we like it or not, the media 1) distributes ideas to far away places 2) legitimizes constructs and 3) writes history. We will all remember 1991 as the year of Nevermind and Loveless, but we unfortunately will not remember 2004 for anything good. The fragmentation of society will make us reconsider the way history is written - with only one winner - but right now, the lower-middle taste mainstream is a plurality and they are winning - with Bush, with Britney, and with the Bachelor.

Hypo getting big is not just good for Hypo but good for a lot of people who otherwise would not hear Hypo. So, yes I'd like the spoils go to the real winners, but I'd also like the media to focus on where the real action is.

And that's why I think VICE needs to be fought against, because their spotlight will never stray from their own clique of similarly-minded friends nor a different aesthetic. VICE will never progress, so progression will have to require its total destruction.

I am determined that we all need to break out of our small coccoons of culture and really put together a broad coalition of small groups to take back the mainstream space in both culture and politics.

I'm going to set up a meeting between Howard Dean and the Crunkers right now.

save me a ringside seat, nick!

(And by the way, Marxy, screw 1991's 'Loveless' and 'Nevermind', 2004 had crunk and grime. HISTORIC!)

I'm going to set up a meeting between Howard Dean and the Crunkers right now.

You'll all thank me when we're sitting around the White House den, getting high and listening to the Animal Collective.

are those last few marxy posts really marxy?

is the engrish of "t v r" supposed to be supported by that photo?

was this song worth doing?

are those last few marxy posts really marxy?

Unfortunately, yes. Despite the haircut out of Le Fantome de la liberte and the Lodenmantel, I am secretly a pro-Dean hippy. You'll all have to tolerate my optimism once in a while.

Optimism is good. I have even at times been accused of Panglosianism.

i often speak in half engrish, even though i don't speak japanese. it just happens because i hear and read it all the time. you now.. when i'm sitting around recording trucks. i personally like engrish over english and japanese. but thats possibily because i can understand it.
the picture had no relation. just a cute girl.

was this song worth doing?
http://pliink.com/misc/wofs.mp3

trevor: since engrish is fundamentally 営業言語 I cant accept it in written discourse.

That mp3 works for me. Did you like mine?

sorry chris.. i can't read kanji. anyways. language is relative. and only tratitional rules bind us into some form or word slavery. maybe engrish is more fun to write? more absract. and force's people to thing of what is being said. i was able to enjoy my time with the aprils.. even though we mainly lite cirgarette's.. kompai'd our beers and patted each other on the back. sure it was a deep conversation. but we got along just the same. food and music. the real universal language.

i did enjoy your mellow funk jam. i'm a sucker for 909's and slap bass. is that real bass? i hate to ask the question. if so, thats some nice bass playing lou.

mine was of coarse made right after phil spector was arrested.

here is a real mp3.. its also available at musicrelated.net and pandatone.com
http://pandatone.pliink.com/music/nighttoplay.mp3
fresh off the press.. figuratively.

trevor: the kanji was "eigyou gengo" meaning sales language, as in "engrish" has a primarily decorative sales/marketing function. The "lets " contruction is one that just gets me like a paper cut.

Wish I could claim credit for that bass, its a loop from GarageBand. Its been years since I picked up a bass or played anything in real time for that matter. I'm just a laptop hack producer. If you liked that, check out other music/video at http://superfami.com

i'm not so sure the "lets" is really specificly engrish. i personlly think it can be used pretty much in any form.. "lets ###" like.. "lets rock!" or "lets dance" or "lets get down!" etc.
"lets music" is just a more nonesense form..

and, isn't all lagauge just decorative and a marketing function? your either describing a thing.. decorative, or your giveing an idea or opinion.. marketing.

Abstract poetry? Cut-up lyrics?

Or, speech without intentionality.

where I come from, we call that bullshit

I'm sure they'd call it that where I come from too, if they had the language.

That doesn't answer the point though.

stanleylieber: sorry if you thought I was replying to you, my last comment was to "t v r". Your replies were credible, his were trolls.

For the sake of clarity:

"Lets " = acceptable if gramatically questionable english

"lets " = engrish.

The second line of "t v r"'s last post is troll content and I wont reply to it any further.

It's still a valid commodity in that it continues to provide ready fodder to be essayed about. Take one's own mix of Rock is dead nostalgia and add a dash of "I told you so".

The idea is to pave the way for an "X is the new Rock and Roll" piece to kind of space things out so you can prep your "another golden age" piece.

dang it, the html parser chopped up my last post. The clarifier should be:

"lets verb"
"lets noun"

I picked up a copy of Vice on a recent trip to San Francisco - my synopsis is that it 'tries too hard' it comes across as typical anglo-envy journalism - it's like the writers are using crayons on cheep school toilet-paper, shit's wack, although I did wack-off to the Hiromix spread so it's not a total loss.

Matto/Tokyo (always will be something)