Golden Interview Week: No. 5 - Momus

Momus is a modern man-of-letters with an auspicious track record spanning a half-dozen media and several continents. A pioneering Internet essayist, he currently offers art crit and audioscapes at his blog, Click Opera.

1) America is anti-intellectual, Japan is a-intellectual, Europe is.....?

Yesterday I saw a report on Arte about how Jacques Chirac had invited about one hundred "artists and intellectuals" to the Elysee Palace to discuss the European constitution. I tried -- and failed -- to imagine George Bush or Tony Blair consulting with intellectuals in this way, or even admitting that such a thing as an intellectual exists. On the other hand, I'm sure that the event was mildly farcical, and that nothing creative or original was said, thought, felt or done. I'm sure none of the artists and intellectuals present was as incisive as Jean-Luc Godard, who said, in his film "JLG/JLG", "There is the rule and there is the exception. The rule is culture, the exception is art. Everything speaks the rule; cigarettes, computers, t-shirts, television, tourism, war. No-one speaks the exception. It is the rule to want the death of the exception." I think that's the case wherever you are in the world. Thought will always be dangerous and originality unpopular.

2) Artists and "personalities" are all aggressively using marketing techniques these days to "brand" themselves for consumption in the public space. What do you see as the logical endpoint for this phenomenon? Are we co-opting business practices or just making ourselves commodities?

Being a recording artist is, amongst other things, a crash course in seeing -- and then selling -- yourself as a commodity. It's tempting to say that this is a modern capitalist symptom, something dangerous and accelerating. Books like Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated: The hidden effects of media on people, places and things suggests that we're all now learning the self-presentation skills once confined to celebrities. But self-marketing is as old as life itself. Even apple trees do it. What is an apple but a piece of "marketing" designed to convince birds and insects to spread apple seeds? So, to answer your question, maybe the endpoint of this process is that we'll stop using money and become more and more like apples. Capitalism may disappear: money isn't really necessary (after all, nature gets by just fine without it). But marketing will never disappear. It's essential. Ask the apple trees.

3) Do you feel like music still has the same energy it had in the 20th century or do you think other art forms have moved in to share the pop cultural space to the ultimate detriment of music?

There's a secret that musicians know: there's absolutely nothing as powerful as sound, and specifically songs. People still define their feelings and their sensibilities by them. They make mixtapes, they talk about their music tastes on dates. Songs can touch you more profoundly than just about anything. I think Freud got it wrong when he said the unconscious is structured with language. In fact, the unconscious is structured with pop songs. Next time a song pops into your head, think about why it's there and what it means to you and you'll be amazed at how the song "knows" more about you than you do yourself. So I think music doesn't really have a lot to fear from other cultural media. It can be made cheaper and still go deeper than just about anything else. Of course, there are times when the mainstream embraces radical experiment, or when music seems to be the most exciting thing going on in a society. I'm reading Simon Reynolds' book about post-punk just now, Rip It Up And Start Again, which is based on this sort of premise. And yes, PiL's "Metal Box" did feel very exciting in 1979. But I'm still able to find music that excites and touches me today. I don't think there was ever a Golden Age, and I don't think we're living through the death of music.

4) Did you feel a change in Japan between coming for Poison Girlfriend and then later Kahimi?

I came in 1992 and 1993, and then I didn't come back until 1998. So I missed the five big Shibuya-kei years. I didn't start spending serious time in Japan until 2001. Did I feel a change in that gap between 93 and 98? Not really. I remember being blown away by Shibuya and Harajuku in the early 90s. The big TV screens, the insane teen fashion, the sexiness, the safeness, the playfulness, the tender-mindedness, the togetherness. And all that was still there in 98. If there has been a change, it's been since about 2000. Some of the confidence and colour have gone. But it's a 5% shift. Okay, maybe 15%! The basic things that make me love Japan are still very much there, though, and I'm reminded of that whenever I go to other Asian countries. I could never trade Japan for China, or Thailand, for instance. They just don't have "it". If you ask me what "it" is, I really don't have an answer. It's a "way of being".

5) Explain in detail the experience of being on Music Station.

I'm not a big fan of the show. Like Britain's Top of the Pops, it's a bit of a cattle market. But as I recall, we arrived quite early in the afternoon. A big office building. Kahimi, her management, me, Toog, Horie and someone else, a bassist perhaps. Toog and I had been flown in specially from France to do the show, at the expense of 3D Corporation. We had to wait ages in a hospitality room which felt like a school classroom. We met staff, consumed snacks and tea. Hours of hanging about. I remember seeing a script in which camera angles and shots were mapped to the lyrics of the song ("One Thousand 20th Century Chairs", co-written by Hirohiso Horie and me). We were allowed to wear what we wanted. I had on an outrageous baroque suit in cream nylon. I think we had face make-up applied. Then we were taken to the big dark studio, met the host (the one who looks like a yakuza, I forget his name [Tamori--ed.]) and were sat down on the benches behind him. We were sitting next to girlband Max and visual-kei New Romantics L'Arc-en-Ciel. Max weren't particularly pretty, and the singer in L'Arc-en-Ciel was small and wore a stupid brim hat which he probably thought made him look charismatic. Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra were on the show too. None of the bands talked to each other. The presenter didn't speak to us gaijin at all. We did two or three takes of the song. I mimed playing the guitar despite the fact that I didn't play on the record. I did a goofy thing on the solo where I grinned and kind of fell down in a parody of rock'n'roll excess. People seemed to like the silliness of that. The camera angles were tightly scripted, but you could be goofy and spontaneous and they didn't mind, in fact they encouraged it. The different bands all had a different feel. Max's routine was joyless choreography, whereas the Paradise Orchestra brought a genuine sense of fun to their performance. I'm pretty certain it's the only time in my career as a musician that I'll appear in front of ten million viewers, but I still feel kinda "meh" about it. It was just an excuse for another trip to Japan, with someone else paying. The real joys of that trip were elsewhere: shopping and fucking.

Posted by marxy at May 3, 2005 8:10 PM