neomarxisme

Sorry for the short notice, but we will be having a record release party for my debut album - Marxy Kyoshu Nostalgia - Tuesday night (Jan 4th) at Dark Room (165 Ludlow btwn. Houston and Stanton) from 9 pm. Feel free to drop by if you are in NYC. Copies of the album will be available.

Prologue: I don't believe in a cyclical nature of history, so for me, 2004 was the Japanese mainstream music market's last chance to correct its path before crashing into the Sun. I didn't need music to be good this year - I needed it to save the world.

Meanwhile, Inside my iPod

Unfortunately, Jpop did not save itself, so I found myself listening to mainly non-Japanese music - mostly catching up on the things I missed in 2003 (The Shins, M83. Manitoba (err... Caribou), etc.). While I managed to actually listen to a couple of albums in real-time (Animal Collective and the Go! Team), I used my commuting time and library-like access at Tsutaya to burrow deeper into my historical cocoon. This is a mixed blessing: I'm sure digging up Kinks records is good for me as a human being, but I don't know how much listening to the Grass Roots furthers my self-development. 2004 was the year I finally heard the Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution album in its entirety and was able to relive my childhood circa 1986-1988. (I pleaded for a couple of days with my label to let me name myself "the Evolution Revolution" and they thankfully declined.) Choice Cocoon Cuts for 2004:

Back in the Real World

According to my industry sources and the general "vibe" on the streets, the Japanese music industry's gross sales shrunk further this year with no deus ex machina-type redemption in sight. Not only were sales down, but the offerings were impenetrably awful. Glancing at the Oricon chart here: ballads, ballads, old bands, bad rap-rock, and ballads! Contemporary artists Hirai Ken, Orange Range, and Exile are not going to deliver us from this Foul Year of Bush, and they are barely charting compared with Greatest Hits collections from all sorts of late-mid-career bands like the solidly mediocre Pornograffiti and Mr. Children. I challenge anyone to scour these top 100 lists and find anything that you could stand listening to for more than 30 seconds.

All that melodic punk rock of last year is still around, but has become completely instituionalized. 175R is just the new Glay. Asian Kung-Fu Generation had a big year, but they are perhaps the most underwhelming chart-toppers in recent history. They aren't glossy idols, nor flamboyant rebels, nor heart-warming nice guys, nor neo-right-wing patriots in ridiculous costume - they're just dudes from down the block. Not that I need my bands to "look right," but I need them to do something besides just winning the award for Perfect Attendance.

Rip Slyme had a catchy single in "Galaxy," but they were just going through the motions. Shiina Ringo's Tokyo Jihen only charted #42 on the yearly singles ranking with the relatively awesome "Gunjou Biyori." Oddly enough, Halcali did not break into the top 100 at all. Looking back, Halcali and Tokyo Jihen's albums - Ongaku no Susume and Kyoiku, respectively - were pretty good, but not good enough to redeem the entire year. This would have been fine had their been a new set of creative mainstream artists to replace the old ones.

All in all, this was a terrible, God-awful year for anything other than the blandest, stereotypical Jpop. My friend Mr. Snow over at JeansNow.net and I both made the same observation that a year ago we were able to flip through the cable music channels and find something interesting to watch, but now have to go straight to the Discovery Channel for fear of hearing the new Otsuka Ai single.

This is a link to a story about Japanese gangsters running a "dating service" and ripping off their customers - turns out the "women" on the site did not exist, and their emails to the paying customers were written by male and female employees of company.

The funny thing is that I know at least a half-dozen Japanese friends who have written fake dating emails as a part-time job. I doubt that it's just this one site that does not have real women writing the correspondance. I also find it depressing that all these deai-kei keitai sites are profitting off of single men who should know a lot better.

Look who's back for 2005 and still up to the same dirty tricks! This month's ad targets the vice of eating on the subways - especially the consumption of proportionally enormous hamburgers while sitting on the window ledge. Note that the bear is eating Western food - a hamburger, fries, and a cola - and not something like a nice, compact o-nigiri. The bears' props in these ads all tend to be non-Japanese, which I suspect is a way to make the delinquent action look even more vulgar.

I just went to my neighborhood medical clinic to get my nasty cough checked out, and I realized halfway through the examination that my doctor was rocking multi-colored BapeStas sneakers.

This ad from Tu-ka mobile phones shows 100 Japanese men and women representing the current demographic breakdown of the nation. And as the caption on the top says (日本って、おじさんとおばさんの国なんだ！）, Japanese has become a country of all old-people.

I have never thought that the Japanese Pop Culture explosion was necessarily a inevitable development, but more of a consequence of the huge baby boom in the 60s and the proliferation of single-child families in the 70s. Back then, young people made up about 20% of the population and companies developed products for this huge youth market.

In the next century, Japan will be 20-25% elderly, which could not be a good thing for the youth culture industry. Are we already seeing the effect of this demographic change in the current decline of the music and fashion industries? Tu-ka is working hard to develop special cell phones for technophobic grandparents. That's manpower taken away from dedication to younger demographic markets.

In the West, the end of each year sees a barrage of "Top Ten" and "Best of" lists for music and movies, compiled by critics and offered by media outlets for holiday reading. As I've mentioned before, Japanese magazines and television shows do not (or cannot) provide their readers and viewers with subjective critical rankings. The year-end Billboard in the United States offers both a critical list of favorites and the objective best sellers, while Japan's equivalent Oricon only prints rankings based on unit sales. We know that Hirai Ken's single sold the most, but we have no idea whether media insiders or music fans thought it was any good.

A consequence of this lack of critical reward in Japan is that music never takes on a permanent collective value. Artistic works can always make personal connections with its consumer, but when the media celebrates the quality of specific albums and songs, those works take on a larger social role as a representation of an era. Critical favor is essential for legitimizing pop culture "products" as works of art. Therefore in Japan, very few pop music records are seen as important artistic works nor given public meaning outside of specific social positions at time of peak sales. Amuro Namie's Sweet 19 Blues will always been seen as a representative of a historical age - TK domination, amuraa, and chappatsu kogyaru - but the work itself was never assigned any manner of long-lasting artistic value.

With no "Best of" lists nor other critical rankings, Japanese popular music essentially ceases to exist after its initial product life cycle. Rarely do you run into Japanese people re-listening to old mainstream music, outside of maniac record collectors. The exceptions - YMO, Happy End, Pizzicato Five, and the Plastics - were all conveniently criticized (and therefore, given value) by the Western media. Left to be consumed in only domestic contexts, Japanese pop releases become another example of tsukaisute bunka - disposable culture.

This, however, becomes profitable for the Japanese music industry: without critical value, old releases become "worthless" and do not cannibalize the sales of the new releases. In the West, new product launches often lose out to 15 year-olds buying Pink Floyd records, whereas Japanese kids buy either new Japanese music or new/old Western releases. They'll buy the Beatles but not the Spiders.

The lack of criticism may not matter to a young Japanese consumer in the short run, but in the long run, this practice draws a streamlined version of the cultural landscape built solely upon current product offerings.

For a long time I've wondered: how did CD/record rental stores establish themselves in Japan when record labels and artist jimusho wield the greatest power in the music market? These stores totally wrecked industry revenue between '81 and '85, and the labels worked actively to shut them down.

So why in the world would the government make rental shops legal in their revision of the Copyright Act in 1985? The Japanese government is not especially well-known to side with consumers over industry associations, and it's not like the industry didn't have a good case against this rampant copyright infringement.

Then today, I was reading through some articles about the Japanese music market and found this quote:

Now this makes sense: the giant consumer-electronics were profiting from the media used to copy records rented at the rental shops. And these companies had much more political clout with the government bureaucracy than the relatively tiny and frivilous music industry.

(I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Copyright Act of 1985 for plumping up my mp3 collection.)

I had a dream last night in which I created a Lent-time parody of a The Mamas and the Papas song entitled "Maundy Thursday."

According to this article in the Financial Times, Japan's economy is creating much greater income distribution inequity by creating two classes in the work force: well-paid white collar jobs and poorly-paid working class jobs.

As I've written before, income inequality has been on the rise in Japan since 1970, but the question is: when will the inequality be great enough to crush the myth of a classless Japan in the cultural sphere? A lot of what we like about Japanese culture comes from a lower-middle mass embrace of items from the upper-middle world. Without class consciousness, there's little hostility towards "egghead" culture, and while there may not be a strong upper-middle, intellectual cutlure in Japan, a lot of foreign items from this realm get sucked into Japanese mass culture.

So if class lines start becoming much more apparent, there may become a split in culture, which I would argue, you're already starting to see on the streets. (The death of the Shibuya-kei upper-middle culture indies scene is linked to this.) Culture has an economic deterministic component, and if things progress as they're progressing, we may see Japanese popular culture taken over completely by lower-middle taste, just like current American popular culture.

According to this, the Japanese government did not allow model rocketry until the late 80s and much of the ban was a concern that student radicals in the 60s would use the minor explosives in some kind of unauthorized, violent way.

"15% of Nagasaki students believe the dead can be resurrected".

Ummm....

I just passed another empty lot in my neighborhood where they've razed an attractive old-style Japanese home - the fifth or sixth in the last three months. Where one family once lived, they can usually build two three-story homes or a small apartment complex. My neighborhood (near Nakameguro and the 246) is an up-and-coming area for the young urban upper-middle classes who work in somewhat less conservative fields. Farther from the station (and therefore, only accessible by car), there is a wide area of enormous and posh residences, all of which are unreasonably unattractive and gaudy.

But the point is: nobody here cares. While the standards for gadget and product design are high, nobody has any interest in applying modern architectural aesthetics to their daily residential life. It's not that they have bad taste as much as no taste. And while old-style Japanese architecture is clearly handsome and preserves traditional culture, no one seems to care enough to not demolish houses when money could possibly be exchanging hands.

Most Westerners approach the wholesale devaluing of Japanese culture after the Meiji Restoration as some kind of poorly-informed jump into Modernism that the Japanese would outgrow, but selling ukiyo-e off to the French for pennies seems like something that would still happen in 2005. Buildings and pop song are all created to be functional and practical - not as permanent objects with inherent-value. Permanence and art are bad for capitalism anyway - they get in the way of the next-round of manufacture and sales by hoarding resources and consumer funds.

New Urbanism sprang up from the idea that Modernist designs age - maybe everyone doesn't want to live in impractical visions of the future from a decade earlier. And no wonder it hasn't come to Japan: no one cares if they live in a drab concrete-block painted in fading shade of ochre. Aestheticism of daily life only extends to those objects which can be placed directly on the body. The "interior boom" only came to Japan in the last five-six years as a way to make kids who had all the clothing and vinyl they ever needed to keep spending on something else. (You don't have a Noguchi chair?)

Geographic and geological determinism - the shortage of livable land and the dominance of a wood-based construction culture - may have created this attitude in the pre-Modern era, but it fits perfectly with the needs of Hyper-Modernism and Consumer Culture. My point here is not to decry the ugliness of Japanese buildings, but to say: don't waste your tears. When you see a barren plot where there used to be a traditional house, you're the only one that cares. With no sense of value outside of those attributed by the market, old-style objects are totally worthless.

These mp3s of the new Daft Punk album I'm listening to right now aren't real, are they?

Update: I'm listening now on bigger speakers, and these "Humans After All" leaked mp3s are clearly a hilarious hoax. Or, Daft Punk have become horribly lazy and boring. But, God Bless the Internet - someone went and made a pre-release parody where all the lyrics match the almost believable songs. A+ for effort. And their version of "Robot Rock" is kind of neat.

Alternative Theory: (Courtesy of Trevor) Those mp3 tracks are made up of fragments from the real album looped to fit the actual track length and block up file-trading. This sounds more plausible as the songs themselves sound of the Daft Punk mode. I like theory #1 more - just the idea of someone quickly putting together a slew of fake DP tracks with the titles as the lyrics.

Update #2: This may be real! I am listening now - way less drunk than last night. What a horrible, horrible Internet-age way to be slammed in the press: "This new Daft Punk must be a hoax! They wouldn't put out an album this repetitive!" I don't mind the egg on my face here - I'm reveling in the glorious paranoia of Internet possiblity and mistrust! I love my devout faith in the complete implosion of time and space: the audacity to believe that someone out in the world would make a totally believable, well-mastered Daft Punk parody with correct song titles and lyrics! We ridicule the Internet in our predisposed distrust of gadgetry - but cazart - this thing's got mythmaking power. There's something beautiful in thinking that anything is possible.

Momus scrieb sarkastisch:

Yes, this blog is perfectly balanced. There's bad stuff about Japan day after day, but then you know something nice will come along about Kiiiiiii once in a while.

I plead with people not to simplify my arguments to "Japan-bashing" (which in my memory is unemployed autoworkers literally bashing old Hondas), but I do concur that my blog is negative on the whole.

Objectively, however, Japan's major mode at the moment is decline. Whether that decline is inconsequential or not is another issue, but Japan's world position and economy have fallen steadly since the late 80s. Now, I never especially cared about the financial aspects of this - seeing that a teenage obsession with hypermodernist Japanese culture got me into this mess to start with. But ever since 2000 or so, the drag of the economy has started to take "culture" down with it, and all my favorite stuff is disappearing without new interesting things to replace it.

Some self-analysis via Herbert Gans' Popular Culture and High Culture:

I don't know if I personally have become "downwardly mobile" but all of the culture I like in Japan - Shibuya-kei, mass avant-garde fashion consumption, innovative technology - is essentially "upper-middle culture" (to borrow more from Gans) and at the moment, in decline. The Pachinko playing lower-middle masses don't have the funds anymore to shell out 3000 yen for a Neil and Iraiza cd, let alone 80000 yen for a CdG vest. And they don't care. And no one's going to make them feel bad about it anymore.

In the 90s, there was massive taste inflation that started from a five year lag after Bubble's wealth generation. Now in 2005, we are in an age of taste deflation - where the average person no longer needs to seek out products on the cutting edge and the median style on the street settles more to the middle of the spectrum. Consumers are happy to all wear Louis Vuitton bags, even though they are now obvious markers of lower-middle mass culture. (The super rich have moved on to Hermes so sez my sources.)

So, "my culture" is in decline, and I have spun that into a tale of Japan in decline. I admit this.

However, if you are reading this blog, this is all your culture too. And as much as Momus loves Japanese bathing or atheism or what-not, he better get used to the fact that his and Kahimi's fan bases are shrinking by the minute. The kids just don't listen to fancy indie music anymore.

I was a bit down on Tokyo when I got back from the States, but lately I've been able to reclaim the magic. I like the Edo backstreet mystery, getting lost and discovering somewhere new. What I like about Japan is very personal and a bit difficult to describe in words without sounding like a gauche and sentimental poet. But this blog isn't intended to be about me, as much as it's a journal about popular culture.

I may not be in decline, but upper-middle, interesting Japanese popular culture is. We can either ignore it or get down to the bottom of the problem.

Yesterday, I met with artist Yamamoto Yoko (山本ヨーコ). She did the amazing stuffed-animal ashika (海驢) cover art for my album Kyoshu Nostalgia. She sold some copies of my CD to her loyal cult-like fan base and included the homemade pins above as o-make gifts (excuse the poor picture.) These are unfortunately "limited-edition" at the moment but there are some Yoko-created, Marxy-related products in the works.