neomarxisme

Yesterday I finished a long technical translation (being moments! yield shelfs! epoxy resin!) and an article on a well-known Japanese psych-rock band for a well-known American magazine, so I decided to head down to the Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan (The National Library of the Diet) to look up data for my research. The library is very clean and efficient - books are ordered from a terminal, your number comes up when they arrive, then you can get them copied at a copying service that uses the same number board waiting process. I came home with Oricon chart data years 1997-2002 - the evidence of collusion is hidden somewhere in those numbers!

I had never seen the Diet building, so I took a stroll around it and snapped that picture. Such a bastion of Imperialist Authoritarianism Democracy! Well, it's a neat-looking building.

Jpop is a four-letter word. The domestic fans devour it like character goods. The institutionalized press' palms are greased so well that they can't hold the pencil long enough to write anything critical about it. The "real" rock community in Japan can't stomach it. The foreign fans are, for the most part, a bunch of air-headed anime geeks. Most of the music - Smap, V6, Kinki Kids, Hamasaki Ayumi, B'z, Globe, MAX, ZARD, Mr. Children, etc. - is just manufactured product created to sell to prefab youth markets. Jpop's worldwide reputation of being dreck is completely justified.

So, what I aim to do in this three-part column will put my credibility at stake with all sorts of music fans: I wish to present three Jpop albums that actually stand up to critical criteria, three albums that may stand the test of time, if we let them.

Excluded from the running are anything "indie" or "underground" or not intended to be consumed as pop product (sorry, Cornelius). All three of these albums were big hits of their time. Of course, the Japanese media cannot give these albums any kind of acclaim or merit outside of sales ranking, so I hope this small column will bestow a meager amount of "collective permanent value" or whatever in blazes I call it.

So without further ado:

Number Three:

Puffy amiyumi 1996

Almost a decade before Puffy were stars of their own poorly-animated and inexplicable children's cartoon in the United States, they were just another two-girl idol group created in the smokey backrooms of the Jpop industrial complex. Both Ami and Yumi had entered the world of entertainment through their local talent agencies, which decided to put them together as a group instead of trying for solo careers. At some point, producer Okuda Tamio began to oversee the project. He had been a member of the wildly successful rock band Unicorn, which had originally been put together as a "band boom"-type idol group but soon became a vehicle for Okuda's innate songwriting talents.

Now 30, Okuda got free reign to make these two pre-idols into his own dreamy 60s rock creation. The result was amiyumi - a seven-song girl-voiced pop-rock mini-album that shunned all the conventions and traps of the Jpop world's Eurobeat obsession. Tambourines and subtle harmonies abound, as with hammond organs, flanged-out rock solos, breakbeating drums, and the occasional backwards echo. The big single "Ajia no Junshin" recalled E.L.O. and Cars-era analog synth work way before Western indie bands picked up a Juno-6 and wrote songs about their girlfriend's mom having it going on. "Ajia" seems to be a blatant attempt to open up a pan-Asian market for the girls, but it's easily one of the best Jpop singles ever. When else have Jpop stars attempted to sound like Debbie Harry, backed up by a vocoder?

Clearly, the expectations were low, and the freedom ran high. Open up the CD booklet and Ami is playing a giant sitar on an Indian rug. There's also plenty of fish-eye camera work, portraits avec tablas, frizzy pigtails, and hand-drawn bunny signatures. Shibuya-kei influenced? Maybe. But this was 100% major label output and 100% respectable musically.

Okuda got even more adventurous with their next single "Kore ga Watashi no Ikiru Michi" (recorded and released in mono!), but Puffy soon became stars and their albums became hastily put-together collections of hit singles and throw-away pastiche tracks. amiyumi has its own unique sound - very Summer of '96 - a little bit retro, a little bit Alternative. This was the first Jpop record I ever heard, and I got lucky. This was a rare exception to the rule, and it still sounds good next to the cookie-cutter clutter of today's blah-blah idle idols.

Number Two:

Judy and Mary The Power Source 1997

Almost a decade before the "Harajuku Girls" were exploitative fodder for washed-up American singers, they were an vibrantly colored and unique fashion phenomenon on the Japanese scene. Whether it was Cutie that started the look, I don't know, but a million high school girls swamped Le Foret, Super Lovers, and Betty Blue every weekend to purchase the necessary multihued baubles and layers necessary to put together the ergotistic look. If an SAT from the future asks the following analogy:

Swinging London:Twiggy::Harajuku Cutie Fashion:?

The only acceptable answer would be Judy and Mary's YUKI.

With her chaotic teeth and pouty upper lip, the diminutive singer had a stunning charisma, unique voice, and massive stage presence. She gave hope to a bunch of tiny, unpopular high school girls (I have this controversial theory that body type/height determines fashion for Japanese females. How many tall girls have you seen in Milkfed?). Yuki and guitarist Takuya were in their early 20s when they started the band with the two over 30-year-olds, bassist Onda and drummer Igarashi. Yuki did the Cutie-punk thing, Takuya looked Sporty, Onda went for Visual-kei-style, and Igarashi dressed in classic heavy metal leather.

Ok, so they looked awful, but Judy and Mary's music was a melodically-complex bubblegum punk with high-pitched singing. Those with hearts unopen to things approaching "cute" will probably avoid, but with no exaggeration, Judy and Mary absolutely wrote the best melodies of 1990s Jpop if not the entire world. While US Alternative acts tried to figure out how many songs they could write where the chorus was just the verse FASTER and LOUDER, Judy and Mary resurrected melodic songwriting and went all rococo: notes ran over two whole octaves, falling, rising, doing crazy twists in the most catchy way possible. Also of note: each of the backing members did songwriting for the band and everyone's contributions were of equal merit.

JAM had become household names with their 1994 album Orange Sunshine (a LSD reference? Probably not.) and the follow-up Miracle Diving. For the Power Source, they travelled to London to record, and the British engineering and mixing ended up doing great wonders for their sound. The opening track "Birthday Song" is huge crashing rock with a sentimental heart. "Lovely Baby" is just madness, riding from massive noise rock breaks on a perfect punk bass line to the gigantic chorus. The single "Sobakasu" was unfortunately an old recording and doesn't fit perfectly, but is insanely catchy (and got them on NHK's Kouhaku Uta Gassen.)

"Kujira 12gou" is the shining moment, however. The chorus melody sounds like a submarine breaking through Artic ice: crisp, powerful, from seafloor to tip of the iceberg. I used to have a poster in my room with Yuki's picture and the lyrics to this song poorly translated into English. 'Twas one of my prize possessions at a young age.

Overall, the album stands as the pinnacle of the JAM sound and perfectly encapsulates Harajuku in the mid-90s. The Power Source was also a huge commercial smash, selling half-a-million copies by 1998. Their next batch of singles went way far-out - the jazz-parsed-with-punk rock of "Music Fighter" and the cascading melodic fantasy of "Iro toridori no sekai" - but the albums just didn't hold together in the same way. Their last singles in 2000 or so started to get structurally insane, and they soon split. YUKI has become a fashionable indie idol for the post-Harajuku set, and the rest of the members have faded into obscurity.

For the kind of sweet-tooth sweetheart J-rock that still exists today and will probably exist forever, Judy and Mary are far and away the highwater mark, if not the only respectable crew in the bunch. Most of you are afraid of cavities and will stay away, but I urge the young-at-heart - "all the wild judy and all glamour punks," to steal their slogan - to plunge in.

I got my hand on the Oricon Album Chart 2003. Check it out:

1. B'z - B'z Treasure
2. B'z - B'z Pleasure
3. B'z - Best of B'z: 1994-1998
4. B'z - Best of B'z: 1997-2003
5. B'z - FIREBALL!!!!! ~ The Very Best of B'z
6. B'z - FIREBALLS!!! ~ The Very Best of B'z Vol. 2
7. B'z - quiet fireballs ~ B'z Acoustic Complete Best
8. B'z - 10 Years Many Classic Moment ~ B'z Golden Best
9. B'z - Magnum Collection "B'z"
10. B'z - Greatest Hits

I'm glad these posters come out on a monthly basis, because I need time to think of new puns for my blog posts. With this month's offering, it seems that the advertising team also needs some time to come up with new crimes to lambast. I can't help but think that leaving your luggage on the yellow line is towards the bottom of subway-related no-nos. First of all, most Japanese use the takkyuubin to transport their bags to the airport. I am the only person who is broke/dumb enough to try hauling a huge suitcase from my house to the station to the next train line to Nippori to Narita. Second, there may not be a trainman available in the actual subway car to say, "Hey stop eating that sandwich!" but certainly there's a guy on the platform to keep luggage off the yellow line - if that's really something they are worried about.

The bears in this ad are looking at the camera as if to say, what's wrong with what we're doing? Yeah, I hear you.

(By the way, they are on their way to Alaska. Cute. But why not Hokkaido?)

Number One:

Shiina Ringo 勝訴ストリップ(Shouso Strip) 2000

Always wait for your third album to put "semen" in the title, the old saying goes, and what a triumphant moment over Jpop conventions when Shiina Ringo's ultra-challenging Karuki Zaamen Kuri no Hana hit Number One on the album charts in 2003. Were 400,000 people somehow looking for songs with lyrics like "飲むでも飲み切れぬボットルで不条理を凝視せよ" (Stare upon the irrationality of the bottle left undrunk)? The orchestral single "茎" (as in 陰茎?) was not a big hit and no one really knew what to make of the Taisho-era opium-fantasy short film that came out with it. But the Jpop market is not a free market: the whole idea is to build up fanbases and hope that they buy everything you offer. (Ah, the glories of completism in a capitalist world.) Therefore, all the diehard fans from Shiina's double-platinum Shouso Strip felt obligated to go out and get their hands on the new album upon its release. They probably all went home and popped it in their CD player and immediately found the only solution to its weirdness was to ignore it, but nevermind what happens post-purchase, KSK was clearly anti-Jpop that abused the Jpop fan system to force itself on a passive, consuming mainstream audience. But let's rewind the story: how did Shiina Ringo get to that super elusive moment in the Jpop world where they let you deviate from the script.

Shiina debuted in 1998 to very little notice, but started to rack up attention with her Alanis Morissette-style first album Muzai Moratorium. In 2000, second album Shouso Strip hit number one, backed by the strong selling singles "Gibusu", "Honnou". and "Tsumi to Batsu." The videos all became super iconic, especially the one where she breaks glass in slow-motion dressed up as a nurse. (I doubt most men appreciated the ironic intentions of this post-Feminist kosupure.)

Where MM was a safe kind of angry female alternapop, SS was straight-up noisy art rock. For starts, she created an orthographic symmetry for the song titles so that, for example, the second song and twelfth song each have two kanji. (Her love of symmetry is supposedly related to the asymmetry in her own shoulders.) The first track is a pretty straight-up melodic rocker, but song two "yokushitsu" is perhaps the most respectable crossover into technopop ever made by a mainstream artist. There's a bass drum pulse and some glitchy fills, but the chorus melts into pure dreamy liquid in a way that a trad rock arrangement could never manage to do. More impressive is "Stoicism" which is just cut-up loops and noise-gated voices - a catchy little thing completely unable to exist outside of recorded performance piece.

Even when she tinkers with nice Jpop ballad ingredients like strings in songs like "yami ni furu ame," they are overdriven and dirty. Drums are tape saturated, vocals are distorted beyond recognition. The organ in "tsumi to batsu" has been so mutilated it wheezes into the song.

"Gibusu" is a pretty conventional metal ballad, but goddamn if it isn't the best metal ballad ever! For a Jpop song, the chord structure is overcomplex and the lyrics name-check Kurt and Courtney - I must admit embarrassingly that the thing just brings tears to my eye.

Shiina Ringo and producer Kameda Seiji clearly are breaking a lot of unwritten Jpop rules: 1) Don't go over the audience's head. 2) Don't make things too sonically unpleasant. 3) Don't use big words, in fact, you must use the word "dakishimetai." 4) Smile! No frowning etc. etc., but the overall goal is absolutely to stay within the Jpop world. For all the insanity and meta-narrative, her greatest influences are J-rock acts like The Yellow Monkey, Blanket Jet City, and Jun Sky Walker(s) plus ultra-experimental Western groups like the Carpenters. With KSK, she clearly pushed herself out of what can be considered Jpop, but SS was an attempt to knock down the walls but stay in the room. And she achieved her goal and defied all expectations and made perhaps the greatest Jpop record of all time.

As part of some campaign to promote domestic travel, these posters explicitly compare Japanese tourist attractions to Western ones. But for some reason, the Japanese examples are all kind of low-key and boring. The text on the left poster says: "The Statue of Liberty may be awe-inspiring, but Ueno's Saigo (Takamori) statue is also cool (kakko ii)." In other words, hey, the Statue of Liberty may be this giant, meaningful world-famous object, but why go see it when you can see a pretty neato small bronze statue of a Meiji-era figure who revolted against the central government on your way to work?

Poster two: "Big Ben may be handsome and grand, but so is Ginza's Clock Tower." Are these posters fighting the arbitrariness of tourist attractions? I could go for that, but instead, they just seem like a desperate, passive-aggressive attempt to woo Japanese eyes back to Japan. Hey, the rest of the world may be exotic and interesting, but Japan has a lower cancer rate and a world-class postal system!

Why not compare Japan's more magnificient locations and historical objects instead of banal versions of Western ones? I'd rather see something about Kyushu than: Forget Paris! We have the Tokyo Tower!

Honorable Mention

Albums
My Little Lover - Evergreen
Denki Groove - VOXXX
Mean Machine - CREAM

Awards for Tolerable Songwriting
Spitz - "ロビンソン","運命の人"
The Yellow Monkey - "Spark","Love Love Show"
Dragon Ash - "Under Age's Song"
Globe - "Feel Like Dance","Can't Stop Falling in Love"
L'arc en Ciel - "HONEY"
Black Biscuits - "Timing"
Ulfuls - "それが答えだ"
Lindberg - "every little thing every precious thing"

Too Early to Tell
Halcali - Bacon
Tommy February 6 - S/T
Asian Kung-Fu GeneratioN - "君という花"

Hear me out:

1) A video game adaptation of the 1989 Fred Savage/Christian Slater vehicle The Wizard.

2) A game called 「学生運動’６９！」 in which the player chooses student rebels from Japan's various Communist factions (民青派、中核、ML、革マル、全共闘, etc.) and goes to battle with gebabou sticks against the State's riot guards, and of course, other student factions. Different national campuses are available for fighting backdrops. Those players who can man the barracades and protect their protests from being crashed by the other student groups can advance to the 連合赤軍 (United Red Army) round where one must survive a week of Marxist ideological training - without being lynched by one's own group leaders!

After six months of invitations, I finally joined Mixi.jp this week. I had been a long-time dormant member of the American Friendster.com and felt no real need to be on two of these sites. Mixi, however, is primarily Japanese users (maybe 99%), and I thought it might be a useful sociological participatory exercise to dive in.

Even though the sites essentially have the same format and structure, there is a huge difference in user culture. The whole Mixi mode is obfuscation: fake pictures, fake registered names, misleading and ridiculous nicknames, cat pictures. What I liked about Friendster is that I could search for old middle-school summer camp friends and find them in less than a minute. With Mixi, I am constantly having to navigate contextual clues to figure out who's who in my own peer group. And the nature of Japanese input makes name searches very difficult.

Mixi does indeed take the form of the stereotypical Japanese social unit - small circles only accessible through invitation and unapproachable from the outside. Either that or the Japanese just don't trust the Internet and who may be lurking upon it. I saw some of my friends on Friendster start going towards fake names last year, but in the early days of 2003 or so, everyone from the Lower East Side was pretty much on there as themselves. There was a bit of clique-y-ness, but it was way more penetrable through casual browsing. Just finding people you know on Mixi is like trying to decode PURPLE.

'Twas Max Weber who long ago aimed to peg modern social and economic behavior on the influence of traditional religious patterns - to back up and look at a people's ultimate relation to society through their orientation towards the metaphysical. Scholars always tend to categorize Japan and the West through the tired "group-orientation vs. individual-orientation," but this is a worthless distinction without thousands of footnotes and exceptions. (For example, Americans form more spontaneous social groups than the Japanese and belong to more organizations; whereas the Japanese form a deeper committment to only one group, often the workplace.)

Although I am not a scholar of religion, I do find the superior way to gaze upon differences in both traditions is through the dichotomy of orthodoxy vs. orthopraxy. Christianity (especially Protestantism) is a primarily orthodoxical religion in which believers adhere to their religion through strict belief and faith. In contrast, Confucianism (the moral backbone of East Asian civilization) is orthopraxical in that Confucius preached proper social behavior and adherence to ritual as the key to aligning the cosmos. We must add that all religions have both orthopraxical and orthodoxical elements, but one side is stressed more than the other.

While most Japanese do not have a firm "belief" in religion or God, they certainly take much influence from a long tradition of Confucian humanistic moralism. One needs not to attend Church or pray to make peace with the cosmic order; adherence to daily rituals and respect for hierarchial social relations is enough. Even atheism does not necessarily cancel out participation in this mode of moral behavior.

As Confucius argued, perfect performance of ritual requires strict attention to detail. The idea of performing the ritual is not enough - the performance should be done exactly. Thus, Confucian orthopraxy teaches detail-orientation, whereas the idea of "faith" in Protestant Christianity suggests goal-orientation. The details of everyday behavior are irrelevant as long as they are done in regards to the deeper purpose of God's wishes.

Momus' new entry references this New York Metro piece about New York City being "over." As Gavin from Vice and Momus suggest, sure, generations upon generations have made the same solpsistic mistake of declaring their city "over" only to see rebirth in the coming years.

I will have to admit, however, that during my last visit to New York, I got the same gut instinct. People were certainly saying as such, but moreover, the somewhat clique-y, "naturally-occuring" aesthetic bundle of LES/Brooklyn 2001 has become completely codified and predictable. The jukebox at my release party automatically spit out Iggy Pop then Joy Division then the Velvet Underground before we could get the manager to turn it off.

I like New York City, and I feel a bit sorry for those who need to be hanger-ons of a well-recognized community of aesthes to enjoy their lives. But, media practice has now become so ingrained in our heads that we naturally judge our own communities to be in, out, or five minutes ago. Cities are conglomerations of individuals, and unlike an individual, cannot up and change their style once the trend cycle has run its course. So, NYC is stuck being NYC late 2001 for a while, and at this point, the media - who knows the story and the cast of characters already (Terry Richardson, you are so dirty!!! Vice you are so post-Fascist!!!) - moves on to a new city, like Berlin.

Tokyo today carries essentially the same stylistic bundle it did in its "heyday" of the late 90s. 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. In this our global supermarket of nation-states, the media can just make the rounds to more and more exotic locations until one of the major cities get moving. The media can jump from the tops of each city's trend cycle and always have their feet above the water to provide their readers with glimpses of the Bohemian good life.

So, NYC may be "over" in a sense that as a commodity, it's passed the peak of its trend cycle - whether people should fall in for this kind of tomfoolery is another issue. 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.

Japan's answer to the Hippies - the Fuuten-zoku - used to clutter up Shinjuku station in the late 60s during the day and sleep out in the bushes in the night (the so-called "Green House"). In a land of few illicit substances, they took sleeping pills and huffed paint thinner out of plastic bags. The authorities came in and washed these kids away, and by the end of '69, they were essentially gone.

There's a good reason no one has much nostalgia for the 60s in Japan: they smelled like tear gas and paint thinner.

A side note: I spent most of last night looking through a History of Japan series created in the early 60s, flipping through pages upon pages of pictures from the immediate post-War period. A lot of the events of that era do not make it into the English textbooks about Japan, except as small references to bigger trends, and noticing this, I realized that I have much left to learn about 20th century Japanese cultural history. We look back upon everything as if Bubble-era wealth and 90s-taste were some predetermined, inevitable conclusion when the truth is that for a very long time, Japan was a grey, dreary place straddling the fence between Fascist relapse and Socialist revolution. The older generation always whines: the kids don't get the poverty we went through, and they are right. Unlike Americans who worship the Wonder Years of American Dreams, the Japanese don't have a history fetish for anything post-1920 and pre-1980. Much effort is required to really feel the social history of that specific time frame.

I'm off to celebrate a traditional Japanese Valentine's Day - eating homemade Chocolate cake and watching a first-season Twin Peaks marathon. (Good marxy trivia: I dressed up as Agent Cooper for Halloween when I was 11.)

Post-viewing: Watching almost a decade-and-a-half after my initial period of fandom, I had hoped to gain an all new perspective on Twin Peaks. But with a "hot" medium like television or film, there's not a lot left to learn. I found Cooper to be much flakier than I did at age 11, and I grew bored of the episodes directed on days when David Lynch was off the set. The film Fire Walk With Me still creeps me out, but I could imagine how much more powerful and disturbing it would have been had Laura Palmer actually looked 18 instead of 27. In this extended viewing, the series was not as great as I remember, but I still salute the instances when low culture picks up art film ideas and spews them out to the unwilling. How many backwards-forwards speaking, dancing dwarves will show up in an early Aughts reality show?

Robert asked:

isn't the SAMPLING of music a kind of non-mediated (i.e. we don't copy the sounds with our instruments, we copy the very sounds themselves with our computers) hyper-orthopraxical musical technique insofar as it is a modification of the audio-cultural meme (as opposed to the mythical ex nihilo creation of original musical 'substance')?

My intial feeling was - yes, sampling is hyper-orthopraxical - but then I reconsidered: isn't sampling just a production technique? One of the earliest samplers - the mellotron - is used on "Strawberry Fields Forever" to replicate flute sounds. If sampling stays at the level of "production technique" and not "total creative outlook," then we can very easily say: no, it doesn't have much to do with orthopraxy or orthodoxy any more than a guitar does.

Orthopraxy/orthodoxy come into play in two areas: creative intent/direction and critical judgement. With Shibuya-kei, the fundamental desire was to mimic the sound of the artists' favorite records down to the melodic range and pan placement. The creative impulse does not come into any kind of conflict with "sticking to a script" because you are supposed to stick to a script.

Bourdieu and other post-modern thinkers would probably argue that musical taste and purely original creative endeavor do not exist, but are dependent upon prior access to cultural and educational capital: i.e., even the orthodoxical Western musician is ripping off something he's heard and rearranging it. Musical ideas are not sui generis.

However, the "ideal" in the West has always been about original creation - not sticking to the script. And while we have bands like Jet who are as into pastiche as any of the Shibuya-kei bands, they get slammed in the press for "ripping off" Iggy Pop etc. Franz Ferdinand prove that sounding like the past is fine as long as you obey the 25 Year Rule.

Armed with a heart towards orthopraxy and a high artisan skill in imitation, the Japanese end up making a lot of very, clearly imitative works. Those in the West that aim to imitate are so clumsy with their imitation that original works just happen. The Beatles just happened to have a new sound because their imitation of American R'n'R didn't sound "right."

Meanwhile, the Japanese philosophical and artistic tradition cannot distinguish between content and form, and therefore, every single part of a work ends up available for imitation and analysis. In the past, Japanese dramatists put on fake Western-looking noses when doing Shakespeare. They couldn't understand that the incidental "form" of being European had nothing to do with the performance of the play. When all culture is imported, everything is up for breakdown and research. This in turn creates a script of conventions, and with an orthopraxy value system, that script is to be followed.

Back to sampling, Cornelius' Fantasma seems to be post-orthopraxical in that he creates a highly original sound through curated imitation. Plus-Tech Squeeze Box is hyper-post-orthopraxy in that he's cut up the sampling/imitation into such small units that it takes much original work to put them back together. He doesn't do My Bloody Valentine for a whole song: he does it for 10 seconds before moving on to country rock or something. I don't think that orthopraxy has much to do with his creative intent, but I do think that his bending of lines between pop (with sugar sweet melodies) and electronic (sampling mayhem) hasn't won him any fans with the older generation.

The Kinks - the kings of Orthodoxy Rock.

Exhibit 1: Face to Face's "Session Man." Only an orthodoxically-oriented artist would denigrate the able session player.

Exhibit 2: Something Else by the Kinks' "Love Me 'Til the Sun Shines." No acts of good will are necessary - only "love." Faith alone makes the ritual observance of proper behavior unnecessary.

Exhibit 3: The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society's "Do You Remember Walter?" An attack on the anti-social rebel's abandonment of his core beliefs and eventual re-entry into proper society.

When I'm not paying attention, Momus often mentions me on his site as a foil for whatever he's arguing against - this time I'm a paranoid conspiracy theorist in the same vein as David Lynch. As Dali (Mr. Avida Dollar) suggested, paranoia is the most holistically consistent system - everything is connected. Am I supposed to ignore the fact that two masters of late 20th century paranoia Lynch and Pynchon both have "ynch" in their names? I do indeed have an unhealthy obsession with the mysteries of Jonestown (why does the CIA not release their 700 pages of records on the event even after being sued for FOI disclosure?) and the J.F.K. assassination (why was someone claiming to be Oswald in Mexico City before the murder?), the October Surprise, MK-Ultra, and the true motivations behind Watergate.

Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks both hit me square in the chest - I had enough childhood years in Oxford, Mississippi to be afraid of what was lurking out in the woods. I now prefer the city - the atavistic fear of the dark dwarfs any modern fear of urban crime.

Being skeptical about paranoia is as natural as paranoia itself, but as the late Kurdt wrote: "Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you." Most of the so-called conspiracy theories about U.S. government wrongdoing turn out to be true: oh, yeah, the CIA did help topple the Iranian government in the 50s. The government's natural position is to cover up its messes, deny, deny, so why on earth should we always be giving it the benefit of the doubt? I blame history for this permanent state of suspicion - the more we know about the world, the more we know that man is absolutely capable of all the things we paranoids accuse.

For those into cabals, collusion, cartels, conspiracy, cults, corruption, creative accounting, cosa nostra, and construction companies, Japan is an unbelievable fantasy world. There's absolutely no indigenous idea of "public disclosure" - everything is done behind closed doors, off the record. The urabanashi stays in the shadows. There's also no particular sin associated with nepotism and oligopoly. No conspiracy would be the greater surprise. I tend to read sinister Black Lodge motives working underneath actions and policies, and this is my mistake - conspiracies are real and alive, but banal and pedestrian. Even without channeling supernatural dark forces, the powers-that-be maintain their control.

I have collected a huge amount of Oricon data and am currently spending my afternoons entering the data into huge Excel charts for my research. Artist names, jimusho affliation, and record labels are all coded for later analysis. I'm also looking at relations between Top 100 songs and appearances on the widely-watched music show Music Station and have already found some quite interesting phenomena. For starters, most big acts will perform their new song only once - two days after the song was released, whereas artists from Johnny's Entertainment will perform a song up to five times, often two weeks before the song even comes out. Furthermore, other male idol groups - even those from powerful jimusho like Rising's DA PUMP - are barred from the show! Seeing that 65-70% of all Top 100 hits (and 80% of the Top 25) are performed on the show, this appears to me a quite formidable barrier to entry.

Something else: almost all songs in Japan hit Number One immediately after their releases. In other words, very few songs (less than 10%) come out and get to the top through a slow diffusion into the public sphere. Although I have yet to compare directly to American data, I find the "planned" nature of all hits to be quite suspect.

As bad as the American music market can be, there has been a very evident evolution from Pop to Alternative to Pop to Hip Hop in the last decade. For the same time span, a pretty standard flavor of Jpop has essentially dominated with the same few firms/artists in control. More to come in the coming weeks.

Spanish magazine Babab has posted a Spanish-language review of my album. And I quote:

In order to find some fresh air in this season of Pop Cultural Malaise, I've recently being reading about the Japanese student movement of the 1960s, so much to my delight, I discovered that a documentary film about the Japanese New Left called Left Alone was showing in Shibuya. We hurried to Eurospace last night to see the late show, paid our $13, and were then subjected to the worse hour-and-a-half of cinema ever.

Shot on video, with audio courtesy of the camera's built-in mic, the film tells the entire history of the decade's riots and tribulations through poorly-shot long interview segments with four or five of the ex-student leaders. The standard "talking heads" style would have been a delightful departure from this inexplicably bad, rambling, pointless mess of a film. I wanted to say it was probably edited on iMovie, but I think iMovie lets you do more than 25 cuts in 90 mins.

Although I often revel in critical bashing, I was honestly disappointed with what could have been a very interesting documentary. I could have ignored the technical and narrative problems had they shown lots of archival footage, but we got 5-10 book covers and the occasional photo. Maybe, however, there just isn't much film stock of the student riots. Celluoid was expensive in 60s Japan, and the powers that be didn't want to give it any more attention than it was getting. TV stations probably have some reels in a back closet, but I don't get the sense that there's actually that much footage of the events.

Left Alone 2 coming to theatres next week!

An mp3 from my album is featured on today's Music for Robots along with a review.

My rhetorical question to Gwen Stefani about her use of the Harajuku Girls is featured today on the Village Voice music section's "blog rock."

In Japan, celebrities often vanish from public view in a blink of the eye without any explanation of what happened. Last year, Space Shower TV host Brian Burton-Lewis's sudden disappearance befuddled me, and only later did I hear through the grapevine that his jimusho put him on voluntary "vacation" after an incident involving drunken fighting. The artist management companies often use this voluntary blackout method as if to quickly plead nolo contendere and get the artists out of the hot seat. Last year, the powerful Up Front Agency put Morning Musume alum Abe Natsumi on suspension when the media revealed that her book of poetry was mostly plagiarized from other sources.

In a certain light, these voluntary career halts seem to be a rather responsible way to deal with wrong-doing, but the extreme solutions to more severe incidents demonstrate the inner workings of the industry. For example, in the 70s popular singer Ken Naoko was arrested for "suspicion of marijuana possession" - not even possession - and only returned to her normal career after a withdrawn period of public apology and self-remorse. (Others tied up in the arrest were permanently blacklisted.) Even worse, when police stormed into popular singer Makihara Noriyuki's apartment in 1999 and found him doing meth with his boyfriend (!), he wasn't just placed on a temporary leave - Sony decided to immediately recall his albums! If they had to recall all the works by artists arrested for drugs in the States, there wouldn't be a music industry. After a long hiatus, Makihara is now back on the charts, but the model at work here is: artists are products, and when those products go defective, they need to be recalled.

These stories illustrate how the Japanese music industry still maintains a 1950s American vanilla wholesome image, but the king of all disappearing stories is Suzuki Ami. When her artist management firm AG Communication was prosecuted for "tax evasion" (isn't this a code word for organized crime?) in 2001, Suzuki's parents demand that she be able to get out of her contact for fear that the jimusho's reputation would ruin her career. Even though her request was perfectly legal, the firm could not believe their audacity and promptly blacklisted her from the entire industry. At her peak as an artist/product, she instantly became a pariah without having done anything wrong. Here was this cash cow waiting to be milked and no one would touch her with a stick.

The traditional explanation for why cartels don't work is that someone will always have great incentive to cheat and go around the informal rules, and thus, I wonder, how great was the punishment for spurning the blacklist? How can one jimusho have so much power to override everyone else in the whole industry's most basic profit-motivations?

While most of the record industry went totally silent on the logistics and circumstances of Suzuki's disappearance, I obtained this information from Steve McClure's critical December 8th, 2000 article for Billboard on the event, which industry insiders warned him not to publish.

Our love of gossip bursts from our unbridled desire for perfect information, and I am often frustrated with the secrecy and lack of public accountability in the Japanese business world. Moreover, blacklisting is inherently anti-free market. In a world of expanding communications and media possibilities, I find it hard to believe that the industry players still have so much power that they can disappear their own artists and make sure no one asks why.

My friends like to rub in my face the current American fascination with Japanese pop culture - "if Japan has become so uncool," they are prone to ask, "why is it now more popular than ever in the States?" They've got a point: I cannot deny the popularity of Lost in Translation, anime, kanji tattoos, Puffy Amiyumi, A Bathing Ape, Hiromix, and Japanese horror films. Hell, Nigo's in the new Snoop video.

However, all of the current items mentioned above are all essentially dated from the late 90s Japanese pop explosion. All that's happened is that this wave of Japanese culture has gone from innovators like Momus and Tokion to early adopters Raygun and Matador to the mainstream - but it's the exact same wave. For example, A Bathing Ape was something Mo Wax and RECON were fooling around with in the mid-90s, then became a hipster item for British street wear kids around 2000, and now is fashion for the Source Awards set.

My point remains: there's no next wave here in Japan. There's no new Nigo, no new Puffy, no new Cornelius. There are certainly a bundle of super talented individuals, but they've parted ways with the Japanese mainstream and live on the fringes. I don't believe that Americans will see this late 90s wave as a mere "trend" but a sign that Japan "has made it" in the world community. The sad thing to report is that the environment that created and coddled that specific post-Bubble cultural milleu is now defunct. At least in music and fashion, things are grim, and I'm not convinced that Japan has more power in the video game industry than it used to. Art and design may continue to be strong, but in what other fields is Japan currently becoming more innovative?

Since I thought it would always remain somewhat under the radar, I am very surprised that circa 1998 Japan has now become big in the United States, but I'm not quite sure that circa 2004 Japan is going to fly with the same crowd. They better like bad hip hop and Uniqlo cotton blazers.

Editor of Wired, Chris Anderson, wrote this interesting explanation of three different personality types in trend forecasting:

1) position people who judge where something is at the moment
2) velocity people who judge something compared to past size
3) acceleration people who judge something on its rate of growth

He links the sensational "endism" to type 3 and excuses this kind of analysis in the following way:

I think you all know how I stand on Japan's cultural industries, and linking this to yesterday's post, from a "Position" analysis, Japanese pop culture is all swell, but from the other two, there are problems about. Some of you believe religiously that culture has absolutely no connections to social structures and moves in some kind of cosmic cycle, and I can't convince you that industry conditions shape the ways in which funds are allocated to artists and distributed. But if we do take structural growth into consideration, things have seen better days.

My dad liked Rock&Roll.
My mom liked Rock.
My big brother liked College Rock.
I liked Alternative.
My son will like 3/4 Bossa-nova Breakbeat Free Jazz.
My granddaughter will like Neo-Estonian Revival Proto-Crunk Krautpop Hip-House Currump Version 4302.487 in C#m.