Noriko Manabe on Dengaryu and Stillichimiya as 'Rural Rap.'

Great article at Japan Focus from the enduring Noriko Manabe.  Dengaryu's album is titled "B Kyuu Eiga no you ni," which means "Like a B Movie."  So, that's a big point in his favor already.

Video with subtitles:

Video: Anarchism and Japan's Anti-Nuclear Movement

Here's the video of my recent presentation at New College of Florida's All Power to the Imagination conference in Sarasota, FL. It was a great experience, with a small but attentive audience of anarchist activists and (mostly) theorists.  It's an annual event, and I highly recommend that you make the trip next year if you're at all interested.

Basic Training: Japanese Hip Hop as a Legacy of Militarism

Note, 2013: Those with University Access can now read the fully-fledged article that came out of these ideas in Communication, Culture, and Critique. 

Second Note, 2013: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Image and some info from Mixtapetroopers

This is the cover of a mix CD put out near the end of 2010 by DJ Muta of Libra Records and Juswanna, Mega-G, and DJ 49 (not really familiar with the latter two guys, but Mega-G apparently hosts an occasional Ustream show).  The cover echoes an earlier Japanese hip hop CD cover - I think by Buddha Brand, but I'm not sure? - and the idea of the CD is using the instrumentals from old records and putting new vocals over them.  The title connects to military themes and images that have long been prominent in U.S. and, in turn, Japanese hip hop.  Examples that jump to mind include Public Enemy's S1W security/dance troupe and the Wu-Tang Clan-affiliated Killarmy, who took the contemporary trend for camouflage to a logical conclusion.

But in Japan the military connection is particularly deep and multidimensional, going back the better part of two centuries and connecting contemporary Japanese hip hop to the forces of Western imperialism and Japanese modernization.  And "Basic Training" is specifically part of it.  In his book Kokka to Ongaku [Nation and Music], Okunaka Yasuto tells the fascinating story of how the bakufu, the military government of Japan in the fading years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, came to introduce Western music to Japan for the first time (with the exception of missionary music that Christians had brought in the 15th century before their exclusion).

The motivation was not aesthetic - the introduction of the fife-and-drum corps was part of the bakufu's efforts to upgrade their military forces to modern standards of uniformity and organization.  The Japanese military before the mid-19th century had their well-known equivalent of knights - the samurai - who mostly engaged in single combat on open fields or rode independently on horseback..  Then they had foot soldiers, who were decidedly not the equivalent of relatively well-organized English men-at-arms and bowmen.  Rather, they tended to be utterly untrained and undisciplined peasants who ran around in chaotic masses. This was all well and good when they were fighting each other, but as soon as the bakufu became cognizant of the threat posed by the better-organized and -armed Western powers, they became quick students of modern military arts - or at least, to the extent that they could through the somewhat narrow channel of information they had access to, Dutch scholarship.

Along with technology (mainly guns), the bakufu realized they needed to adopt discipline, and this was strongly rooted in drilling and marching.  There are some pretty fantastic scenes in, if I remember correctly, The Seven Samurai that suggest just how important the drum would have been to implementing uniform drilling.  The townspeople that Takashi Shimura's character attempts to teach have a firmly ingrained habit of running at top speed and with no sense of unit cohesion when under the duress of training, up to and including running into each other.

Shogunate Troops with Drum

I found a trove of great information about this period over at Axis History (a site whose politics I know nothing about). The drum was introduced, along with other reforms, by Takashima Shuuhan, as a tool for management, giving marchers a guide for timing their step, regulating their speed, and in turn, staying out of one another's way.  Here is a frame of drum scores from the book he released, and here's a great video of a contemporary troupe re-enacting what a pre-Meiji Japanese military band might have looked and sounded like:



This was, of course, a pivotal moment in Japanese history, of which the musical impact was among the smallest parts.  But the link between music and militarism continued.  Take, for instance, the so-called gunka, military or patriotic songs largely derived from the Prussian tradition (which replaced Dutch Learning as the basis for Japanese military practice in the Meiji era).  And while the flowering of jazz in Tokyo starting in the 1920s was part of the strongly anti-militarist "Taisho Democracy," the groundwork for it was no doubt laid in part by the exposure to Western sounds that had started with Japan's military - particularly since military instruments were much closer to the sounds of jazz than the palette used in classical music, the other musical import aggressively promoted by the Japanese government as part of Meiji reforms.

But the biggest further impact of militarism on Japanese music came, of course, during the American occupation.  During this time there were massive food shortages among the Japanese general public, and working musicians would certainly have mostly belonged to this group of the not-particularly-elevated.  The only people with food and money in abundance were the occupying forces, so Japanese musicians quickly learned to play what the American soldiers wanted to hear - initially jazz, which they would have already understood well, and later early versions of rock and roll.  The same dynamic continued into roughly contemporary times, though not in Tokyo - even today, the areas of Okinawa's capital city of Naha surrounding the American bases have clothing stores and music shops catering specifically to black American soldiers, forming a cultural resource for Japanese youth with any sort of interest in hip hop.

The bigger questions here are profound.  I had long assumed that the story of Western music in Japan began with Admiral Perry's landing and the group of minstrels he brought with him, making the entire ensuing history of Western music in Japan a matter of imperial imposition.  But this isn't the case at all - as happened again and again throughout Japanese history, something was consciously adopted from abroad as part of attempts to transform Japan into a nation that could compete internationally (that 'internationally' is complicated but key - at this point the Bakufu were reforming the military as part of a frantic rearguard action against international interference, so in some sense they were trying to keep from internationalizing - but were nonetheless doing just that).  The same pattern would continue over the next century-plus, in music as in other things.

Megane Super Rapper

Megane Suupaa (literally, "Glasses Supermarket") is a pretty bland chain of big-box glasses retailers throughout Japan.  But this one guy in Shinjuku is semi-famous for pitching their deals on glasses and contacts in the form of high-speed and basically not bad rap.  Just another little sign that, while it might not be nearly as dominant as it is in the U.S., hip hop has nonetheless penetrated deeply into the fabric of Japanese life (well, okay, at least urban life).

Red Bandana Lab, Ochiai Soup, 7/2/2011

Had a really fantastic time Saturday at Soup, normally a home for experimental music, this time more focused on political messages and satire. The first act was a Ukelele/drag singer.  The prominence of broad drag on the Japanese radical left is something I've only just really noticed, and I haven't quite processed it. It's particularly interesting because the same scene is home to a higher-than-normal concentration of transgendered people.  It was a lot of fun and in good humor, but still I wonder how those in the audience (a couple) felt about seeing this:



The main attraction was Red Bandana Lab, who I knew from their appearances at numerous sound demos going back years. They really blew me away, both with their otherworldly track selections and MC Yuso's furious styles.



The event attracted a huge swath of Tokyo's radical left.



Kei of Irregular Rhythm Asylum



Taku from Shirouto no Ran



Photographer Goso Tominaga.  I wrote a mini-essay for a book of his pictures coming out sometime in the fall.

In conclusion, stay away from awamori, that stuff is dangerous.

Event Announcement: Understanding (and improving) Independent Music in Japan

From The Ground Up: Possibilities and Obstacles for Independents in the Japanese Music Industry

A conversation with Hiroki Sakaida of Pop Group Records

Toukyou Geijitsu Daigaku (Geidai), Kitasenju Campus, Lecture Room 1, 18:30-20:00, Tuesday January 12th

[I've put together a fairly informal event for next week, and I sincerely hope you can attend.  Information follows.]

In 2005 Hiroki Sakaida independently produced and released “Kaikoo,” a DVD chronicling the activities of a group of hip hop and electronic artists in Tokyo.  Building on the huge success of that release, he founded Pop Group records, which has become the home to a wide variety of artists, from hip hop to punk rock and R & B.  Pop Group’s aim and philosophy is to introduce innovative artists with an exploratory spirit into the Japanese mainstream.  With an entrepreneurial ethos and constant eye for new channels that can carry the label’s message, Sakaida has grown the business consistently over the last five years, including establishing the annual Kaikoo festival.

However, considerable obstacles face efforts to operate outside the traditional channels of the Japanese music business.  Many independent artists perceive an “indie glass ceiling,” a limit to success due largely to the cozy relationships between mass channels, such as television, and powerful artist management companies and large labels.  Independent labels such as Zankyou and Rose that have launched the careers of successful artists, but such cases seem comparatively rarer than in, for example, the post-Nirvana U.S. music market, where the route from indie to major is more well-worn.

In an informal conversation format, Sakaida will discuss his experience founding and expanding an independent label in Japan, and consider how infrastructure, policy, and culture have impacted his efforts to champion new aesthetics.  We will attempt to draw lessons from his experience about what changes to these conditions, if any, might make it easier to foster and spread adventurous Japanese popular music.

The conversation will be in Japanese, with English translation available as needed.

Characterizing the Japanese Music Industry

I've been trying lately, as I move toward the end of my time in Japan (for now) to do a little summing up - to think about what I've learned, how I can structure it meaningfully, and what holes I want to plug before I leave.  Much of what I've learned revolves around the daily lives of musicians, but I want to place that within the broader context of the general conditions within which they're working.  So what can I say about Japan as a context for the production of music?  As an initial stab, the Japanese situation is one of:

1. Intense stratification and hierarchical control.  For musicians who want to reach a mass audience, there are no strong alternatives to the major labels and management companies.  For a variety of reasons (including strong-arm tactics by dominant management companies and, just maybe, high-level ties to organized crime), it is almost impossible to access television except through these channels. Where in the U.S. we've become used to seeing independent musicians on late-night talk shows, hearing their music on commercials, etc, there's no real equivalent to this in Japan.  Meanwhile, for musicians who bow to the structure, management companies tightly control their talent (even those with genuine musical talent), approving and limiting their releases as well as non-music projects.

Do you really even need to listen to this?

2. Partly as a result, there is Palpable Contempt for Mass Audiences.  This is not a cultural constant - Japanese pop music from the sixties and seventies was of high quality and often aesthetically or culturally progressive. But music of the recent past is simply insulting, pandering to an (admittedly often true) image of mouth-breathing otaku and blandly disinterested housewives. Of course, AKB is the apex of this (the recent CGI affair is only a rather patent manifestation of the plasticine idiocy they represent), but it's everywhere - teenage girls singing meaningless lyrics over cookie-cutter tracks.  Even artists who use visuals promising something interesting usually . . . aren't.

3.Thorough Domestication, at least at the top. The very biggest Western artists still get some traction (for instance, currently, Lady Gaga), and there is a genuine 'Korean Wave' of bands like Girls Generation.  And if you look at the culture more broadly, of course, there's a huge engagement with, in particular, Western (mostly American) pop, rock, jazz, soul, and hip hop from the fifties through nineties.  But charts are dominated by domestic artists. This might not be a problem, maybe not even notable, except that this insularity is self-fulfilling in the export market - the failure of the Japanese pop machinery to engage with global aesthetic developments over the last ten years has left Japanese pop relevant abroad only to a marginal, if not exactly small, group of international otaku. Again, this doesn't apply nearly as much to indie and underground acts, for example bands like Boris, Acid Mothers Temple, and Melt Banana who are active, relevant contributors to global music.

Why Isn't Chiyori Famous? or, a Grainy Endoscopy of the Japanese Music Industry

I have plenty to say here, but let's let her speak for herself first, in this video from a performance last night at a small club called Bed in Ikebukuro (Western Tokyo):



So, now you'll have at least some small sense of where I'm coming from.  This is a woman with gifts in the realm of an Amy Winehouse or Adele (admittedly, this video doesn't quite do those justice), but with a fierce and unique, subtle strangeness that she seems barely aware or in control of (a fact this particular song does highlight).  The question is, why is she playing a tiny club like Bed, after putting out a full-length album on a relatively high-profile indie, and putting in years worth of work building a series of events and nights (including this monthly event, Zettai-Mu, itself)?  As she said herself when I walked in last night, Bed is "a pretty ghetto club," though in Tokyo that means more 'marginal and cheap' than 'sketchy and dangerous' (You can read her blog here (Japanese), and hear a few more polished recordings here).

In fact, I had a far better time there last night than I did on Friday at Air, which had a vastly superior soundsystem, some great DJs, and all the personality and atmosphere of a Soviet pharmacy.  Air is one of what I would call Tokyo's "listening clubs," places including Daikanyama Unit, WWW in Shibuya, and Liquidroom.  They have the most mind-bogglingly incredible sound systems (I'm willing to bet) of any club their size on the planet.  And they're all beautiful.  But they cater to an aggressively upscale trendy market (editors note: decidedly not a 'hipster' market, but young professionals).  They most often feel like a collection of strangers, though there are exceptions (for instance, when Liquidroom hosts smaller events in its upstairs lounge).

On the other hand, there are smaller places, quite literally on the outskirts, like Heavy Sick Zero in Nakano, Bed in Ikebukuro, or Family, which is able to exist in Shibuya only because it's literally the size of my apartment.  These clubs host smaller, sometimes stranger, always more amateurish shows, for crowds that tend to be more intimate.  They're also usually cheaper (entrance to Bed on Saturday was 1/2 to 1/3 the charge for Air on Friday, even though Air was basically just a DJ night and Bed had three bands).

BRK(L)N Connections: Hip Hop and Noise and Music and Technology

Tomorrow from about 7:30 at the fantastic club Superdeluxe, the leftfield rapper Killer Bong teams up with Japanoise stalwart Hair Stylistics – Masaya Nakahara, formerly known as Violent Onsen Geisha – to do . . . something. I’m not sure what. But apparently K-Bong does it pretty frequently, and has performed in the past with a lot of other noise artists. There’s a three-way collaboration coming up in July between Bong, DJ Baku, and Merzbow (more info as it comes my way).

The connection between hip hop and noise is also being mined across the Pacific, where the single hottest rap crew of the moment, OFWGKTA, made a big portion of its bones in affiliation with the underground psych blogosphere, sites like Gorilla Vs. Bear that mainly traffic in spacey drone-pop and the softer-edged, lo-fi, Occidental version of ‘noise.’ Another current example is the group Shabbazz Palaces, who make rap that’s stretchy and dubbed-out enough to sit comfortably next to neo-hippies like Peaking Lights and Grouper.

But this is deeper than any of-the-moment trend. Hip hop and experimental music have been worshipping at each other’s altar since the early eighties, a source traceable backwards not just in the self-conscious path through DALEK, Cannibal Ox, cLOUDDEAD, Kid 606, Dr. Octagon, Maquinquaye, and Bill Laswell* (*figuring out why exactly he’s terrible deserves a separate post), but all over the pop charts and the hearts of the dismissed “old school.”

Here’s Rammellzee’s epic “Exterior Street” (1985)



Yin-Yang Twins "Salt Shaker" (2003), which still basically sounds like Can. I could also have linked J-Kwon’s “Tipsy” (2007), the stupidest extremely weird song I can think of.



And Lil B’s “Motivation” (2011), with Clams Casino mining psych to give us one of the greatest tracks of all time.



Why do these aliens keep surfacing in a genre that we tend to believe we’ve tamed? More than some weird micro-trend that’s kept alive by willful eccentrics, this is the inevitable return of the repressed – hip hop may have gone pop, but at its root are the same forces that have been explored more self-consciously by “art music” in both its conservatory and basement forms. Hip hop is a product of technology as much as of music – its lineage stretches to the turntable and sampler no less than to James Brown and Lee Perry (and there’s no Lee Perry without the reel-to-reel, a.k.a. the turntable before the turntable).

While Morton Subotnick, Robert Moog, and various inventors and entrepreneurs were pushing the boundaries of audio technology, the beatmatchers and backscrathers of the Bronx were encountering and harnessing the potentials that had already been released into the world – new forms of recording, playback, amplification, and (later) sampling and synthesis. But they weren’t just going with the flow – they were breaking things, overloading them, detourning them: the “scratch” is a more radical analog to John Cage’s prepared piano (more radical because it entirely reconceived the purpose of the turntable, though this was itself a repeat of another of Cage’s accomplishments). Add to that the fact that while rapping did derive partly from Jamaican toasting, which derived, along with reggae, from American soul and R&B (and thus has at least a link with rock and roll), another major source was the patter of DJs on southern black radio stations – here again another cultural innovation driven powerfully by technology (for more on this, including some amazing transcriptions of proto-rap from the 1950s, see Roni Sarig’s Third Coast).

There's something here about the relationship between the avante-garde and the everyday. Did experimentalists like Luc Ferrari somehow prepare the way for hip hop? There are, of course, a few direct connections, particularly how much the Bronx loved Kraftwerk. And never underestimate the determination of a music nerd to self-educate, even if they're mired in abject poverty. But I've never read any indication that people like Herc were consciously aware of those developments. The more plausible, and coincidentally much more interesting hypothesis would be that hip hop and noise are parallel outgrowths of our media and technological environment, though certainly inflected by cultural differences. The consequence is that whenever hip hop gets truly self-reflective, it has a strong tendency to turn into noise and go underground. Just about as often, the pop impulse in hip hop forms a channel for the welling up of strange machine artifacts into the mainstream of American life.

Rappers on Earthquake and Recovery

Hard In the Paint: Interview with Live Paint Team Doppel

One really distinct thing about Japanese hip hop shows and parties is the frequent inclusion of a live paint, which is just what it sounds like - painters producing art live.  Most often, the painting takes place over the course of three to five hours, slowly progressing, and giving things a real three-ring-circus feel, especially in certain of Tokyo's big clubs.

Doppel is a two-man team, Baki Baki and Mon, who have been doing live paint events together (as well as separately) since 2001.  I saw them in March at Superdeluxe, where they did an unusual and compelling timed paint – they gave themselves exactly 20 minutes between acts to complete what turned into an elaborate, Ainu/Inuit inspired painting of a rearing horse-like creature.  The timed element made it even more entertaining than the live paints usually are.  The questions here were answered by member Mon (Koutaro Oyama) on behalf of the group.

Q: Were you originally inspired to do art by graffiti or hip hop?

A: The motive to start painting was separate from hip hop.  Basically, we were both mostly inspired by Japanese manga and anime.  But after starting, hip hop has had a huge influence on us.  At the beginning, more than American graffiti, we were really influenced by KAMI and DELTA, graffiti artists from about two generations before us.

Q: Is Live Painting mostly done at hip hop shows?

A: We do it at shows in all kinds of genres.  The first thing we did was a Drum and Bass party.  Of course, we do a lot of hip hop shows, but also a lot of techno, house, and other kinds of dance parties.

Q: Have you ever done street graffiti?

A: Yeah, we do all kinds of tagging and stickering.

Q: Have you done other ‘timed’ events like the one at Superdeluxe?

A: Yeah, we did a 20 minute set at a party called HUOVA.  As far as we know, that’s the first party to use that sort of time limit.

Q: I’ve seen similar Live Paint events happening in Cali.  But it started in Japan, right?

A: We’re not sure whether or not it started in Japan.  Graffiti artists have probably been writing at parties for a long time.

But our genre isn’t graffiti per se, it’s live painting [specifically].  After we started doing live paints, we met this guy named Heavyweight from Canada, and we were really influenced by his style.  As far as Japan, Live Painting is a scene that started from the clubs and spread out.  That’s why we use brushes and paint instead of spraypaint (spraying in a club can get rough).  Now there are live paint artists all over Japan.  We got started very early in that history.  As far as artists doing live painting specifically, we were really among the first.

Q: Before a show, do you practice? For example, in circumstances similar to the show?

A: Almost never.  Even when we practice, it’s not really connected to a [specific] show.

Q: At Superdeluxe, you painted together.  Did you have a plan?

A: To a certain degree, we had a course of action.  That was for the series called “Chimera.” At the Superdeluxe show, we’d only chosen that the lower half of the body would be a horse.

Q: At that show, the picture eventually became a horse [My mistake – a horse-like chimera].  It was suspenseful, though.  Do you do things that way for the enjoyment of the audience?

A: Exactly.  Depending on the order you lay down the details, a live paint can be dramatic, or it can be boring.  Our ideal is that watching our shows will be just as exciting as watching sports.

Q: Is acting or performance important to the Paint?

A: It’s not important.  We’re never acting.  Sometimes we’ll shout or throw our hands up to get the crowd going, but it’s really not important.

Q: After the event, what happens to the paintings?

A: We keep them, and put a protective coating on them or frame them so they can be put on display.

Information about Doppel can be found at:

www.doppel.to

www.koutaroooyama.com

www.yamaokohei.com

International Transport Volume 4 - Black Music

Sometimes we need fantasy and sometimes that fantasy can be pretty and heroic and help us forget our problems by pretending to be someone we aren’t, doing something else.  But sometimes we need to deal with a reality that’s pretty dark – and maybe then, too, fantasy can help, but it’s a darker fantasy we need, something murky and menacing, something that might itself kill us if we’re not careful but that may also help us see a way out.

International Transport Volume 4: Black Music

Tracklist after

Having the Time of Her Life: Dance/Display/Fantasy

I spent last night (literally, it was an overnight that ended at 7am) at a hip hop show, a benefit for earthquake relief put on by Pop Group Records. I got there quite early, saw Club Asia before the lights were turned down, before the large staff blended into the crowd, running around with clipboards and checklists through what still looked like a workplace but was about to become a playground. Asia is a fantastic club, really, like a smaller but Tokyo-polished version of First Avenue in Minneapolis – that is, a hipster mecca, elevating underground music to a professional level of polish for a select (read: small) number of devotees. Although someone with connections to the club once stated with certainty that it was a money-loser subsidized by Vuenos, the cheesy dance club next door owned by the same people. So maybe good taste doesn’t pay. But it was a great night – I saw my friend the writer Shin Futatsugi for the first time in months, and the chance to get to know everyone in the Pop Group circle a little bit better. The place was full, so though Hiroki (head of Pop Group) didn’t seem super impressed, I gather some money was made for earthquake victims.

Early on, when the club was still only about a third or less full, one audience member was dancing to the early DJs. She was really enthusiastic and really attractive, owning the hell out of a charming and unusual fashion sense. I was up towards the front, against a wall, leaning against a table and taking some notes. As I half-wrote and half watched her dance, I had an experience that is embarrassing, but which, if this post is to have a leg to stand on, is not unique. It was impossible not to, at least at the back of my mind, think that she was dancing for me. When I’ve had a few drinks, this sense can become explicit and make me act like a stupid (read: average) male, but even standing there clear-headed, I could sense the logic unfurling in the back of my brain – she had noticed the tall, nerdy-looking writer, and was trying to . . . well, you can imagine the train of thought only gets more pathetic from there.

Of course, this was just a girl having a good time, and she didn’t deserve to be the object of even my most subconscious narratives. But it wasn’t just me – she was dancing in a mostly empty club, and couldn’t have failed to be somewhere in the attention of most if not all of the dozen-odd other people playing the wall. This, of course only adds to the bathos of my fantasizing – I’m sure it was shared by more than a few of the other guys around. In fact, I realized, the girl was both an object of desire and, in a less direct but structurally similar way, a model of enjoyment that served a variety of purposes in giving meaning to the event. She was a non-romantic, fantasy object for all of the workers who had set up the show, for the staff and servers and even to some extent the musicians. They were all there for her, to create the enjoyment of which she was the model.   They certainly, in reality, were also doing it for those of us vaguely nodding our heads, enjoying the music and the feeling of being there in less expressive ways. But this explosively dancing girl required less interpretation.

I thought, particularly, of myself and the photographers, writing about or documenting the event. Her presence justified our activities, because she was the real thing – someone genuinely enjoying a party whose purpose was enjoyment. We, the watchers (professional and otherwise) needed her, because she enabled us to justify the fact that we weren’t engaged in a direct enjoyment of the event. To paraphrase Zizek’s formulation about laugh tracks, we needed that one girl to enjoy the even for us.

But even as I write this, I have to point out that it misses one dimension – that the photographer or the writer is not merely at a distance from the activity of ‘pure’ enjoyment, but is engaged in a ‘pure’ enjoyment of their own activity, one that the dancer in turn doesn’t know. The ultimate example of this is the musicians themselves, who I can guarantee from experience are having more fun than almost anyone in the audience, an enjoyment enhanced by, but not dependent on, enthusiastic audience members.

Scratching the Surface: Japan

Potentially interesting, but the preview isn't exactly gangbusters. 2005 documentary about Japanese hip hop.

http://www.thesrk.com/301141

Available for purchase on DVD.

EXCLUSIVE: Gold Panda remixes Yamaan, "Blossom"

I've written here before about Yamaan, a producer from Tokyo's Temple ATS label.  Gold Panda, he of one of 2010's hottest albums, just dropped this version of the fourth track on Yamaan's "12 Seasonal Music."  The track, including vocals by Chiyori, filters Yamaan's pretty, clean sense of nostalgia through the beautiful dirt that now rules Western beatstyle.

Blossom (Chorus By Chiyori)- GOLD PANDA REMIX by YAMAAN

Also, I'm pretty sure I'm the first to have this joint, many thanks to Yamaan!

Download the MP3 here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=O0UUZN4U

Notes from the Field: Indie Index - Hip Hop Sales in Japan

So, I recently had a chat with a new friend of mine (who at least here will remain anonymous) who worked for an indie label that released Western/English hip hop in Japan between 2006-2008.  I thought I'd share a few highlights from our conversation.  Most interesting to me was that, since he's not working for the label anymore, he wasn't shy about numbers.  I'm in a lusty, desirous relationship with information about how many units people are moving, and how much money they're making, so, with no apologies to Harper's:

Note: This may be an empty gesture, but I ask that you NOT use this information elsewhere without permission.

20-30,000: Number of units moved by Nujabes, the Japanese producer of jazzy instrumentals.  These numbers were big enough to set off a wave of imitators/followers.  This was not a record released by my friend's label, but it helped guide the direction of what they chose to release.

18%: The very highest royalty rate offered by my friend's label.  This is for artists who were established or otherwise expected to do particularly well.  The lower end of the range was 12%.  According to another source,  royalty rates have plummeted since in the last four or five years.

9,000: The number of units shifted by a record that did "pretty good" for my friend's company.  This was a record that, I was amazed to hear, was crafted by a Western artist, specifically for the Japanese market, expanding on a particular sound found on a handful of previously released tracks.

Y2,400: A pretty typical retail price for a Japanese release.  More than $30 at current exchange rates.  My friend added a couple of pieces to the puzzle as to exactly why this is so high.  First - higher production values of the average Japanese CD (digipacks instead of jewel cases). Second - the henpen distribution system, which requires labels to accept returns of unsold product from distributors, who nonetheless take their distribution fee even on unsold copies.  This leaves the label exposed to a great deal of risk.

$25,920: What an new artist could expect to make from a "pretty good" CD release, assuming the numbers above, and at 2006 exchange rates.

30: A very, very rough approximation of the number of hours it takes to make one fully developed, professional song, from start to finish. Probably an underestimate.

12: Rough average of the number of songs on a full-length album.

260: Number of hours spent recording a full-length album.

$99.69: Hourly rate of pay for recording an album that sells 9,000 copies.

This looks pretty sweet at first, but at least from a purely economic point of view, doesn't take into account a few things.  Most immediately, the costs of recording and promotion, which can fall variously on artists, labels, or even clubs, would have made this number smaller (or in a few cases, larger, maybe) than when it comes out of this simple equation.  Especially for a first album, this amount would need to account for initial investment costs, i.e. gear a musician bought for the purpose of teaching themselves how to make music.  Similarly, there's no accounting here for many, many hours spent teaching oneself to be at least a half-decent musician.   If Malcolm Gladwell is to be trusted, this would be about 5,000 hours (we're talking competent here, not someone of the world-class, 10,000 hours type).  With that one adjustment, suddenly the hourly rate for that first, moderate-performing album becomes . . .

$4.97.


Eat your heart out, investment bankers.


A final tidbit, from a totally different source:

6,000: Number of units moved by a fairly well-known and respected Japanese DJ/Producer.

The Pre-History of Japanese Hip Hop 2: The Japanese Olio Minstrels, March 27th, 1854

I'm out of academia!  Temporarily! Maybe!  Check out my new blog, focused on my interests in weird fiction, experimental music, and generally all things so post-academic that they're not academic at all, over at Blownhorizonz.com.

After hearing some academic rumors to this effect, I've finally done the digging, and it's true: when Admiral Perry sailed into Edo Bay in 1854, a troupe of minstrels was on board the U.S.S. Powhatan with him. They performed in both Tokyo and Yokohama, more than once. NYU's Victor Fell Yellin (whose name could actually be the title of a minstrel routine) has got the academically legitimized version.  Less authoritative-looking but very informative is this brief article (Japanese), which draws its information from Kasahara Kiyoshi's 黒船来航と音楽　(Music and the Arrival of the Black Ships).

And there are a few great images floating around the web: 

A program:

A Western depiction of the March 27th "Welcome Party" (talk about a euphemism) at which the minstrels performed.  I can't quite tell from this whether that's actually them on stage.

And best of all, one of several images of the troupe produced by Japanese artists of the era:

Notes from the Field: Three Studios: Hip Hop Life

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Liyoon - Japanese Killer Whale

I can't believe I haven't heard about this already.  Apparently released about five months ago, this is in some ways a predictable Japanese "national pride" perspective on the discussion over whaling/dolphin hunts that's still boiling well after the release of The Cove.  But there are several weird/interesting twists, some of which will be obvious immediately:



It makes a lot of sense that this is in English, since the essential message is about the hypocrisy and even racism of the Western anti-whaling position.  The most convincing point made, as far as I'm concerned, is that pigs, like dolphins, are pretty smart animals, but the West eats tons of them anyway (actually, so does Japan, but I think the point still stands).

The really interesting part, and a vital reminder of the vastly different Japanese political landscape, is that Liyoon is Zainichi - a Japanese-born Korean.  He used to belong to a group called KP, which stood for "Korean Pride."  From an American perspective, it's odd to think about an ethnic minority pushing such an overtly nationalist (or at the very least, patriotic) viewpoint, but the dominance of American influence in Japanese politics and culture changes the math radically.  At some moments it makes sense to identify as Zainichi against a Yamato ethnic mainstream, but at least as often someone like Liyoon is going to encounter threats to the "Japanese" side of his identity, and feel the need to rise to their defense.

That reactive/defensive stance seems omnipresent - in fact, it pretty much explains the whole whale situation.  Most Japanese don't actually eat whale meat, but many nonetheless support the hunt because it has a symbolic power even if they're not participating in it.  It represents their ability to defy the West, and specifically America (home of the Sea Shepard), at least in some relatively small way.  If that element of defiance wasn't important, it's pretty clear most Japanese, at the very least, wouldn't care about whale hunting one way or the other.

Japan the Beats

Welcome to everyone finding my blog via my column at Tinymixtapes.  A couple posts of particular interest:

Japanese hip hop prehistory: Jagatara

The Sumo Tapes: Ganja, Rappers, and Big Fat Asses

You can also find a ton of good stuff just by following the "Japanese hip hop" tag, conveniently attached below.

For those headed the other direction, here is the most recent Japan the Beats at Tinymixtapes, about Origami, nostalgia, and indie-farm fashion.


Synergy, baby!