January 27, 2007
News | Slate's Back Door to "jTunes" |
This week Slate writer Paul Collins points out a somewhat hidden passage to Japanese music: by switching countries in a pull-down menu in iTunes, you can check out the world of Japanese pop. Much of it, he notes, is in English and much of it is excellent:
Like the British invaders of 40 years ago, the Japanese seem to care more about our music than we ourselves do.
The result? Japan's bands are by turns bracingly experimental and jubilantly retro, a land where our own greatest music returns with an alienated majesty.
Okay, wait a minute. Whose music? Unless "Paul Collins" is a pseudonym for Little Richard, I'm not sure how he gets off claiming ownership of rock-n-roll or any of its bastard offspring. Popular music has been a transnational phenomenon since its birth in the heyday of recorded music. Jazz was being played in Shanghai before Mr. Collins was born and the Japanese surf rock explosion was roughly concurrent with the British Invasion. In other words, rock is every bit as much "their" music as it is "ours."
Anyway, that objection aside, Collins is to be commended for turning more people on to Japanese music. The problem, he points out, is that Apple doesn't want you buying Japanese music from iTunes Japan--they'll block any purchases you try to make with your US credit card. He suggests a sneaky workaround involving fake foreign addresses and Japanese iTunes cards.
However, you can also do what I suggested a few weeks ago and try Japan Files, a hassle-free, DRM-free alternative to "jTunes."
January 22, 2007
This week's mp3 offering at Radiodiffusion is one of Stuart's finds that raises more questions than it answers, a pop music LP from Papua New Guinea. Its old-school, academically lecherous, National Geographic-esque cover has nothing to do with the electric guitars that emerge from its grooves and it was put out by a label in New Zealand, both of which suggest that it was not for local consumption. No date of release, no indication of what the language is. As for the tunes, they're not bad.
January 17, 2007
News | SUBS' Transnational Identity Crisis |
Beijing rock band SUBS consists of the caterwauling of Kang Mao, the sonic assault of Wu Hao on guitar and the thunderous rhythm section of Zhu Lei (bass) and Shi Xudong (drums). They are really good at what they do, which is to push the sound of heavy 80s and 90s post-punk forward in the 00s. However, this hasn't been the main focus of the media attention they have received. For foreign reporters interested in China more than music, the story is that they are punk band--something these writers (incorrectly) perceive as rare. For foreign music media, the story is that they are Chinese. For Chinese rock writers, the story is that the band tours abroad. As for SUBS, they wish writers would focus more on the music. Pop Matters writer Jon Campbell wrote a perceptive article on this issue of SUBS' transnational identity crisis about a year ago. This kind of media attention is a crisis that a lot of Chinese bands would love to suffer.
Article: "China Syndrome" by Jon Campbell, Pop Matters
Radio Report: "Artists Make Noise on Beijing's Fringe" by Anthony Kuhn, NPR
MP3s: SUBS on purevolume.com
More info and links: SUBS on ChaileWiki
Photo essay: "Foursome punk band in Beijing" by Reuters
January 08, 2007
News | YouTube Gets Hammered-On Mario |
One of my favorite cultural phenomena of 2006 was YouTube--I had no qualms about jumping on the bandwagon of linking to music videos, digging up vintage eleki from Japan and homebrewed goofiness from China.
However, the most interesting musical use of "web 2.0" I saw last year was the YouTube shredders, amateur guitarists from all over the world who use the site as a way of showing off their hot licks. Often young and often Asian, these six-string otaku look like they've spent years woodshedding in their bedrooms--indeed, the videos are often shot in their bedrooms, creating an interesting dissonance between private practice and public performance. The players are almost always alone and sometimes seem conflicted about exposing themselves, concealing their identities with baseball caps and obscure screen names. This has led to a controversy over the identity of "funtwo," whose blistering version of Pachabel's Canon became one of the most-viewed videos on YouTube. A reporter from the New York Times eventually found the true performer, 23-year-old Korean Jeong-Hyun Lim.
However, in terms of pure enjoyment, my favorite video is by a young Korean living in Malaysia, Zack Kim Yong Woon: the Kuala Lumpur resident does a great version of the theme from Super Mario Brothers. Playing two guitars at once, Zack uses the metal-derived technique of "tapping" or "hammering" the guitar frets, allowing for a degree of polyphony otherwise impossible on guitar. He's not the only guy doing this on the web, but he's got a nice sense of feel and a nice sense of humor--it's just fun to watch and listen to him play:
This video got me thinking about what a great tune the Mario Bros theme is. Its author is famed Nintendo composer Koji Kondo. Would it be safe to call him the first great video game composer? Wikipedia points out the severe technical restrictions imposed on him by the technology of the early game hardware:
Kondo found himself in a totally different environment at Nintendo. Suddenly, he was limited to only four "instruments" (two monophonic pulse channels, a monophonic triangle wave channel which could be used as a bass, and a noise channel used for percussion) due to limitations of the system's sound chip. Though he and Nintendo's technicians eventually discovered a way to add a fifth channel (normally reserved for sound effects), his music was still severely limited on the system.
Viewed in this context, the Mario theme seems almost miraculous to me. Kondo still composes for Nintendo today. And he apparently wears a white lab coat while doing so, which scores major bonus points in my opinion!
January 04, 2007
News | Beijing Music, New and Old, in the U.S. Media this Week |
Billboard Magazine and National Public Radio dip into the music of Beijing this week. The U.S. music industry magazine names China's capital one of "five unlikely cities spawning exciting new sounds" and singles out indie label Modern Sky for attention. It also claims that soon the city will be a regular stop on the world tour circuit: "'At the moment it's uncharted territory,' says Maximo Park manager Colin Schaverien. 'But in five years it will be a natural routing point stop-off on the way to, or back from, Japan.'"
Over at NPR, the always-terrific China reprter Louisa Lim profiles a British man who dropped his whole life at age 32 to study Beijing opera, studying with Chinese students two decades his junior. Anyone who knows about the rigorous physical and artistic training that it takes to perform Beijing opera will be surprised by the story of Ghaffar Pourazar, who hopes to help save what may be a dying art.
(By the way, for another good NPR piece, check out Anthony Kuhn's "Lost Sounds of Old Beijing" from May 2006.)
January 03, 2007
News | More Links from the Japanese Underground |
When I round up links of Asian music sites for your perusal, they tend to focus on Japanese music. The reason is pretty obvious: when it comes to English-language representation on the web, Japan easily eclipses its neighbors. This is probably due to the popularity of Japanese pop culture in the west and the presence of some 50,000 westerners in the Tokyo metropolitan area alone. Japan has a large number of distinctive pop music subgenres and a fair number of online reviewers, DJs, and bloggers to help the rest of us sort them out. Here are a few more of my favorite J-links that focus on music you might not otherwise hear about:
What's next, filling you in on a cool new search engine called Google? If you don't know it, Keikaku has at least ten writers in Japan and around the globe and they turn out a lot of reviews. The site is also valuable for its profiles, which provide bios and discographies for a number of indie bands. Think of it as a cross between Pitchfork and All Music Guide for Japanese rock. "Rock" is probably the operative word, as the profiles tend to focus on dudes with guitars like Eastern Youth and Polysics.
The premise for this excellent blog is simple: a foreigner living in Tokyo goes to live indie shows week after week, snapping photos and writing about bands that get little to no exposure outside of Japan. Have you heard of advantage Lucy, Orange Plankton, Plectrum, Spangle call Lilli line or Swinging Popsicle? Neither had I until I started reading Japan Live.
As an outsider, one could be pretty into the Japanese pop, owning discs by disparate groups such as Shonen Knife, Cornelius, Boredoms, and Nobukazu Takemura, and have little idea what scenes they come out of or how they relate to one another. Clear and Refreshing is a good place to get your bearings, as its reviews and articles tend to contextualize artists within their respective regions or genres. It's a good place to read a brief rundown of the Osaka or Tokyo underground and learn that "the "Akiba-kei" strain of new wave and technopop is quite possibly the most irritating of all musical genres," capable of turning an otherwise normal person into a raving kitten killer.
This is an mp3 blog with tasty J-pop, underground, electronic and oldies tunes for your listening pleasure. Unfortunately, downloads are limited and I never seem to get there in time!
I'm cheating a bit here, because I think I wrote up this site when it launched, but Japan Files is now building up trove of Japanese indie rock, pop, punk, techno, and hip-hop for legal download. As far as I know these tracks have no DRM (take that, iTunes!) and go for 99 cents each. Hurrah, I can download the nutso new Limited Express album without paying Japanese import prices!