Day 3
The smallness of the world regularly throws up fascinating coincidences. After naming a singer from Guadalajara as my first potential Sugar Man on day one of my month of musical discovery, today I find out that Dublin is to be twinned with Guadalajara some time in the near future. Checking out the music scene in Dublin’s twins then seems like at least an idea, if not a particularly good one, and after skipping San José and Liverpool for obvious reasons, or reasons of obviousness, I landed on our Japanese twin: Matsue. There seems to be no source of acknowledgement of this twinning outside of the Wikipedia page for Dublin, but that’s hardly important.
Checking the year-round festival listings of Matsue I noticed they held an Irish festival in March every year to commemorate a man named Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn was born in Greece in 1850, the son of a Greek woman and an Irish Protestant man and at the age of two his family relocated to Rathmines. His connection to Matsue is that he moved there at the age of forty and lived there for fifteen months, marrying and assuming a Japanese name. His relevance to the world is that he was the first writer to report to the West on Japanese culture, often mythologising and romanticising it at his whim. His relevance to my little experiment is that before moving to Japan he spent ten years in New Orleans from which he also wrote about the culture of that city (New Orleans music of course being the reason I started this experiment).
One final connection is this picture of Matsue Lake that looks a bit like Dublin’s Grand Canal Square. Small world indeed.
***
We all know a little bit about Japanese music. Like every country they have a traditional scene and a pop scene, both tending to be largely generic and unoriginal, no matter how good technically they are or how big a show they put on. The second tier of music in Japan is the genres that are adapted from other parts of the world; jazz, folk, hip-hop, ska, and the “alternative” music, noizu, which is a kind of glossy metal, like a cross between extreme versions of Kiss and Killswitch Engage.
The most penetrating form of Japanese music in the West however comes in a particularly non-traditional form; video game music. Koji Kondo is known for doing one or two video game themes you may be familiar with, but Nobuo Eumatsu is probably the most noteworthy figure in Japanese video game music for his work on the Final Fantasy series. Besides the original electronic form his music appeared in for the video games themselves, they also appear in more rock-based form with his group The Black Mages and in full orchestral versions. For those of us who grew up playing Final Fantasy VII there’s not much to say about this music. Too many memories.
But this music already has a fairly dominant presence in the West, and now all my endeavours have brought me to another one of those godforsaken drum ensembles, the epitome of a dead-end. Those are the three generic genres you’ll find anywhere in the world; traditional, pop and drum ensembles. Who engages with this kind of music? Who is propping it up? Are there any situations in which you find yourself craving a bit of drum music? Has a romantic situation ever escalated as a result of the introduction of Michio Kahari and his Acrobatic Drumming Samurai’s rendition of Cardiac Arrest? Even the Blue Man Group is an unnecessary indulgence, and at least they have those PVC pipes to give the illusion of some sort of melody.
You really do have to dig through mountains of crap to get to the good stuff and eventually I come across a genre I’m not familiar with; enka. It’s a traditional form of sentimental ballad that has had some impressive practitioners over the years such as Murata Hideo and Keiko Fuji, but as good as their music is the singing is very old-fashioned and it doesn’t quite satisfy Western sensibilities. Then appears Meiko Kaji and it looks like I’ve struck gold.
With a genuine potential Sugar Man on our hands it feels necessary to define the term. To be a real Sugar Man you have to be either unknown or forgotten in the West. Besides Rodriguez there is another obvious precedent in Nick Drake, who was largely unknown until certain artists started to claim him as an influence in the mid-’90s, some twenty years after his death. Both these artists had very little circulation so even if someone gave you their names with a recommendation to look out for their records you were likely to never come across any. Of course the most important part of being a Sugar Man is to have music that is not just good, but that feels essential, like it should be a part of your everyday listening habits. Meiko Kaji is that unknown, and she is that essential.
Unfortunately her music is also that difficult to come across. Streaming sites and iTunes have only two songs of hers that appeared in the Kill Bill films, with only the odd song here or there on YouTube. It’s enough to realise how great her music is but not enough to be able to enjoy it at leisure.
Meiko Kaji is best known as a film actor in a number of Japanese movies in the early ’70s, including Lady Snowblood which has been released in this corner of the world on Blu-ray. The majority of her musical output dates from around this time but unlike the enka music that immediately preceded it, Kaji’s music makes prominent use of American funk-style instrumentation while keeping its exotic Japanese edge. The music generally makes use of symmetrical arrangements and a particularly adept use of different instruments in which every sound explicitly justifies its presence in the song at some point.
In 2011, Kaji released her first album of new music since 1980, but it has no presence in the West.
***
Day 6
As much of an anti-Marxist thing it is to say, I have to question my earlier assumption that the reason certain kinds of music don’t become well established in this part of the world is because of the will of “the monied”. It’s hard to believe that almost no foreign acts make any impression here without the average listener being partly to blame, as powerful and all-encompassing as the influence of promoters and labels is in forming our musical tastes. The foreign acts that do manage to make an impression on us are almost exclusively groups who perform either instrumental or atmospheric music (like Sigur Rós) or perform their songs in English (like Daft Punk).
The effect is somewhat understandable because, unlike foreign language cinema in which we at least get subtitles, the singing of a song in Japanese or Zulu or Spanish either live or on a record makes it so that an English-speaking listener will not grasp the literal meaning of the song lyrics. But the music of Meiko Kaji is a fine example of why this reticence on our part is superficial, because if you really listen to her singing you understand without needing a translation. Her music is melodramatic without being sentimental, and stoic while still being light-hearted. It takes that slightest bit of effort on the listener’s part, but if often doesn’t happen, and the fact that her songs are in Japanese probably best explain why her brilliant music didn’t take off in the West as soon as it appeared in Tarantino’s films.
This isn’t to say that I believe lyrics to be irrelevant, but there aren’t in reality that many artists whose lyrics are as important as their music. You think of early Dylan standing onstage with just a guitar and a harmonica and these long sprawling verses coming one after the other, it’s hard to see how any non-English speaker could enjoy those droning monotonous renditions of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. But there’s a reason guys like Springsteen find such a success in Spain or Eastern Europe, beyond the fact that the people there are assaulted with American culture everyday, just like the rest of us; and as good as his lyrics are its his rebellious energy and uninhibited sexuality that are “the point”, the lyrics only explain what you would know if you listened to the music. It’s because Springsteen stands for something abstract but comprehensible that people want to be a part of his ethos and his culture. In the West we haven’t quite mastered the art of becoming a part of the non-English speaking world.
It’s the reason your friends go away to Spain or France for a year and come back listening to all this strange and unusual music. It’s not because they’re weird, it’s because they’ve crossed that little superficial barrier we’ve set up for ourselves. They’ve learned to speak French so they don’t feel that first feeling of repulsion (that feeling of finding both the music and the language strange) on hearing a piece of Malian music. A similar reason could be given for the general marginalisation of jazz and classical music today, the difference being that both those genres have strong roots in Western culture. Meiko Kaji and any other Lady Snowbloods out there, don’t have that foundation, and it’s to the detriment of any fan of great music.