International Music

When I worked at the poison factory, I worked with young people. Folks just out of college, in their mid and late 20's for the most part. They liked rape music. There's no nice way to call it anything else. It was for pimps and rapists in Oakland and it was offensive and awful. And most of it was offkey, using vocoders and nasty lyrics. I can't say anything positive about it. It was all bad. I would love to see them of the air for Hate Crimes, because that's what it was. I tried to expose them to the wider world, but that's what they wanted. A few liked what I showed them, what I played, but Rape Music was what they preferred. It really hurt me.

Some years ago, I saw an anime about art school in Japan called Honey and Clover. It was two seasons long, and the first was beautiful, and exposed you to some interesting characters with a really great musical sountrack with Suneohair and Split and few other artists. Suneohair is the Japanese equivalent of U2, to give you some idea. The front man Kenji Watanabe is my age. They've been around 14 years, remain high quality, and are a good band. When a band plays together for 20 year, since high school essentially, they learn to cover a lot of ground, like the Beatles did. The second season of the show was so sad it would make a bronze statue cry. The soundtrack just emphasized this.

I was watching Arakawa Under The Bridge, which is about crazy people in Japan, lots of different kinds, and the closing music is by Suneohair, video above. A nice use of minor keys and just the right amount of wa and distortion pedals. Electric guitars balance out the purity of the human voice really well. I think that's why they're so popular.

Under a Weeping Sky (Sora Mo Isogashii) is a pretty intense tune of theirs. The video here has good sound quality but doesn't cover the context well.

How do you explain context and grief to children who barely string words together, nevermind coherently? Top universities. They're graduates, but what does that get them? Rape music. The horror. The horror. Heart of Darkness takes on a very real urgency when I place it against the people I worked with. Piles of arms. That's what I think about. They just can't possibly get this. No sense of the world around them. Its all about their own petty, small, concerns. Getting theirs. Its vile. When the news depicts the latest inhumane insanity, some violent atrocity and says its unthinkable, I think of these people I worked with and I can only cry because I know they'd do it in a heartbeat if they believed it would get them closer to their ambitions.

Japan believes in Flowers. They believe that flowers are STRONG. You may think that's crazy, but hear me out. Flowers bloom only to die. In Japan they believe that everything has a soul, including flowers. Everything is conscious. That means a flower blooms KNOWING it will die. But it blooms anyway. And that is its strength. This is why the most powerful billion yen companies are represented by flowers. Because they are strong.

How do you explain that to some petty punk from Manilla or Saigon or Seoul or Taipei that what they want is ridiculous? That they're morons? That they need to look at the bigger picture and lose like the rest of us. Nobody wants to hear that. This is why foreigners don't like Jazz or Country music. These are about accepting reality, about holding up the world. Foreigners think the party started because they got here. They think WE OWE THEM because they showed up. And don't deny this. I know dozens of immigrants. They ALL say this. I know more than you. I've had many LONG conversations with each of them. And they are convinced they're going to make it, no matter how many bodies need to be piled up in front of them. They're using our corpses to build their road to prosperity.

Japan is America in 15 years. They're broken by their Real Estate crash, same as ours. Their currency and bond markets are crashed forever. They're doing business with enemies, just to delay the worst of it. They have no new jobs. They're eating their babies, metaphorically speaking, sacrificing the hopes of the young to keep the mean old grandmas in charge, protecting them from the further consequences of their greed. They're an evil people with sweet little girls. Japan is the sort of place where the Underdog is literally crushed underfoot, with glee, because nobody likes them and nobody will stop the murder. Its different from America... for now.

I worry, often, that America will become more like Japan as the years pass. I worry we're going to end up killing our young people because the people with money, with ownership, don't want to face they screwed up. They don't want to admit they are the reason we have no future as long as they live, as long as they own things, and that we have to usher them on if we want to recover, much less survive. They won't have it. They have papers which say they own something. And that paper is... paper. Revolution's coming.

And the only thing that will stop it? That's a deeper understanding of shared miseries, and a second pint of bitter. This is what Ireland did to deal with their own economic collapse. They held a brief protest, then went to the pub. We should do the same. Violence won't help us. Its much too late for that. Greed and Ambition didn't help the MBA in Niea_7. No amount of marketing savvy will fix reality.

This is the most important bit that the young Internationals don't and won't understand. Their goals are impossible to achieve. We don't live in that world anymore. Its over. Scale back, accept lesser ambitions, and be like the Japanese: get along with what you've got. They're already living in The Future.