Sons of Loki

I got into the Teriyaki Boyz recently, this Japanese rap supergroup comprised of Nigo (founder of A Bathing Ape), a dude called Wise, Verbal from M-Flo, and Ilmari and Ryo-Z from j-rap superstars RIP SLYME. I thought I’d expand my burgeoning interest in J-hip-hop by checking out Rip Slyme, who I was vaguely aware of before. So, first of all, listen to this. Listen to that synth bassline when it kicks in at 0:30. Isn’t that just the best thing you ever heard? Don’t you want it injected into your blood to harness the supreme sunny glory of that synth? Don’t you want it to be played from all the rooftops of all the houses across the land?

Saturday I was thinking about heading down to Shibuya to check out the BAPE store (as a child of 00s hip-hop rather than 90s rap I have been subtly brainwashed to buy designer clothes rather than shoot cops) but I ended up doing the complete opposite and shopping Akiba for DVI cables and cheap monitors (you can pick up a second-hand TFT one for 2.5k (£15), which is nuts). After that I met up with the guys in Shinjuku for nomikai, literally “drink-meet”. We found a izakaya which we thought was deliciously cheap. However, we had been burned. The izakaya was not offering cheap nomihoudai, as represented. It was some kind of gypsy grifter establishment … sorry, I’m channelling Philip K Dick here. Anyway, we ended up with a lot of food we didn’t want and a bill for 3,500 yen each and some dangerously watered-down cocktails. I wanted to use my gaijin smash to escape, but in the end decided to save it for another day.

Luckily, the club we went to was free.

We decided – well, the girls decided – to take Miles to his first ever gay club. And the place for gay clubs in Tokyo is Nichome in Shinjuku, so that’s where we went.

Man, it was gay. Nary a woman in sight. Bars with hilarious names. Men holding hands. Sunkus (truly the gayest combini chain). It was kind of exciting, in a gay way, like I imagine San Francisco to be. We met a Australian girl with her male friend (gay, no doubt) who was trying to find the same gay club as us (“Arty Farty”, which sounds pretty gay). Eventually we found it, went inside, and bought our mandatory gay drink (mine was a gay Vanilla Mule). Unsurprisingly, the place was packed with men. From what I hear, Arty Farty is the only place to attract a sizable gaijin (or should I say “gay-jin”? no, perhaps not) crowd, so there were quite a few foreigners about. And so we drank our drinks and entered the gay dancefloor, fittingly as “I Will Survive” came on.

And you know what? It wasn’t bad. No, actually, I had a really good time. There was just a different vibe to other clubs; everyone was there to have a good time, not to get pissed or start a fight or hook up with girls. (Uh, you know what I mean.) The music wasn’t too bad, and it was a whole lot cheaper than other places in Tokyo – and you got access to their other branch for free, which means basically two clubs for the price of none.

Today I went to the Tachikawa immigration bureau to get a student work permit. It was my first interaction with the machine of Japanese government bureaucracy by myself, so I’m surprised it went as smoothly as it did. I brought my documents and the form from TUFS authorising me to work, waited patiently for my number to come up, went up, was told by a scary man to fill out a form, filled out the form, waited for my next number to come up, went back up and – yes! – hadn’t done anything wrong. Japanese efficiency applying to everything but government, I should receive my permit in three weeks.

It was quite interesting, the ethnic mix in the waiting room. I know it’s not so, but always I tend to assume that the majority of gaijin in Japan are Americans, followed by Europeans, but that’s a colossal mistake. Of the zainichi (from zainichi gaikokujin, lit. “living in Japan foreigners”) the vast majority are ethnic Koreans and Chinese, who have quite an interesting place in Japanese society – they were born in Japan, have lived in Japan their entire lives, speak only Japanese and are to all intents and purposes Japanese, and yet just … aren’t. It’s an interesting subject.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Orbital lately. Obviously when their sweet brand of English techno was all the rage I was six or seven, so give me a break, okay? When I was that age I knew I liked indie and I liked britpop, and all this dance music seemed the complete antithesis to that. It took Laurent Garnier to open my mind a little, about two years ago. (I can remember downloading and listening to “The Man With The Red Face” in some nameless hotel in some city in western Japan (Hiroshima?) and thinking “hey, now this is interesting…”)

But I guess it must be weird for the people who grew up in that scene, who are now in their thirties, for me to be getting into the music of their formative years. It’s like in ten years time, in 2020, kids born in the late 90s will be discovering The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand and The White Stripes, and I will be terrified.

Home is where I want to be
But I guess I’m already there
I come home, she lifted up her wings
I guess that this must be the place

Some songs have a few good lyrics in. Some songs are simply perfect from start to finish. (And this from the greatest concert movie ever made.)

I was looking forward to writing about the newly-spiced up battle for Christmas no. 1 when a few days ago this woman basically said it all for me much better:

We live our lives amongst popular culture. The Christmas number 1, for the past decade, has nearly always been a novelty record, but the group isn’t protesting at that. What they’re angry about is that nearly everything is now a novelty record, that the charts are now full of talentless jingle singers with sob stories instead of genuinely exciting musicians, and that thanks to all that, children now assume that becoming famous needs no discernible talent or effort.

Now I wasn’t too bothered when the idea of “Killing in the Name” came up as a rock-the-vote candidate for Christmas number one, because there were a few songs floating around and none of them seemed to have any chance of defeating Cowell’s dreary inevitability. But then … something very magical happened. Imagine that, a miracle at Christmas! The Facebook group grew, and grew to the point where it might actually happen. A proper grassroots campaign might achieve it.

Everyone got it wrong, of course. It wasn’t to spite Joe Whatshisface – the truth is I didn’t even know his name until last week, and I have no idea what his song is like, and I’m sure he’s a lovely lad, but he is a celebrity now, and has become a pop singer through a shamelessly commercialised route, and must come to terms with the fact that the public may not like him. It’s not really about Cowell, who is actually a guilty pleasure to watch at times (but mostly a dick). It’s not juvenile rebellion, even if there is an irony in a band of people coming together to say “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” and then sheepishly all buying the same record because one guy told them to. (As Rebecca Winson notes, “Lying down and letting a Miley Cyrus cover, for crying out loud, with all of its connotations – take us into the next decade… well, now that’s sheepish behaviour.”)

It’s about all the people in Britain who are fed up of being pandered to by crappy reality shows and mindless tabloids (who predictably lashed out at the campaign, suggesting that they lived in some bizarre fantasy world where Simon Cowell owned Sony and got a direct cut of RATM’s royalties, which is patently untrue). All the people who didn’t want another bloody cover from another bloody here-today-gone-tomorrow artist with the right voice and the right looks to appeal to a very particular market did indeed cry out, “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” This can only be a good thing, right?

And it’s more than that. You know where I spent my formative years? By the radio, listening to the Sunday chart show with my sister. Every week, like an unrepentant gambler, I would have my own choice for number one, something made with real talent and sweat. Every week I would hope against all odds for Marion or Kenickie or The Bluetones to get to the top spot, and every week it would be the same commercialised, soulless pap. You know what that does to a small child? Disillusionment. I was taught from a very young age that real talent and hard work will get you nowhere thanks to Simon and his cronies.
As I wrote this last night, the results were yet to be in.

I wake up today to see that Rage won.

Good times. It is only a small thing, but I hear my childhood self cheering.

I just saw a poster downstairs advertising the last party of the 00′s, and I realised – the noughties are ending, the Decade Without A Proper Name. It feels like we barely knew you. And yet everything exciting that ever happened to me happened in these ten short years. There’s a blog post in that.

But for now, I thought I’d just go over a few of my favourite songs of 2009. I’m usually two or three years behind modern popular music (have you heard of these Arctic Monkeys?), but this year I made a mild effort to keep up. Here’s what I have enjoyed:

Jamie T – Sticks ‘n’ Stones
I was vaguely away of Jamie T for a while, but it was only this year that my brother introduced me to him. And what a tune, of past dalliances and teenage frivolities.

University of Chicago’s Voices in your Head – Magic
Ben Folds recorded an a cappella album. Not usually my musical style of choice, I’ll admit, but when someone on Twitter (one of the RPS guys?) linked me to it on Spotify I was immediately hooked. This song in particular will always remind me of my time in Korea, and is possibly the most beautiful song on a fantastic album.

Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling
You know what made me feel old this year? I looked at one of those “What UCAS didn’t tell you when you signed up for university” groups, and one of the things was “That people will play “I Gotta Feeling” at full volume 24/7.” And that’s when I realised there’s a whole year of new inductees who are just getting their first taste of university life and their soundtrack is a song that came out in the summer, a song that didn’t even exist when I started uni. (Uh, last year.) But still, a great tune.

Florence + The Machine – Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)
There’s something about this whole song, the simultaneous power and vulnerability in Ms Welch’s voice in lines like “I must become the lion-hearted girl…” Wonderful.

Lazy FLow – Mambo Fever
There’s something about having a keyboard that makes a man go “whoop! whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop!” and “aarg, aag-agg” that appeals to something deep inside me.

Final Fantasy – Lewis Takes Action
I am very excited about Owen Pallett’s upcoming album Heartland. Even with his silly new haircut, he is still spellbinding in a way unlike any other artist. I mean, who else can reference “Be My Baby” and “Ashes to Ashes” (and even Spirited Away?) in the same song?

Peter and I, the wee hours of Sunday morning, karaokesuruing it up for Fran and Katy's birthday celebrations.

Things are pretty much just ticking over here. I’ve got bored with my weight and am aiming to lose 10 kg, which means I’m finally taking advantage of the free gym next door and working my way up to 5k runs (so glad I brought my running shoes) and a bit of muscle training. Also, I may be appropriately dressed for winter at last, but the resultant hole in finances means it will be a pretty miserable Christmas until the loan comes in in January and I get paid for my articles, at which point I am hypothetically stable for the rest of the year.

Until I get my mid-term results on Monday and everything falls apart! We did the exam last Monday, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t do so well. And so I I await the the results with great interest. If I get anything near a pass, I’ll be very happy.

I love it here, but I just can’t seem to get my head round the whole, y’know, language side of it. I keep getting urges to run off to photography college or sequester myself in a hotel for a week while I write  a novel, which is obviously not what I should be concentrating on right now. Must do language.

I think I’m going to concentrate on piling through every single goddamn kanji in Heisig’s book, because if there’s a way into Japanese that I can deal with, it’s the kanji characters. They fascinate me, in all their myriad forms and disguises, and I pick them up much easier than the actual vocabulary.

A weird thing just happened; I was listening to “Shibuya”, off the Lost in Translation soundtrack (everyone’s visiting Tokyo this month and they all want to visit the New York Bar and I cannot afford to go there on a weekly basis guysss) and there’s a bit at the end where it segues into the mundane sound of a shinkansen train and the PA chime and the announcer saying “この電車はこだま号、新大阪ゆきです” (“This is a Kodama train bound for Shin-Osaka”) and it suddenly hit me, a memory of listening to that in the UK and thinking “I can’t wait until I’m in Japan and I hear that for real” and it all came back to me, the anticipation of coming to Japan, and now suddenly I’m here and I’ve been here for so long that I forgot it this morning up until that point when it once again hit me – hey, I’m in Japan.

So I have wandering feet again. I want to head out to Yokohama or ride the Tama monorail or, pfft, I don’t know, just go somewhere. I haven’t been anywhere in ages.

I’ve just realised where this has come from. The last time I was in Japan was 72 days. Today is day 71 of this expedition. On Saturday I will have been abroad for longer than ever before. Interesting.

New favourite band: J-technopopsters Perfume, who are irresistibly moe and backed up by some bangin’ choons. Am planning to enter Writers’ And Artists’ 2010 short story competition. In negotiations for possible house to live in next year.