Metalchicks concert review, part 4: The Metalchicks

(:title Metalchicks concert review, part 4: The Metalchicks:)

9月5日 (日ー月) 1:07 am JST

9月6日 (月ー火) 12:54 am JST

9月7日 (火ー水) 1:23 am JST

Back in 2002, Buffalo Daughter talked to Nylon for a magazine article. Their basic story was that they wanted their album I to be consider a pop album, not some weird, far out Japanese thing. Elsewhere Buffalo Daughter has also talked about how their name is in English and their songs are mostly in English, because that’s what you’ve got to do to break out the domestic market ghetto and get into the international music scene. At any rate, the writer for Nylon fairly laughed at their suggestion. I, the interviewer declared, was not pop. It was weird, really weird. And thus, really good. Buffalo Daughter had failed in their aspiration to be a pop band and so, succeeded in being hip.

A key cultural difference between Japan and America is that popularity builds on itself in Japan, where it collapses on itself in America. Let’s face it, the American version of the Goro trial would have been an immense spectacle. Instead, the Japanese media kept it under wraps so as to avoid the fierce wrath of Johnny’s. The American media on the other hand wanted Jackson to burn and published articles speculating about the kind of anal rape he could expect to receive in prison, and Sony Music couldn’t do a thing to stop them. In Japan, it’s OK to mock Matsuken Samba, but if you don’t enjoy the audacity of it on some level… well, it doesn’t speak well for your sociability.

The Metalchicks displays their Buffalo Daughter roots in the way the band is committed to a Middle Path of audience satisfaction. Where nisen’nen mondai bludgeoned with sound, Metalchicks soothed with their precisely anticipated chord changes. Where kiiiiiii begged, Metalchicks wooed with their understated rhythmic repetitions. Where Asa-chang & Jun-ray were indifferently absorbed in their tech, Metalchicks projected a subtle rockstar vibe. They didn’t hate their audience, but neither were so they blinded by passion as to lose their cool. They looked squarely at their audience and struck a fine compromise between what they wanted to play and what they knew the audience wanted to hear.

And what everyone wanted was clear: Metal.

Arrogant young nerds may say that they reject the world because everyone else sucks, but older, more self-aware nerds are haunted by questions: Am I alone because I choose to be alone and push others away or because my character is such that I can’t help but repel others? And which is worse? Knowing that I could be popular, but don’t try because I subconsciously prefer some aspect of my current misery? (“Must only be lonely? ^[1]”) Or knowing that no matter how hard I try, all my efforts to change my current pathetic state are doomed to ignominious failure, as my unsinkable weirdness finds new ways to burst to the surface? Or is there even a difference between the two states; is it a false dichotomy? No matter what the reason, to be a nerd is to be alone.

Nylon’s theory is that, Buffalo Daughter is a delitefully weird band with a weird essence in its weird DNA. It’s a theory that’s bound up in their vantage point. To them Buffalo Daughter is weird, but from the vantage point of Japan, the earnestness of Buffalo Daughter’s pop ambitions become clear. With in the confines of the now-dead Shibuya-scene, Buffalo Daughter is not a novelty act. The problem is that the Shibuya system was unable to expand to reach the ambition of its participants. Buffalo Daughter studied up and learned how to politic its way right to the head of the nerd table. Sadly however, even the king of the nerds is unable break bread with lowliest team towel boy.

Incommensurable, all is incommensurable!

The Metalchicks, composed as they are of suGar Yoshinaga of Buffalo Daughter and Yuka of OOIOO stand to once again make clear the pop drive of the Shibuya scene. Pop meaning not that they expect to be or want to be Ayumi Hamasaki, but that they are sensitive foremost to the demands of their listeners. The framework in which the band chooses to express this sensitivity is, of course, metal.

On the one hand, the Japanese do not “get” metal, in the sense that the Japanese fail to see the perfectly natural correspondence that comes between utilizing the power chords for one’s songs and dressing like metal steve. Somehow it seems that a lot of the cultural expectations of wearing frayed T-shirts and throwing the goat horns are at least partially lost in translation. But a lot of Shibuya was lost in translation too! I, for example, have no idea why Buffalo Daughter read from an English language clothing catalog in “Live 303.” Are they being ironic? Is its semantic banality a purposeful part of their effect, meant to counterbalance the frenetic music? Or are they just reading it because it’s in English and was easy to find? Could they have used anything for this part of the song, or did it have to be about the wrinkle resistance of clothes? The song works perfectly, but like reading haiku in translation, you know you’ll never know what you’ve missed.

Sometimes, what’s lost in translation adds a beautiful mystery, an intoxication by exoticism. It’s almost too Zen to say it, but just using words for something causes us to castoff a lot of the actual experience of it. For things that aren’t linguistic concepts, the thing-in-itself cannot be identical to its referent, so there’s always something in the trash can due to the difference between experiencing something and experiencing talking about it. Just like how no music review can be the same as listening to music. However, what remains after we castoff bits is frequently more beautiful than what we started with. Music reviews can be pleasurable in their own way. Sometimes, truth just can’t candle to beauty, which is why we let Keats lie to us with his poppycock about truth being beauty. It’s more beautiful to believe Keats than to insist on the grayness of the world.

Since the ‘50s, Japan has been lying to itself and saying that everyone in Japan is in the same class. This isn’t actually true, but people consider it to be, which makes it a powerful force within Japan. Since people need to have an Other, it worked out that it’s everyone else in the world versus the socially united Japan. (Incidentally, America pretends that it has no classes either, but mostly does its Othering along racial, political, and coolness lines.) It isn’t true that everyone is really a salaryman in Japan, but it’s true that that’s the dream. Which is why pop isn’t bad in Japan. Since they’re pretending that all Japanese are the same, that means that when something becomes popular, it’s a reflection of the collective wisdom of Japan, which makes it part of your wisdom. To question pop is to question yourself. American pop acts break down because everyone asserts their rugged individualism by rejecting mass phenomena. This results in the hilarious spectacle of everyone trying to prove their own hipness by making lame jokes about the unhipness of Britney Spears, in spite of the fact that Britney being lame is the consensus opinion, and Britney being cool was only ever a minority opinion held by a certain demographic subset of MTV watchers.

At any rate, most Japanese acts are content to remain domestic acts, since the global market is Other to Japan’s self. SMAP goes out of its way to make it seem like foreigners don’t know who they are. They even enlisted friends of my friend to pretend that they didn’t know them, in spite of their being fans. When they went to America for an episode of SMAP x SMAP, they purposefully went witout entourage or accommodations. SMAP is positioning itself as Japanese against the world. When Hikaru Utada foolishly attempted to debut in America, she accentuated her otherness by singing about being “Japanese-y,” which was an incredibly poorly thought out move. Americans will accepted a foreign exotic, but foreignness for its own sake invites xenophobic rejection. Ricky Martin spiced his songs by saying la vida loca, but he didn’t sing, “I’m so Puerto Rican!” The American pop market demands normal not weird, so if you must be weird, then you’re stuck in a niche market from now until you make enough money for people to stop asking, “Isn’t it weird for gangsters to be considered normal?”

So, by some historical quirk of fate, Shonen Knife managed to tour with Nirvana. Shonen Knife was clearly exotic, and this allowed space for other Japanese bands make modest in-roads in the American college market. One nerd girl managed to date the Homecoming King, and suddenly there was room at the lunch table for one or two of her better groomed friends. They of course tried to fit in, but it never really entirely clicked, and then the music scene moved on and everything collapsed. Now, a golden era of music is over, and only a few remnants keep on a-rockin’.

So, Buffalo Daughter is now the elder statesman of a defunct scene, and they have spun off Metalchicks to allow SuGar to explore new things with her friend Yuka, while the rest of the band domesticates their lives with houses and children and whatnot. The new thing that the two girls have set out to explore is metal and they do so by means of pop, the idiom through which they understand all music.

Kant’s theory about genius is that where others do their best within a set of rules, the Genius creates a new system all together. Two new JETs who’ve come this year have done ta been talkin’ ‘bout how their respective nose rings and Tiffany necklaces are not in fact the class identifiers that they so blatantly are, but rather, social filters by means of which they filter out those who would so terribly discriminate against them on the basis of mere appearances.

This is total, self-serving bullshit.

Like the nerds at their lonely lunch tables, the girls are doing things with known effects and then getting upset when the consequences follow their actions. Nerds will do things known to repulse others, then become angry at others for being repulsed. They say, “Ah, this confirms my suspicion that my social superiors suck, for observe, they were repulsed by mere social convention!” However, if you know about social convention and you know what others expect for words to mean, you aren’t allowed to be upset when people interpret things in the usual manner. It’s like saying, “Oh, they suck, because they left when I said, ‘I hate you,’ even though I’ve redefined ‘I hate you’ to mean ‘be my friend.’ They’re clearly trapped in thrall to dated linguistic conventions.”

I’m with Confucius: 不知言、無以知人也. “If you do not know the meaning of words, you do not know men.” I’m with Kant, Genius is a rare, rare thing. So, yes, if you know how a group dresses in order to be cool, it’s your fault if you dress differently and are rejected by the group. The onus is on you to prove that the initial impression you give of being one opposed to the group’s conventions and perhaps existence is not the harbinger of more anti-group activity. It’s not wrong to judge on surfaces, when surfaces are usually arranged to reflect interiors. Once you are in a system, it’s nearly impossible to escape. A Genius might be able to overthrow the conventions of the group, but if you just want to flaunt conventions for your own selfish reasons, you’re probably not a Genius. The one hope you have is that sometimes, along the borders and edges of systems, things get lost or distorted, and you can play with those omissions and distortions to create a new, more equitable system.

The basic gimmick of the Metalchicks is to put speed metal over 909 (example). They do this because it is their earnest belief that 女だって metal. And it’s pretty good. “Dead Loss Angeles” in particular built up to a powerful peak resolved with shattering catharsis, sending musigasms up and down the spine. They talked in their set about how they’re going to be in a movie of some sort about women and music and metal. SuGar said that some people asked if they really considered what they were doing metal. I couldn’t understand all of what was being said, but it seems like to them metal is about just an aspect of the attitude, rather than a way of life or a slavishly replicating a particular sound. Surely, they don’t really get metal the same what that other people get metal, but so long as they aren’t looking to the American metal community for acceptance, that’s their right. We’re all allowed to interpret things however we want, just so long as we understand that our interpretations have no force over others.

My key beef with Metalchicks is that I secretly wish they were Buffalo Daughter. I miss Yumiko’s vocoderings and Moog’s noodlings. Also, their popness reduced the extremity of their rocking. Unlike nisen’nen mondai, they had no particular battle to wage against our dental fillings. Which is good in the sense that it allows them to make proper songs that actually satisfy the audience melodically, but bad in the sense that you wonder what they’re holding back. Still, everything really came together by the end of their set, and they really did suck you into their powerful groove of Rock. After the show, I embarrassedly had my EP signed by the girls and confessed my fandom to SuGar. It was dorky, but it’s the nature of the fan to be dorky towards one’s idols. All together, it was a powerful show, demonstrating the strength and weakness of different approaches to relating to the audience, positioning one’s self within the realms of pop or metal. Metalchicks doesn’t actually know words in the Confucian sense, but it’s OK, because they don’t make the mistake of begging for recognition of their non-vocabulary. Instead, they merely continue to jam with one eye cast askance at the audience, judging our reactions and polling how best to rock. It works.