I'm reposting my country critics ballot, since I'd originally put it under flock so that Geoff could have first shot at my comments for the Nashville Scene's poll issue. That's up now - Ashley Monroe made the top twenty! - so here this is again, for the lurkers. I thought Geoff ducked my most interesting contentions, in the bit he posted of mine, but I guess he took what was most easily excerptible, my description of Taylor Swift's voice and my cheers for her recording studio.
Down in my comments I'm responding to Geoff's contention in last year's poll writeup, "Suburban teenagers need their own bards who can work the established themes and techniques of pop-rock into something new. But small-town, divorced, blue-collar wastrels also deserve their own bards who can draw from a hillbilly history of song-making. All music grows out of the past, and if we refuse to distinguish one lineage from another, the discussion of new music becomes hopelessly muddied. Swift is a great artist, but it's not clear that she's a great country artist." And at the end I'm responding to his assertion two years ago that we critics were voting Miranda Lambert over Carrie Underwood because, unlike the majority of record buyers, we shun reassurance and instead want our assumptions challenged and want to hear something we don't already know.
Oh, and since filling out this ballot I made up my Country Top 35, and you'll notice I had some changes of mind.
Here I am sipping a G&T last night with Matsuri-kei star Doddodo in the Misono Building, a strange labyrinth of countercultural bars (there's one for Gothic Lolitas, one for stuffed rabbit enthusiasts, and so on).
Today I'm heading round the coast in the Daihatsu Naked with Yoyo and Hisae. We'll lunch in Kobe then head across various headlands, spits and peninsulas to Shikoku, lodge somewhere near Takamatsu, then take the first ferry on Saturday morning to Naoshima. Here's the SANAA ferry terminal on that island:
Finally, a reminder that I lecture at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto on Tuesday. It's open to the public, and begins at 10.40am:
Momus lecture: My Life in Art Tuesday, January 12th 10:40 a.m. - 12:10 p.m., including time for questions & discussion w/ students. Soshikan Conference Room (創思館コンファレンスルーム, next to the clock tower) Ritsumeikan University, Kinugasa Campus, NW Kyoto, close to Kinkakuji Some simultaneous translation into Japanese will be provided. Open to the public. Map.
Frustratingly broad piece in the Economist that both Sabina and Tom linked on their Tumblrs. I posted my own two cents over on Tom's comment thread - a response to his commentary and to a comment by Mark - and I'm pasting the two cents here as well. I do think the decline of the mid market is significant where it happens (and potentially bad; e.g., can knock a Cassie or an Ashlee out of the business), but the questions really need to be: Which mid markets, where, and to what effect?
Well, all those mentions of the Broad&Market style blog paid off; yesterday I got to reprazent Abeno, Osaka (apologies to all the much cooler Abeno kids who wouldn't have looked as chubby as I do in the lead picture; it's all layering, I swear). The most important part of the interview Maggie includes is the bit where I say: "My policy is probably to evoke some kind of otherness and to refute the global monoculture in some way... I’m struggling against it by using other reductive norms like workwear — that’s a bit of a paradox... So workwear, or like, kabuki clothes or gardener’s clothes or peasant’s clothes, or sportswear like golfing wear."
To that list of othernesses I'd like today to add a new category: pilgrimwear. From Friday to Monday I'll be traveling in Shikoku with Hisae and Yoyo (seen above on Christmas day in the amazing tea pavilion that stands in the garden at her family house in Hinoo). Now, art, friendship, hot water and food are really the goals of our "pilgrimage" (we hope to visit the art island of Naoshima and bathe in Shinro Ohtake's amazing bathhouse), but Shikoku is also famous for its 88-temple pilgrimage. Below you can see the traditional white garb of the Shikoku pilgrim. Dōgyō futari on the sign means "two traveling together".
Pilgrimwear is a good dress lexicon to adopt for various reasons. First, it's an ancient dress style, yet not dodo-dead; it's still worn by pilgrims in Japan today. Secondly, it's leisurewear, not workwear. So it avoids the usual recontextualisation paradox by which the look of other people's unfreedom is shiftily reframed as the look of one's own freedom. (To all those wearing jeans, you do realise that you're voluntarily wearing the clothes cotton-picking slaves were forced to, don't you?)
The otherness quotient of pilgrimwear is fabulously high, and yet the look doesn't stifle itself in piety, as, say, priestwear would (though I must say I have a yen for the conch-playing priest's garb in my Tiger Mountain video). Pilgrims, after all, are secular amateurs merely visiting, in a touristic way, religious sites. And as any reader of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales will tell you, pilgrims can be a rowdy, bawdy lot. A religious trip can be a pretext for carousing and even become arousing; in The Art of Love Ovid sees temples as pick-up joints, and Chaucer's set of scabrous stories begins at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, where brothels, palaces and cathedrals stood side-by-side. What could be more natural than following the ingestion of incense with the letting-off of sexual steam?
So, although Japanese pilgrims evoke the same kind of ancient otherness the Hasidim do, you don't have to feel like a hypocrite, anti-semite or satirist walking around dressed up as one. You can just be... human.
But don't you have to be super-ascetic if you're going to be a pilgrim? Not really. Modern Japanese pilgrims take taxis, cars, buses and trains on their 88-temple pilgrimage. They eat hamburgers. Buddhism stresses "the middle way", not total asceticism. There was an interesting action recently by Chim↑Pom touching on this. Hisae and I attended the finissage performance for a show the renegade artist group held at Yamamoto Gendai gallery in Tokyo. Good to be a Mummy saw Chim↑Pom collaborating with friends Yasuyuki Nishio, Sachiko Kazama and Yoshimitsu Umekawa to make an exhibition themed around self-starvation.
Motomu Inaoka, a Chim↑Pom assistant, became a living sculpture for the show, losing so much weight during a fast that his ribcage began to poke uncomfortably through his chest skin. The idea of Sokushinbutsu (or "living body Buddha") was that a monk fasts while meditating then dies to become a mummy. A rather scary sculpture was made of Inaoka at his thinnest, but by the time we caught the show he'd put the weight back on again. Chim↑Pom passed a big heap of McDonalds hamburgers out to the crowd during the blow-out finissage party. Munching on this stereotypically monocultural food, I immediately wanted to embark on a fast (followed, perhaps, by a multi-temple pilgrimage) myself. It smelled and tasted like shit.
I'm doing a little roundup of print-and-paper today, because it's something I'm fond of, in a retro-sentimental sort of way. I'm particularly interested in print's Unique Sales Proposition in the digital age; what it has to offer post-internet, or alongside-but-distinct-from-internet... if anything? When I "make myself scarce" by ending this blog on February 10th 2010, for instance, will I "graduate" from free to paid, purchasable, print-only writing?
That's what Momo Nonaka (right, above) seems to have done. Momo is an old friend, and from the 90s to the mid-noughties her blog Tigerlily made her one of Japan's best-known culture-bloggers. Now Momo is concentrating on print, and specifically zines. Tigerlily has become a paper magazine store called Lilmag. Momo is using the internet to distribute -- and blog about distributing -- her mags, but the products themselves are made of pure post-internet paper.
My alongside-internet, print-only novel The Book of Jokes gets an interesting review in the January edition of American literary review The Believer. Although The Believer is primarily a print publication, you can read Justin Taylor's review online. The reviews editor has tried an interesting "read-without-prejudice" experiment, sending Taylor my book without its cover or title pages, its spine blacked-out with a sharpie, and a ban on all googling. The result is a review I'm tempted to call "disorienteered", but also a satisfyingly context-free take on a wedge of paper, which is what a book finally is. This review doesn't rewrite the press release, but simply lets the unfolding text lead the reviewer through revulsion, amusement, disorientation, and trains of personal association. It's something I tried myself recently when I wrote a Playground column describing step-by-step my real-time discovery of a band called Hecuba. Taylor links my Book of Jokes to Lynne Tillman, a writer I met a couple of times in London in the 80s, via mutual friends, and who's apparently also written a book based on jokes (1999's No Lease on Life).
Turning to newspapers, the Israeli daily Haaretz mentions me today. Swiss "pop literature" writer Christian Kracht, in an interview with the paper, quotes the whole lyric to my song Germania, which, as I recall, was an attempt to channel a Germanic sensibility I'd found in art by Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Beuys, and imagery from the poems of Paul Celan and Rainer Maria Rilke. Kracht is one of my most important print mentors -- he published my debut short story 7 Lies About Holger Hiller in literary review Der Freud in 2004, and he's the executive editor of the German edition of The Book of Jokes, which will appear this autumn on the Blumenbar / Buenos Aires imprint. More paper!
There's less paper in the world thanks to the official closure last month of ID magazine, the American design magazine to which I contributed regularly. I even managed to get a young Norwegian graphic design collective called Yokoland onto the cover. ID was great to write for, because they paid a dollar a word. This time last year I managed to live for about three months on their fees for three or four easy-to-write articles. The magazine's closure seems to reflect the axiom that anything the internet can do better than print, it will do better than print. Designers are well-served now by design blogs, which they expect to read free online.
Japanese magazines are still my favourite form of print (and since I can't read them, that must mean that print has some sort of talismanic-fetishistic quality for me). In the photo above (Tsutaya's "recommended titles" shelf) you can see the camera jyoshi mags called Phat and Snap. A camera jyoshi is a young woman who's obsessed with cameras and photography. She's about 22, possibly an art student. She usually has an elegant retro model of camera (she prefers film to digital) which may or may not be covered with stickers (as Ume Kayo's is). The only thing she likes more than photography is sitting in old cafes eating the tasty lunch set and leafing through old magazines, or traveling in other Asian countries. Hisae -- essentially a camera jyoshi herself (her photos grace the current edition of Apartamento magazine) -- flipped enviously through Phat and Snap and told me that there weren't all these titles for camera jyoshis when she was in her early 20s. Magazines must be doing something right if they're diversifying titles about obscure dead-tech hobbies.
I showed Maggie from street fashion / interview blog Broad&Market a Japanese mag called Tokyo Graffiti, and we both went into raptures over its current edition. "This is the perfect magazine for me," said Maggie, leafing through pages showing people stopped on the street to talk about what they're wearing, or holding up Gillian-Wearingesque signs stating their worries about the world, or sitting in their bedrooms describing their decoration preferences. Tokyo Graffiti -- which features almost no advertising, though it may be doing some subtle product placement, for all I know -- is the ultimate vox pop magazine, and so far no blog can provide enough research, content, context and detail to endanger it. But after flipping through the whole of Tokyo Graffiti in the act of intellectual shoplifting called tachiyomi ("standing and reading"), Maggie and I -- blogger pirates both -- replaced the mag on the recommended shelf unbought, took a snap of the cover, and resolved to blog about it. Paper is doomed.
Mahika Mano is a hammock cafe in Kichijoji, located on a street illuminated by two huge red "Soapland" signs (a soapland offers rather more intimate comforts, I'm told).
Swinging there with Hisae and Karin Komoto was comfortable!
Yesterday in Osaka we discovered another interesting cafe, Yusoshi, in the basement of the Loop Centre at Tennoji. It's the local branch of a Kyoto cafe which has teamed up with our favourite makers of tabi shoes and socks, Sou Sou, and employs the same mixture of retro and futuristic; you sit on beanbags at traditional low tables illuminated from below, Stanley Kubrick-style.
We had a very long lunch there with our new friend, Maggie, maker of the Philly-based Broad&Market style blog.
The Some Videos thread is developing into an interesting discussion of Korean pop (and a little bit of Japanese pop), featuring a couple of people - petronia and askbask - who know more than I do. (Also, we ref back to this thread a little.)
Does anyone recall if conversations about Korean pop ever occurred on ilX?
Relax; if you live outside Japan, once you finish this article you'll never have to hear of Flumpool again. That's one of the nice things about being on holiday in a foreign country; things which are destined to persecute the natives, possibly for years, are merely local curiosities for you, the tourist. You can derive some passing amusement from the marketing around Flumpool -- a new band from the Osaka region, completely without musical interest, currently promoting their debut album -- without having the sinking feeling that you're destined to spend several decades either listening to or resisting them.
I made a decision in 1984 to ignore Madonna, you know. I decided she wasn't interesting. I've been living with that decision for 26 years. But ignoring Madonna is not an option in Western culture. Madonna, her management and her marketing people have made absolutely sure of that. There is no freedom of choice when it comes to attention, though there may be freedom of choice when it comes to purchase. As far as I know, none of my money has ever gone Madonna's way. But I've "paid" attention to Madonna. Look, there she is on the subway wall, modeling for H&M! Look, here's a serious, intellectually-respectable book about Islam that talks about her! And here's that song where she paid a bazillion dollars to ruin Abba's "A Man After Midnight" forever! This song sticks in your brain like charred tar! Can we leave the taxi at the traffic lights?
But Flumpool. Flumpool are big, but they're not as big as Smap or Arashi. If you made a decision in Japan to ignore Smap when they came up in the early 90s, well, I'm sorry for you. Smap are on the cover of almost all the TV magazines in Japan this week, as they seem to have been continuously for the last twenty years. (The ones Smap aren't on, Arashi are. And let me remind you that if you chose to ignore Arashi, well, your girlfriend or your wife didn't. Instant couple conflict, as you are daily revealed to be not-Arashi. Thanks, marketing! Thanks for pissing on me from a great height!)
But to get back to Flumpool. You'd think it would be a no-no for a band with "pool" in their name to refer, on their first album sleeve, to the piss mannekin, the Manneken Pis in Brussels. But why not? There's a successful musical called Urinetown, and a piss manifesto. So this band is a pool of piss, and proud of it! They even pun cunningly on the proximity of "piss" and "peace" -- in April they'll play a "Love and piiiis kids' show".
Musically, as the clip above shows, Flumpool are crushingly banal. Their ultra-formulaic songs sound as if they've been written by a machine, and completely exemplify the super-conformist "aggressive normality" which characterises so much of Japanese -- well, let's face it, of all -- commercial culture these days. But if innovation is banished from the music, it's alive and well in the marketing, and that's how we seem to want things.
I went into a branch of HMV yesterday. In stark contrast to all the other shops in the And& shopping centre in Osaka (clothes shops, Muji, Loft, Chisato Tsumori), HMV was quiet as the grave. And I thought to myself: "Was there really a moment when record shops teemed with people, and when a young Me would come here looking for the newest, most exciting things in the world?" There was, but that moment has passed. There will be no more cakes and ale at HMV.
There was also a moment when I was employed as a songwriter for the Japanese market. I'm reminded of it during a business meeting with Sony Music Japan, my worldwide song publisher, in Tokyo. It's a sort of surreal experience. Books about Bob Dylan lie around reception, and somewhere someone's playing The Beatles' Abbey Road album (Sony Music Japan publishes Lennon and McCartney).
Sony Music Japan signed me in 2001 on the expectation that I'd perform as well commercially in the 00s as I did in the 90s, when I wrote a string of hit records for Kahimi Karie. Of course, fashion is fickle, and the Shibuya-kei movement I was associated with got replaced by... well, nothing special. So the big sum of money Sony gave me has never been earned back, and because I'm on a roll-over contract, I stay signed to them forever. I don't mind at all; I get a worldwide music publisher with an impressive name and Japanese connections. But regularly we have these meetings where Sony nudge me gently about the outstanding debt: "So what are we going to do to recoup this advance we paid you, Nick?"
At this moment I remember all sorts of famous Japanese people I've been told like my songs. That sensitive one from Smap, what's his name, the one who reads novels? He once mentioned me in an interview! And Miki Nakatani, is she still making records? She's got good taste! She likes me! Or what about if I wrote for Arashi? My girlfriend would fucking love that! I could even get revenge on Ninomiya for being so pretty by making him sing something stupid and self-effacing!
Sony tell me, gently, kindly, that sure, they have connections to Arashi's management and could play them anything I wrote for them. But they mostly do rap numbers, in Japanese, with fairly generic music. And the days of Japanese bands being impressed by foreign writers and producers are over. I listen to all that, nodding, then ask if perhaps Aoi Yu doesn't want to make a record at some point? She might, thinks my publisher, but her management would probably want it to be a sure-fire hit. Solid, commercial material. We both know that doesn't mean me. (Intriguingly, Sony Music Japan employ their own full-time songwriter, a kid who's sitting on the sofa beside us wearing headphones, making songs on a laptop as we speak. How very Tin Pan Alley! There in the office, under the strip-lights!)
We end the meeting with a compromise; I'll send in an mp3 of me and Kyoka singing Dracula; MTV have asked for some horror film-type track to be used in an ident and who knows, we may be in with a chance.
But, to get back to Flumpool... well, let's not bother. You and I, since we don't live in Japan and are beyond the reach of even its most inventive marketing, need never hear the name Flumpool again. We can let our definition of Japanese music be encompassed by this fabulous 1985 documentary about Ryuichi Sakamoto instead. That and Akio Suzuki banging on a can, Doddodo screaming, some monks playing conch shells, the enchanting story-chanters at the kabuki theatre, and a gorgeously mournful snatch of gagaku.
Over on his own Pazz & Jop ballot, Josh Langhoff recommends that we list the "gatekeepers" who introduced us to our favorite music. Someone named "Chuck Eddy" recurs on his list. In any event, here's my P&J ballot again, this time with the added info of who or what first led me to the music. (I don't think "gatekeeper" is the right term, really.)
Singles 2009
1. Shystie ft. DJ Deekline "New Style" - Kat Stevens on poptimists 2. The Black Eyed Peas "Boom Boom Pow" - Lex Macpherson on his lj 3. Love And Theft "Runaway" - Chuck Eddy on the ilX Rolling Country 2009 thread 4. MC Lars ft. Brett Anderson & Gabe Saporta "Hey There Ophelia" - Moggy on her lj 5. Timberlee ft. Tosh "Heels" - Lex on his lj 6. The Lonely Island "I'm On A Boat" - Dave Moore, either on his Cure For Bedbugs blog or his Tumblr or his lj or by email 7. Das Racist "Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell (Wallpaper Remix)" - Kat Stevens, either on her lj or on poptimists 8. Rich Boy "Drop" - MySpace music front page (and my previous fandom of artist, whom I'd first heard back in '05 on Denver's reggaeton station when it was playing the shit out of the remix of "Get To Poppin'" featuring Pitbull) 9. Girls Aloud "Untouchable" - ?? I think it was through the Singles Jukebox 10. Röyksopp ft. Robyn "The Girl And The Robot" - Dave Moore by email, but I didn't start liking the song until it came up for review on the Jukebox and I revisited it
Albums 2009
1. Taylor Swift Fearless - My own vast insane fandom brought me to this one, with the help of Big Machine Records and various radio stations and other outlets (first heard Taylor on the radio in summer '06 but it was Jimmy Draper who insisted later in the year that I listen to her first album) 2. The-Dream Love Vs. Money - I think it was Lex who was talking this up first, but it might have been Dave. My interest already existed because of "Ditch That" (recommended by Luc Sante) and "Umbrella" 3. Ashley Monroe Satisfied - A Columbia publicist sent me the promo back in early 2006, probably at the instigation of Chuck Eddy, who was still music editor at the Voice (alb was shelved, finally released on iTunes this year) 4. Rihanna Rated R - The world at large 5. Scooter Under the Radar Over the Top (The Dark Side Edition) - Chuck Eddy, on my own lj (but I'd gotten him interested in Scooter in the first place, and I think it was Jeff Worrell who'd gotten me interested in Scooter) 6. Lily Allen It's Not Me, It's You - The world, again, with special input from Erika Villani; but it was Mitya who first talked up Lily to me in March '06 on Rolling Teenpop, with enthusiastic support from David Orton and William Bloody Swygart; Mitya'd heard about her from Popjustice 7. Martina McBride Shine - The Ross-Broadway branch of the Denver Public Library (but it was Chuck Eddy who got me interested in McBride back in '99 or so) 8. Electrik Red How To Be A Lady: Volume 1 - This must have been Lex, again, on lj, with Dave right on his heels 9. K'naan Troubadour - Heard "ABC's" by accident when the record company was promoting it as its single of the week on its YouTube site which I was visiting for some other artist's track; finally got back to the album because Chuck and Xgau had praised it 10. Brad Paisley American Saturday Night - Chuck Eddy on ilX's Rolling Country 2009 thread
On January 2nd 2010 we climbed Mount Shigi in Nara, Japan to celebrate the new astrological year of the tiger and 1300 years of Nara.
It was in another tiger year that "multitasking" Prince Shotoku Taishi (apparently so intelligent he could understand ten conversations at once), was defending Buddhism against the Mononobe family. Prince Taishi called on Bishamonten, the Buddhist god of war, in the Hour of the Tiger, on the Day of the Tiger. It seemed to work; Taishi prevailed over the Mononobes. He built Shigisan Chogosonsiji Temple -- the tiger shrine -- on Mount Shigi in Bishamonten's honour. We climbed and we climbed, my how we climbed...
I had an ongoing list of videos I liked, then back in May I forgot to keep up with it, so here are some vids from early '09. For further viewing pleasure visit Kat's tumblr.
Untouchable ft. Hwa Young "Tell Me Why": petronia wrote, "What I'm getting is that the 'interrogation scene' takes place in the head of the male protagonist. His fiancée rejected him, fell into an obvious deep depression and attempted/committed suicide in such a way as to make it seem the relationship was the problem (tearing up photos, etc.), except the guy was basically blindsided - so the rest of the vid is a reification of his warring emotions of anger and confusion (TELL ME WHY YOU DID THIS TO ME) and helplessness at not being able to save the Korean Sylvia Plath from herself (stuck on the balcony watching the proceedings). Why he had to call in a pop group to aid him in the effort I don't know though - presumably Untouchable speak to his emotions during this difficult period in his life?"
My decade's end piece in the Las Vegas Weekly, though after I'd pitched it I rebelled against the idea of trying to fairly sum up, hence no mention of Timbaland or Max Martin, whom I'd peg as the two most important figures in '00s music. (The Club Mix has brief mentions of "Behind These Hazel Eyes" and "Since U Been Gone," though not in regard to Max's input.) In about a month I'll post an Extended Freestyle Mix, and I'd welcome any suggestions as to what you think it should contain.
1. Vanity makes me wise, and narcissism makes me listen. A Google Alert tells me that someone on a blog called Litwack is talking about me (specifically my idea of 1:1 input-output shops), and I find they're also talking about something called Overton Windows, which I know nothing about, but find terribly interesting.
2. The Litwack blog says: "Aaron Schwartz wrote recently on the shifting of the Overton window re: slavery and murder, both of which were perfectly acceptable in American history as long as you were targeting the right ethnic groups." This chimes closely with something I wrote on Thursday: "Did Beatnik Grifter Play On Loathsome Hipster Negro Fetish? begins with an article about the grifter on the Jezebel blog entitled Did "Hipster Grifter" Play On Loathsome Hipster Asian Fetish? then does a thought-experment on it by substituting "Negro" for "Asian", revealing how weirdly acceptable racial prejudice still is the US in 2009 (as long as it's Asians, not blacks)."
3. I turn to the Aaron Schwartz article and read: "Imagine you were an early settler of what is now the United States. It seems likely you would have killed native Americans. After all, your parents killed them, your siblings killed them, your friends killed them, the leaders of the community killed them, the President killed them. Chances are, you would have killed them too, and you probably wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with this." Schwartz doesn't mention the Overton Window in this text, which seems to be covered by the idea of moral relativism; ethics change over time, and from place to place.
4. So what is the Overton Window? Wikipedia says: "The Overton window is a concept in political theory, named after its originator, Joe Overton, former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. It describes a "window" in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on an issue. The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it, and adding new ideas that can push the old ideas towards acceptance merely by making the limits more extreme."
5. Wikipedia continues: "Overton described a method for moving that window, thereby including previously excluded ideas, while excluding previously acceptable ideas. The technique relies on people promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous "outer fringe" ideas. That makes those old fringe ideas look less extreme, and thereby acceptable. The idea is that priming the public with fringe ideas intended to be and remain unacceptable, will make the real target ideas seem more acceptable by comparison."
6. This makes sense; it's basically what we've seen centre-right politicians in the UK and France do with the National Front over the past fifteen years or so. Wikipedia draws a rough Overton Window with the list: Unthinkable, Radical, Acceptable, Sensible, Popular, Policy. The idea seems to be that you can shift the window by re-mapping your own radical ideas by relating them to even-more-radical ones, therefore making your own seem relatively innocuous. So far, so Machiavellian.
7. There's a rather more nuanced description of the idea from an employee of the Mackinac Center here. He says you can't really shift the window without there being a significant groundswell of popular opinion behind you. He also says that "Overton Window" recently shot to the number 2 most-searched term on Google when someone mentioned it on primetime TV in the US.
8. The Wikipedia entry on the Overton Window relates it to the framing effect in Psychology, which states that you can influence answers (in polls, for example) by framing the issue in a particular way.
9. This relates to a theme I think about a lot; it even came up in my Unreliable Tour last week at NOW IDeA. I pointed to the window and said that artists are the only ones who really know the power of frames, who really see them. Because artists are frame-makers, professional attention-drawers and subject-delimiters, expert experience-editors. As I sang in my song The Minus 5, "history remembers the names of those who creep out of the shadows and reposition the frames".
10. It's a subject that's been touched on in several Click Opera entries; The arrow and the frame says that it's not opinion that counts, but rather the way you frame the issue. How long has this been going on? makes fun of experts who tell us things like "the contemporary cult of celebrity begins in the 18th century with Sir Joshua Reynolds". And Ideology is alive and well and living in syntax looks at how cunning journalists and politicians pack their dogma into innocuous-seeming framing words like "whereas", "despite" and "still".
11. A nice example of an Overton Window (and hidden ideology) at work is provided by Misleading breeding stats are the new skull-measurement, a debate in which an American YouTube video called Muslim demographics is fact-checked by a BBC radio show, who post their findings in another YouTube video called Disproving Muslim demographics. An astute Click Opera Anon commenter shows how the really toxic assumption is one they're both implying: "And yet surely the BBC vid is premised on the same fear. Only it's saying: "relax, it's not going to happen." Personally, I couldn't care less if Europe becomes predominantly Muslim. It might be a very good thing for both Europe and Islam."
12. Now, "I couldn't care less if Europe becomes predominantly Muslim" is a position outside the acceptable parts of the Overton Window. It's a radical view you wouldn't normally hear on determinedly-centrist BBC Radio 4. Referring to it would be useful for anyone wishing to reveal -- and perhaps shift -- the invisible framing of the issue implied in both those "opposing" YouTube vids; that it would be terrible if Europe actually did become Muslim.
13. Making formerly-invisible things visible is useful if you want to renegotiate basic terms. If the boss calls you into his office and says: "You've worked for us for two years, and we've never had any problems, have we?" you know that something's probably wrong. Something is probably about to change. Making the context visible is making the context problematical, malleable, renegotiable, even when you're being explicitly reassured that nothing's wrong.
14. A successful context is one we tend to take for granted, and leave in the background, just as (McLuhan would say) a successful medium is one we believe is a window on the world, not one we start to see as a window on the world. The medium desperately tries to prevent us seeing that it, itself, is the message, because its power lies in us pushing that knowledge to the back of our minds and believing that it represents something. Like a politician.
15. It's worth adding that radical views aren't always aired to give people the option that it's legitimate to hold radical views. Rather, they're aired surrounded by a context which labels them clearly unacceptable, and become a spectre designed to scare people back to centrist positions which have, nevertheless, in the meantime, shifted a tiny bit closer to the radical than they were before. When Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time in the UK recently, it probably played into the hands of the Conservatives, allowing them to shift the acceptable part of the Overton Window a notch or two rightwards, yet still make a clear policy distinction between themselves and the British National Party. Even when he's deploring BNP policies, David Cameron is deploying them.
I don't know what the status of "Night & Day" is, actually. If it's simply a leak by the artist it's a single; if it's also a future album cut it or if it's an unauthorized leak it isn't a single, unless it starts getting the attention due a successful single, in which case it is a single.
1. Lloyd "Night & Day" [single?] 2. I Blåme Coco ft. Robyn "Caesar" 3. Sade "Soldier Of Love" 4. Selena Gomez & the Scene "Naturally" 5. Nicki Minaj "Saxon" [single?] 6. Martina McBride "Wrong Baby Wrong Baby Wrong"
Resolution for the New Year: to write "ft." for "featuring" rather than to write "f."
A few quick comments: Asher talks slow with ace timing on "College" and he does something different with a party track by giving it a 3 AM and spent feel, and these people don't bother me. It's music, it's art. Speaking of art, my favorite of this year's GaGa tracks has some guy on it telling us that his name has a second syllable pronounced "AY," and "Till I got a buzz like that nigga Chris Mullin" is hilarious; of course, I know who Chris Mullin is. "Welcome To The Future" has a much richer sense of color than I'd ever heard from Brad Paisley, feels like something new in country; thick, bright paint.
Top 100 Singles, 2009
( 1 through 10, which you've seen already ) 11. Jim Jones f. Ryan Leslie "Precious" 12. Nicki Minaj "Beam Me Up Scotty" 13. Jamey Johnson "High Cost Of Living" 14. Hilary Duff "Any Other Day" 15. Jim Jones "Na Na Nana Na Na" 16. MC Hammer Vs. Britney Spears "Can't Touch 3 (Bedbug Mix)" 17. Depeche Mode "Wrong" 18. Champion DJ "Baako" 19. Asher Roth "I Love College" 20. 3OH!3 "Don't Trust Me" 21. Taylor Swift "You Belong With Me" 22. Britney Spears "3" 23. Lily Allen "The Fear" 24. Paleface f. Kyla "Do You Mind (Crazy Cousinz Remix)" 25. Ne-Yo "Part Of The List" 26. Demi Lovato "Don't Forget" 27. Busy Signal "Tic Toc (GreenMoney Liquid Re-Rub)" 28. Scooter "J'adore Hardcore" 29. K'naan f. Chubb Rock "ABC's" 30. Jeremih "I'mma Star" ( 31 through 100 )
Singles (as opposed to nonsingles). OK, here's where the decade barrier gets in the way: for me the arc of modern music starts in approximately '97 when Timbaland begins hitting with Missy and when Max Martin scores in the U.S. with the Backstreet Boys, and the Dirty South is bubbling up nationally, though I didn't connect to most of this other than Missy until '99 when Chuck enticed me back into the public eye. '99 is one node, with "...Baby One More Time" and "Back That Azz Up" and "Nann Nigga" and the flowering of the Ruff Ryders sound. Incredible year. '03 is another node - the top three on my list! - among other things for the dominance by the Dirty South, crunk coming to the fore. Then '04 and '05 are the peak of the rock confessional, what we've been calling "teenpop" but it's really young-woman pop that teens and tweens were lucky enough to be the prime consumers of, shepherded by men and women like John Shanks and Kara DioGuardi and the Matrix etc.; it brought my heart back into the business in a way that no one earlier in the decade except Eminem had done. I really needed Ashlee et al.'s lyrics, 'cause there's only so far I can care about whether someone gets low or not. The end of the decade doesn't have a node, exactly; country bumps in and out of the other stories, dallying with hip-hop in '04 and then Taylor Swift leaps into the rock confessional gap with her Taylorness, which is pretty much its own genre. Despite having written what I think was one of the significant bits about Destiny's Child, and liking Mya etc., I didn't start really clicking with - or on - r&b until '06, reaching back into the late '90s from there and then Lex has been a big help in my feeling it now.
Top Ten Singles Of The '00s
1. Panjabi MC ft. Jay-Z "Beware Of The Boys" 2. Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz ft. Ying Yang Twins "Get Low" 3. 50 Cent "In Da Club" 4. Hilary Duff "Come Clean" 5. Missy Elliott "Get Ur Freak On" 6. Jay-Z ft. UGK "Big Pimpin'" 7. Eminem "The Real Slim Shady" 8. Kelly Clarkson "Since U Been Gone" 9. ATC "Around The World" 10. Kelly Clarkson "Because Of You"
"What is a nonsingle?" I hear you ask. A nonsingle is an album cut that never becomes a single and never acts like a single (so, doesn't get a lot of airplay or get talked about by more than one set of friends and doesn't chart for more than a couple of weeks), or it's a leaked track that wasn't leaked by the artist and doesn't act like a single (see previous parenthesis). So, for example, Jay-Z's "Takeover" was an album cut that was never pushed as a single, but it's not eligible in the nonsingles category, the reason being that it was chatted about and responded to all over the place, was the subject of an answer song, etc.
Top Five Nonsingles Of The '00s
1. t.A.T.u. "Kosmos" [English-language version is "Cosmos (Outer Space)"] 2. María Daniela Y Su Sonido Lasser "Duri Duri" 3. Margaret Berger "Robot Song" 4. Fannypack "Smack It Up" 5. Lindsay Lohan "Nobody 'Til You"
(Didn't do a 6 through 10, but if you want a top ten, just insert your five favorite Cassie leaks.)
"Kosmos" is the standard t.A.T.u. exploitation of their supposedly forbidden supposed love, and in all its transparent obviousness it is just utterly, exquisitely, beautifully moving. "Robot Song" does the same trick, forbidden romance as a gag, "I'm in love with a robot," and then fakes out the gag with its own exquisite beauty, is as intense for me as Murnau's Tabu or Ophuls' Earrings Of Madame de...; I like to program "Robot Song" and "Cosmos (Outer Space)" back-to-back: come to get me when the stars die, another time, another place, another world, you're the only one who makes me feel a thing, guilt for the second best, feel no more, feel no less, our home forever is outer space, black stars and endless seas, outer space, new hope, new destinies, outer space, forever we'll be in outer space.
"Smack It Up" is a bratsmack, and "Duri Duri" is a Mexican Italodisco '80s classic given it's own '00s smackiness. "Nobody 'Til You" is - what? - the second most beautiful John Shanks song, a gorgeous flood of guitar chords.
Here's a New Year's Day puzzle I've set myself. I'm not doing very well at it so far. I'm trying to locate the oddly-shaped Osaka building in the userpic you see above. It's a crop from an image Rhodri Marsden took from his hotel window when touring Japan with Scritti Politti in 2006:
Now, finding exact locations from skyline views is something I pride myself on. For instance, I was able to locate the Tokyo apartment I've just spent the last three weeks in before I was given a street address, just based on a view from the balcony and a combination of Google Maps and Google Streetview. But this one has me completely stumped, and it's crazy, because the photo shows lots of distinctive buildings.
Hisae's father thought the skinny-tall building on the right was the Cosmo Tower, housing the World Trade Center, out by the docks in Nanko, to the west of the city. It certainly looks rather like it, but I'm not so sure. What we see in Rhodri's photo is a dense and rather chic central area. The district around the Cosmo Tower is bleak and windswept dockland. What's more, Rhodri was playing at the Quattro Club, and the promoters had probably booked Scritti Politti into a hotel not too far from it, which would make his view more likely to be out over Shinsaibashi. But I can't find any buildings in Shinsaibashi that look like that.
My next theory was that the black building on the left side of Rhodri's view is the same as the black building towards the right of the photo above showing the view north from Osaka Castle over Osaka Business Park.
But since I can't see any of the other buildings in Rhodri's picture when I "walk" around that area in Google Street View, I've abandoned that idea.
My goal is to drop a Google Maps pin right on the spot where the weird wavy building in my user icon is, then drive out in Hisae's mum's Daihatsu Naked and photograph it (as well as find out what it is). I probably have a mild case of Asperger's.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
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My alongside-internet, print-only novel The Book of Jokes gets an interesting review in the January edition of American literary review 
Turning to newspapers, the Israeli daily Haaretz 
Sony tell me, gently, kindly, that sure, they have connections to Arashi's management and could play them anything I wrote for them. But they mostly do rap numbers, in Japanese, with fairly generic music. And the days of Japanese bands being impressed by foreign writers and producers are over. I listen to all that, nodding, then ask if perhaps Aoi Yu doesn't want to make a record at some point? She might, thinks my publisher, but her management would probably want it to be a sure-fire hit. Solid, commercial material. We both know that doesn't mean me. (Intriguingly, Sony Music Japan employ their own full-time songwriter, a kid who's sitting on the sofa beside us wearing headphones, making songs on a laptop as we speak. How very Tin Pan Alley! There in the office, under the strip-lights!)![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
12. Now, "I couldn't care less if Europe becomes predominantly Muslim" is a position outside the acceptable parts of the Overton Window. It's a radical view you wouldn't normally hear on determinedly-centrist BBC Radio 4. Referring to it would be useful for anyone wishing to reveal -- and perhaps shift -- the invisible framing of the issue implied in both those "opposing" YouTube vids; that it would be terrible if Europe actually did become Muslim.
Now, finding exact locations from skyline views is something I pride myself on. For instance, I was able to locate the Tokyo apartment I've just spent the last three weeks in before I was given a street address, just based on a view from the balcony and a combination of Google Maps and Google Streetview. But this one has me completely stumped, and it's crazy, because the photo shows lots of distinctive buildings. 