Nice post here on Japanese hip-hop via So Many Shrimp.
There are a couple of great remixes of Ciara`s Oh knocking round at the moment. The Cadence Weapon remix can be found at his site here. Also check the Ghislain Poirer remix over at Fat Planet
Suzuki Ichiro is huge in Japan; he is the Rock of Japanese baseball. Here in Kobe we go to the beach and we have summertime jazz music from the super-slick Soil and “Pimp” Sessions and Pe`z.
Soil and “Pimp” Sessions
Soil & Pimp Sessions – Fragment.mp3
Pe`z – Where Will We Play Next_.mp3
Soil and “Pimp” are playing in London at Cargo on Thursday 25th August.
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Couple of links here to Justin Lincoln`s Osaka-based street photography sites: Elliptical and Desiring Machine. American girls are convinced that American men only come to Japan for Japanese girls. American film producers only come to Japan for japanese culture. For Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai the two are interchangable. His way into the self-sufficient paradise of the dignified savage is to kill a masked samurai (so the individual and the culture become interchangable) and have his wife fall in love with him befre eventually wearing the dead man`s armour into battle t defend Japanese values. Yeah yeah orientalist shit I hear you cry but this film was ENORMOUS in Japan. The conclusion of the film is that Japan must not loose sight of the old ways – it is that which makes the japanese special. People were breaking down crying in cinemas and newspapers were editorializing about how this film depicted the soul of Japan and what a national disgrace it was that it took Americans to show it to us. Also interesting is the depiction of the Emperor as a well-meaning patriarch manipulated by sinister advisors which was a cornerstone of MacArthur/Post-war political rhetoric. Myth-making is just as prevelant about domestic culture as it is about foreign culture – the idealisation of the golden age – a time before capital where everything was in harmony. This idea can break through brick walls but it`s just another device. Ask Tom Cruise, or sympathetic Japanese critics about peasant life under the samurai. Product versus reality. Is this a false dichotomy? The days of the Tokugawa are never coming back. All there is left is reconstructed castles and Lone Wolf and Cub manga. Still tho it all stays fluid. Rhetoric meets self-image meets action and there`s a hard kernal of nationalism at the heart of a lot of Japanese media and culture (just ask anyone here about China). Bang bang you`re dead / 50 bullets (or perfectly exected zen-like sword swipes) in yr head.