i’ve been watching a lot of j-pop videos and it started me thinking about the state of pop here… i don’t follow the charts at all closely, but check stuff out via the internetz etc and certainly don’t hate on decent product (though my tastes err more toward american R&B). i can usually be relied upon to defend good mainstream music - and also its hypersexualization and bling but…

…but j-pop - and by that i’m mostly thinking of Ayumi Hamasaki (Ayu) & Hikaru Utada (Hikki) - operate on a very different wavelength… Hikki has recently contributed a song and my favourite video of the year (‘Passion’) to the Kingdom Hearts game - wearing a cremasterish pseudo-biological gown and dancing with a cast of eerily-veiled drummers and dancers - and Ayu’s video history is littered with incredible identity shifts - from the batgirl princess of ‘ourselves’ to the preening ghost of ‘alterna’, the fun fur sex poodle (and part-time military dictator) of ‘ladies night’ to the extremely goosebumpy me & my doppelganger of ‘rainbow’… (Ayu’s vids are also more likely to recall the recent resurgence in Japanese horror films with some pretty unsettling moments). a la…

i saw a new Hikki video tonight - ’sakura drops’ and it’s about as far out as i’ve seen - aestheticised psychedelia with plants and animals morphing into one another in unbelievably saturated colours…and it all seems so much more, well, imaginative than promos i’m seeing here - where videos often seem materialist wish fulfilment more than anything else (scene one: x arrives at hot party, scene two: y in hot car, scene three: z in bedroom with hot girls/boys…) everything seems geared toward stressing the brand identity, as it were, or trying to sell the life of a star to its audience. very aspirational.

there are j-pop videos that do this - i love Namie Amuro, but she has been guilty, especially recently (although the austere old school japanese cliches of ‘ningyo’ more than make it up)… but the examples above go so far out their way to be deeply, defiantly, magically unreal…

i do wonder if a culture so visually focused on anime isn’t a big part of this - whereas only still (relatively) expensive films can afford genuinely incredible FX, anime is always limited only by the ideas of its creators… video games, too. hmm.

Posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006by kicking_k