CITY POP (70s-80s Japanese Pop)

[luka]

ive already deleted it you paranoid lunatic

 

[craner]

america did well to castrate them. i dont think they will be able to do that to the chinese though.

They should probably marshal their resources and castrate you instead.

 

[luka]

so aggressive!

 

[luka]

im enjoying this essay Gus its better written than your more recent stuff in some ways. defintely more approachable at any rate.

 

[craner]

I'm just a Patriot.

 

[luka]

There are dozens of books meticulously exploring how nostalgia affects and interacts with music consumption and production, from Benjamin Filene’s Romancing the Folk and Richard Peterson’s Creating Country Music to the work of Susan Stewart and of course, the amateurish but important Retromania by Simon Reynolds.

 

[version]

It's amazing when you come across the claims being made for the future of Japan in the late 80s/very early 90s compared to what happened next. From global domination to second tier irrelevance in the space of a few years.

Yeah, there's that bit in American Psycho where someone says the Japanese will own everything by the end of the 90s.

 

[luka]

Yeah, there's that bit in American Psycho where someone says the Japanese will own everything by the end of the 90s.

at least one major hollywood film about it. mike davis talks about it a lot in city of quartz.

 

[version]

Die Hard and Nakatomi Plaza.

 

[craner]

They were bad guys in a lot of the action movies of the time.

 

[craner]

There are dozens of books meticulously exploring how nostalgia affects and interacts with music consumption and production, from Benjamin Filene’s Romancing the Folk and Richard Peterson’s Creating Country Music to the work of Susan Stewart and of course, the amateurish but important Retromania by Simon Reynolds.

Let it go Joe!

 

[version]

They were bad guys in a lot of the action movies of the time.

They come in and start trying to take over Detroit in RoboCop 3.

 

[luka]

But why are we celebrating artists who don’t know how to properly work their equipment, or take no measures, as simple as they might be, to make their words intelligible instead of garbled, or even worse – who are able to record at a higher fidelity, who have the know-how and the skillset and deliberately deceive audiences with a certain self-representation of amateurism? I think these are important questions to pose.

One thing I am interested in with Gus' taste is this aversion to wrong, like music has to be this immaculate product. I find it curiously bourgeois, but even the actual bourgeoisie are quick to disown this sense of totalitarian completeness, hence their obsession with hipster chic and poverty porn.

he's an interesting case study isn't he sat nav?

 

[luka]

I don’t have any of the answers, but my most concrete take-away might be this: the critically important artistic and intellectual questions posed by lo-fidelity and punk centered around the importance of art’s aesthetic trappings, displays that the content of the art is often more important that how pretty or “perfect” its realization is. But lo-fidelity fetishization in some ways throws this entire development into the trash can. It’s not rejecting aesthetic idealization – it’s simply trading out one aesthetic ideal for another. And in that, there is profound danger. ⚡☠️☠️⚠️⚠️⚠️

 

[craner]

Danger!

 

[version]

They were bad guys in a lot of the action movies of the time.

There was that weird period of Hollywood films involving the IRA too, like Richard Gere playing an IRA sniper in The Jackal.

 

[craner]

Apparently Albania have taken the Taken series quite badly.

 

[snav]

he's an interesting case study isn't he sat nav?

The upside is he has a fantasy image of perfection that he could manifest if he put in the work. The downside is that nothing he listens to will ever live up to it. Chasing the dragon forever. Negative taste (I don't like this because it doesn't live up) vs positive taste (I like this). The former works great when you're, say, reviewing promo CDs at a radio station (a hellish sort of task but in a fun way).

Reminds me of another guy that Spendy and I know who's absolutely convinced that nothing good has come out in the last decade or two... film, music, doesn't matter the medium. The hatred comes from the fantasy of perfection... but if he loses that fantasy, what's left for him?

 

[luka]

wheres the showgirls pink lip gloss meme format gone?

 

[craner]

I love it whenever Kenneth Brannagh turns up as a Russian supervillain though.