2008 was not the debut year for Watanabe Atsumu by any means. The 39 year-old actor and comedian was part of other comedy groups from 1991, notably Jarizumu, and his newer “Sekai no Nabeatsu” (世界のナベアツ) persona had enjoyed minor success in 2007 on shows such as Bakushō Red Carpet (爆笑レッドカーペット). But in the very end of 2007, Watanabe was able to introduce his gags to a new audience numbering in the thousands, even millions: Japanese families sitting around their kotatsu, snacking on mikan and mochi and watching manzai duo Downtown’s annual Batsu Game (罰ゲーム).

Matsumoto Hitoshi and Hamada Masatoshi — otherwise known as Downtown, the godfathers of modern Japanese comedy — may not have invented the batsu game, but they certainly perfected it. They’ve been running variations on the classic Japanese sadomasochist “punishment game” since 1990, but since 2004 their highest-profile punishment project has been the annual special Zettai ni waratte wa ikenai (「絶対に笑ってはいけない」, “You absolutely must not laugh”), also featuring the rest of the Gaki no tsukai ya arahen de!! (ガキの使いやあらへんで！！) team: Yamazaki Hōsei and Cocorico’s Endō Shōzō and Tanaka Naoki. On the special, which has been shown on New Year’s Eve since 2006, Matsumoto, Hamada, and the others are paraded through a themed setting — in past shows, an onsen, a high school, a police station, and a hospital — and confronted with funny situations. If they laugh, they are punished with a caning on the rear.

The producers gather a huge cast of comedians and celebrities to participate in this festival of complete madness. They all help surprise Ma-chan, Hama-chan and the others and ensure that they leave with sore asses. Every year little-known or forgotten comedians get a boost from the show.

In 2006 it was Shōfukutei Shōhei (笑福亭笑瓶), an older rakugo artist/comedian. He didn’t even need to show up in person — his introduction was enough to send the Gaki no tsukai members into hysterical fits.

The bit was so popular that Gaki no tsukai had Shōhei himself on the normal half-hour program in early 2007 to play a small set of batsu game events with them. It was a big break and Shōhei went on to make many more appearances on Japanese TV in 2007 than he would have otherwise.

At the end of 2007, Watanabe aka Sekai no Nabeatsu was the latest beneficiary. In his first appearance on Red Carpet as well as his appearance on the batsu game, he still wasn’t using his catch phrase “Omoro!” (オモロ, “kick ass”), but he proceeded to juice this along with his counting ippatsu gyaggu (一発ギャッグ, one-off gag/joke) for all they were worth all through 2008, expanding from multiples of three sounding like an aho (idiot) to multiples of five sounding like a dog and a host of other things. As is often the case with Japanese comedians, his target audience is elementary school boys.

He’s showed signs of moving away from his trademark gag to other bits , proving that he’s more flexible and creative than Hard Gay aka Razor Ramon, but we won’t know until next year if he has the staying power of a Kojima Yoshio.

Last year was supposed to be the final Zettai ni waratte wa ikenai batsu, but it was so popular that Nihon Terebi would have been fools to not make an offer. They have filmed another year’s installment, and six hours of footage, twice the running time of the past two years, will be shown on New Year’s Eve: our first chance to see which comedians will make it big in 2009.

Postscript

An astute 2 channeler noted that there isn’t much time left this year to take advantage of Sekai no Nabeatsu’s gag:

馬鹿だな、お前ら。
飲み会の時とかに、
「3の倍数と3が付く数字のときだけエロになります」
と言えば、女の子の身体を触り放題だぞ？
今年だけのネタなんだから、活用する方法も考えないとな

Benesse has published the results of their annual baby-name survey. Yui and Yūto are the top names for girls and boys respectively, just as last year, but since there are so many ways to spell both names, they do not actually top the “name + kanji combination” chart. That honor goes to Hiroto (大翔) and Aoi (葵), the latter most likely thanks to actress Miyazaki Aoi — inescapable star of Atsu-hime.

2ch nerds are basically OK with the kanji for Hiroto 大翔, although they don’t like the pronunciation to for 翔. For the record, however, it comes from tobu, “fly, soar”, and it dates back to a poem about Mt Fuji in the Man’yōshū: 飛鳥母翔毛不上 → tobu tori mo/ tobi mo noborazu → “Even the soaring of birds in flight does not reach [its peak]“. Suck it, haters.

And now the news for Kingdom Hearts fans. Sora as a boy’s name has risen in popularity for the fifth year running, up to #5. Meanwhile, Riku peaked at #4 in 2006 and has been falling since, and no-one ever liked Kairi.

Oh… and Saaya has also enjoyed a huge jump in popularity, from #141 to #76. I know someone who’s going to love that.

Candidates chosen for Japan’s new lay judge system: can imposed democracy foster real democracy?

At the end of November, almost 300,000 Japanese citizens received letters informing them that they may be called to judge their fellow citizens. After a series of mock trials starting last year, the letters marked one of the final steps in preparation for the “lay judge” system (裁判員制度) in Japan’s courts, set for full implementation in July 2009.

Japan once had a jury system similar to the United States, beginning in 1923 in the era of so-called “Taisho Democracy” until it was eliminated during World War II. Under the postwar judicial system, a panel of three professional judges hears serious criminal cases as the prosecutors and defense make their arguments. At the end of the proceedings, the judges make the decision on whether the defendant is guilty and also decide the sentence.

After the war, GHQ officials working on Japan’s constitution considered re-instituting the jury system but refrained at the insistence of the Japanese. The law contained a passage that a later introduction of a jury system would not be ruled out, however.

This history laid the groundwork for the conclusions of a 1999 government council on legal system reform, which advocated the passage of laws to create the lay judge system without the need to amend the Japanese constitution.

The new lay judge system will add six citizen judges (aka “lay judges”) to the mix for trials of serious crimes, such as murder and arson, heard in Japanese regional courts. The lay judges will be called to sit with the three professionals and participate actively in the proceedings, questioning witnesses from both sides and considering evidence. The professional judges will make judgments on the law, such as what evidence may be considered, and provide legal explanations to the lay judges, but the actual decision and sentencing will be made by a majority vote of all nine judges.

While on the whole, large-scale public participation in the court system marks a tentative step forward for Japanese jurisprudence, the lay judge system has been enormously controversial on many fronts, including a lack of justification or demand for the reform, the inability for defendants to refuse a trial by lay judges, to the wasteful spending of providing daily stipends for the lay judges.

Some of these criticisms are technical, but I think they mainly stem from the fact that the system was more or less foisted on the Japanese public from the top-down. Unlike Western countries, whose jury systems developed over centuries of conflict between rulers and the ruled, Japan’s lay judge system was invented over a matter of years among Tokyo elites, led by the Kasumigaseki offices of the courthouse bureaucracy.

A recent NHK special on the subject starkly revealed the public’s anger over the introduction of a system they had basically no say in creating. At one point during a live debate between experts and laypeople, one man accused the government of allowing itself to be reformed in reaction to US demands (the US seems to have taken an interest in some reforms proposed by the original panel, but the lay judge system itself appears 100% homegrown). A suggestion that the system be put on hold to allow for more public participation generated shouts of approval from almost everyone in the room.

The true negotiations over how this system will work appear to have taken place between the government, attorneys’ groups such as the Nichbenren, and US groups interested in Japan such as the Mansfield Foundation. Looking at the commentary at citizen media site JANJAN, a typical question raised is why the government is so intent on rushing ahead with this new system.

Underscoring the challenge of introducing democracy from the top down, a December 2006 opinion poll found that a full third of respondents would not want to serve as lay judges even if required by law.

To promote the new system, the government hired advertising giant Dentsu among others to position the system as a move forward for Japanese law. In a wide-ranging campaign, promotion of the jury system has manifested itself in a serial drama, a video game, and literally dozens of hastily drawn “image character” mascots. The profligate spending became a target for criticism in 2006, when the Supreme Court was found overpaying for ad agencies’ services and rigging town hall meetings with planted questions.

But despite the sloppy and dishonest promotion, could a jury system have come about any differently in modern Japan? Japan has been effectively a one-party state run by its bureaucratic class since the end of the War. The public, generally middle class, well-off, and treated justly, is generally so removed from the legal system as to have little interest in it at all. The development of the Internet as a forum for debate has given interested citizens a new voice, but so far its power has been limited.

All in all, I am hopeful that this system will prove a net positive. Despite the doubts of people such as those quoted by the New York Times who worry that harmony-loving Japan will simply go along with the prosecutors each time, I have confidence that most participants will take the task seriously. And every person chosen for jury duty will likely experience a serious wake-up call that national policy can affect their everyday lives.

This piece is published in collaboration with writer Nick Sylvester and his blog Riff Market. For those wanting more background on how we came to write this extremely long essay together, please read Nick’s more extensive introduction here.

Gregg Gillis, a 26-year-old college graduate who likes pop music and owns a laptop, became Girl Talk in the first year of the 21st century. Taking cues from Britney Spears’ self-positioning circa 2001 — when she was famously “Not a Girl, Not Yet A Woman” — Gillis is not a DJ, but not a traditional musician either. With the aid of computer editing software, he creates danceable sound collages that often incorporate over 15-20 audio sources: namely, popular and less popular rock, rap, dance, and electronic songs, no era or genre excluded. The sources are mostly recognizable, and his songs — Gillis calls them “songs” — carry the force of nostalgia but are reconfigured and “mashed up” enough so as to sound fresh and new and free of the groan that collects when somebody insists on playing all four minutes and seventeen seconds of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” at the holiday party. With Girl Talk, we get that blissful moment of recognition without having to suffer through the next three minutes and thirty seconds remembering exactly why it hasn’t been Hammertime for more than a decade now.

Like many others before and after him, Gillis found his success after the indie music website Pitchfork Media bestowed positive reviews upon his third album, 2006′s Night Ripper. “Pittsburgh native Greg Gillis (Girl Talk) absolutely detonates the notions of mash-up,” wrote reviewer Sean Fennessey. “As an illegal art form, it’s surprising no one came along with an idea like this sooner.” The review came out on July 17 — so maybe the summer heat kept the typically spot-on Fennessey from remembering John Oswald’s Plunderphonics, the all-stolen-sample recording from 1985.

Either way, for Pitchfork and many others, Girl Talk raised the bastard-pop bar. He was not just playing two songs on top of each other like 2ManyDJs or Freelance Hellraiser, nor was he playing two songs next to each other in an anything-goes free-for-all DJ set a la Optimo or Erol Alkan. Instead Gillis is something of a surgeon, scalpeling out drum breaks from one song, vocal melodies from another, a guitar riff from another, and stitching them into some danceable semblance of a new song. These Frankensteins were emblematic of the indie-rockcentric Pitchfork’s growing appreciation for Southern rap, modern pop, and dance music too, so it was no surprise when the site took the opportunity to award Gillis’s album Best New Music, its highest honor — to celebrate Girl Talk was, in a way, to celebrate the site itself.

Around that time, Gillis hooked up with the Chicago-based Windish Agency. He quickly began touring the world with his sweaty dance parties. He had a well-blogged reputation for inviting people on stage to dance with him as he huddled over his computer, triggering his samples live, and soon he became a festival headliner. A career in music firmly established, soon Gillis quit his Pittsburgh day-job as a biomedical engineer. And now Gillis is at the point fame-wise where MTV News is more than happy to run a story about his last show, to take place on December 21, 2012. That date counts for the end of the Mayan calendar — believed by some to be the day the world will end. For a guy who plays others people’s music, more or less, Gillis is not doing so bad for himself.

I’LL BE YOUR WHATEVER YOU WANT

Girl Talk, to his immense credit, is an avatar of the most important musical-technological developments and music-industrial complications from the last decade: (illegal) music hyper-consumption in the face of record industry meltdown; the blurring of distinctions in major and indie labels; the plumbing of indie cool; an indie-rock about-face towards “selling out”; an unprecedented participatory music culture, a next-next-level fan club. (i.e.: It’s not enough just to go to the shows, or buy the t-shirts, or track down the seven-inches.) The mega-fans are remixing their favorite songs, lacing them with dance beats and synthesizer presets, posting their remixes on their blogs, commenting on those of others. Even if there were precedents for these complications, the 21st century form of mashups is a very palpable convergence: an internet-mediated, meta-pop moment.

There was a time of openly loathing but secretly loving 2 Many DJ’s blend of Skee-Lo’s “I Wish” over “Cannonball” by the Breeders. But it wasn’t clear at the time (late 2002) that this would be a New Musical Movement with artist heroes and collectives. The mashup was at best the democratization of once elite techie show-off skills. Pro Tools Free or Fruity Loops or Live (cracked or otherwise) were now widely available, and so anybody with an ounce of computer know-how was able to twist and contort their favorite songs into a seamless mixtape. Soon, an army of sixteen year-olds would surely adopt the mashup as a standard protocol in their early musical careers. They’d figure out a way to impress girls by putting Indigo Girls tracks over “Tootsie Roll.”

HE WISHES HE WAS A BALLER

A month after Night Ripper received Best New Music, Gillis told critic Ryan Dombal, “I’m trying to separate myself from other people by having songs that would be considered — technically — original things. I don’t seek out mashups. I’m associated with the whole mashup movement, and it’s too bad because I’m not a huge fan of them.” Two years later, Gillis told Robert Levine of the New York Times, straight up, “I want to be a musician and not just a party D.J. ….and like any musician I want to put out a classic album.” Then again, Gillis doesn’t need to say anything of this sort, with the militia of sycophants he has lined up to defend his work. Our favorite is Chris Bodenner, a guest blogger at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog. Bodenner not only insists Girl Talk is an artist, but believes him to be “the artist for the Age of Obama”:

[Obama]’s campaign — buoyed by young fans and volunteers — embodies that generation in so many ways, as does Girl Talk. Obama is a young, diverse, and unique politician running an innovative, grassroots campaign that thrives offs the Internet. Similarly, Girl Talk is a young, innovative, Internet-based artist whose level of sampling is unique and incredibly diverse — racially and stylistically. And both Obama and Gillis draw from the same demographics: African-Americans and young liberal whites. Plus, they both put on killer live shows.

Suffice it to say, we did not expect the glorification of mashers-up to the point of being artists — as if “talented DJ” just couldn’t suffice. Even Belgian duo 2 Many DJs kept their dark arts in the realm of the “DJ mix.” The Skee-Lo/Breeders track, for example, boasted no pretensions of song title other than a listing of its ingredients. But for some reason this Night Ripper set was an “album” rather than a “mix,” made of “songs” and not of “mashups.”

Perhaps this posing is required, however, because Night Ripper doesn’t particularly work as a straight DJ mix. There is no build; it doesn’t breathe. The genius of 2 Many DJs and some of the other first wave mashup artists was the naturalness of their blends. Without tinkering too much, the harmonic and melodic elements would align to make a sonically pleasing moment. Christina Aguilera sounded plausible singing over The Strokes in “A Stroke of Genius.” No DJ superhero could be heard pulling the strings. In the pre-Girl Talk days, the standard of judgment was the seamlessness, the beauty of a ridiculously paired, yet ironically similar set of songs.

But this is Girl Talk. Night Ripper is a “postmodern musical creation.” This posits itself as Art — challenging all prior definitions of what it means to make music.

A NITPICKY DIGRESSION B/W BEFORE THEY WERE GIRL TALKS

Technology obscures the fact, a simple one to me, that “mashing up” is the fundamental process for music making: i.e. combining and recombining different sounds into pleasing and/or at the very least hopefully-not-boring configurations. Lynyrd Skynyrd were known to mash up guitar and bass and drums into the configuration of “Sweet Home Alabama.” Weezer had a pretty good mashup called “Say It Ain’t So.” Some people/bands make terrible mashups. Other people/bands make pretty good mashups!

All’s to say, there is a context for Girl Talk’s cut-and-paste aesthetic. Technically he is working in the tradition of musique concrete, which when Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry and Stockhausen and friends did it, comprised cutting up physical vinyl records and tape reels and re-pasting them together — using prerecorded sounds and reconfiguring them and then playing them as pastiche.

These were compositions but not traditional songs. And most of these compositions, to be frank, are more fun to think about than listen to. But since then, the concrete nature of recording has been exploited tremendously as part of the modern recording studio setup. Most radio pop songs are cut-and-pastes of previous takes actually, looped and warped and seamlessly woven together. And so musique concrete, one could reasonably argue, has significantly altered the path of recorded music, not necessarily with its content but as a process.

ROMAN CANDLE IN THE WIND

What’s tricky is that Gillis wants the Art-ness of musique concrete and the Popularity of Pop Music. Unlike musique concrete artists, even more popular ones like Matmos, Gillis wants, needs even, his samples to be fully recognizable. He is using well-known songs too, not field recordings of, say, a squeaky door hinge — so there is an element of junior-high level trainspotting to the album’s appeal, right down to the title: Night Ripper clearly plays on the Beatles song title “Day Tripper.” The tracklisting of the Night Ripper song “Smash Your Head” counts (at least) 17 samples, from Fall Out Boy to X-Ray-Spex to the Pharcyde, whose “Passing Me By” itself samples at least two songs. The effect is an advanced version of that game on the iPod, which challenges you to figure out what the song is from a four second random clip. It’s a game, and because Gillis keeps a steady beat, it’s technically danceable too.

It’s rarely listenable though — at least in any traditional, “I am taking pleasure in the configuration of these simultaneously occurring sounds and words” sense of pop music listening. Although Girl Talk has a few choice moments like the “Where Is My Mind” vs. “Hate Me Now” blend, he relies on pitch-shifting and time-distorting everything to fit within the same BPM — cramming all his various found elements into the same one-size-fits-all bed a la Greek villain Procrustes. He is obedient more to his process than the finished product. His most beloved blend of Biggie Smalls and Elton John pitches up “Tiny Dancer” to a ludicrous degree, and to add insult to injury, Gillis lets John’s artificially-chipmunked lyrics step all over Biggie’s rhymes. (This would surely prompt a severe drubbing if done in real life.) Gillis’ labored matching of “Ain’t to Proud to Beg” over “Friends of P” just sounds like “I Love the ‘90s” projectile vomiting.

There are also sloppy segments on Night Ripper where the songs’ keys don’t match up — like Ciara’s “Oh” over Elastica’s “Connection” — which I doubt was an intentional experiment in audience-polarizing post-modernism. Maybe we shouldn’t say that the errors are “unmusical” but they have the groove of a elementary school violin recital.

The ultimate glory of Girl Talk is supposed to reside in a brand new expression of “pop obsession” for a radically-different generation. But as it stands, Girl Talk just seems to love pop music as a sadistic steward, morphing all the hooks and cherished moments of the last forty years into devalued fodder for a long stream of time-stretched mid-range EQ mush with no peaks or dynamics.

Notice we don’t find Girl Talk offensive to copyright, “the ontology of art,” or pop music in general. We just think the relatively innovative gimmick of his style has exempted him from critical thought put towards the actual result. Are we a pop culture generation easily placated to hear our “references” bounced back to us, no matter the context or skill? Recall the Weezer video for “Pork and Beans.” Is the whole game now: “Hey, I know what that is!!”?

I’M GONNA ADD SOME BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

Late this summer, Girl Talk released his Night Ripper follow-up called Feed the Animals. (This is possibly a subtle reference to Belly’s “Feed the Trees,” but I doubt it.) Since Night Ripper, Gillis’s technical abilities improved, and there are fewer “unmusical” moments when keys don’t line up or samples seem sloppy. With fewer mistakes to distract us, the Girl Talk Thesis Statement seems more apparent, i.e. there is a Girl Talk Thesis Statement after all. Like a good crate-digging producer, Gillis aims to salvage what the past has discarded and wishes to figure out how to make worn-out songs sound good again.

A pretty clean example of that: He updates the build of “Dance To the Music” by Sly and the Family Stone, the part when Sly sings “I’m gonna add a little organ” and then the organ comes in, repeat with guitar, repeat with bass — except Girl Talk makes very simple substitutions for the original responses to Sly’s calls. If anything, it’s clever, a good party trick. Later Girl Talk rescues the one great chorus from an otherwise terrible Southern rap track (cf. Shawty Lo’s “They Know” or Cassidy’s “Drink N My 2 Step”) and finds it a better backbeat. Gillis sometimes just goes for broke and it works, combining awesome with awesome and giving us awesomer: For an all-too-brief time, Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” chorus glides over Kanye’s “Flashing Lights” instrumental. Getting paid is a forte; this is something else entirely.

Girl Talk is definitely Gillis’s Ongoing Project — and these records, as long as he keeps making them (four more years, dude!), could very well approach an Aesthetic if not a Point. From a technical standpoint, this is also a project that requires a certain degree of time and effort and patience (and an endless supply of a cappellas). He could just be combining any old songs, but he isn’t.

Obviously sometimes his combinations and sequences don’t taste good. But with music at least, the best moments are more value-indicative to me than the plethora of shitty ones. Shittiness is an inevitability. As pointed out, digital music manipulation tools have become cheaper and more available and the d-word, shudder, democratized. The ignobile vulgus doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to artmaking. Remember what happened when synthesizers became readily available in late disco, giving birth to house music: We first got Frankie Knuckles’ “Your Love,” but then we got, you know, everything else after that. Some of it was awesome. Most was terrible.

We’re not saying Girl Talk is the Frankie Knuckles of mash-ups. But compare him with the rest of what the internet has put out there for us — all the ridiculous song title puns — and you realize the extent to which he does care how he puts things together. His records have rough patches sonically, and he doesn’t have a handle on pacing, knowing only one speed (fast) and one density (brick) and one EQ setting (lots of mids). But he’s not exactly taking the piss, or the same kind of piss, as the rest of these people.

DJ HERO

That being said, Girl Talk’s insistence on not being a pure DJ is a key to why the music sounds like it does, why it has only one speed, one timbre, and one density: if he lets a sample or phrase or loop breath on its own without some kind of additional percussion or secondary element, he is violating his own semantic scruples. Rule Number One of Girl Talk Club: Everything must be mashed at all times or otherwise the whole musique concrete / “art compounded from other art” rationale falls away, and Gillis is “just a DJ.”

This is a bar of poetic, Babel-like heights — an exciting concept, one to which Girl Talk’s execution rarely lives up. But in doing so, Girl Talk has deftly avoided the mashup label, and the musique concrete label, in favor of a brand-new artform whose result, critics be damned, has no point of comparison.

If not an outright lie, most times uniqueness is a bad excuse for Not Art. Many artists recoil at the mere suggestion that someone is doing something else just like them. To that end, these artists create new rules so that no one is on the same court. They get away with it, in no small part because most snobby music fans hate the idea of music having a “playing field” anyway, where music becomes like sports — scratch DJs or guitar soloists who have to practice, practice, practice, who try to outdo their rivals through sheer technical skill, who play at Madison Square Garden for screaming fans, who wipe the sweat with actual towels. (Except when it’s a video game, then we suddenly love it.)

Girl Talk doesn’t want to go to the Wimbledon of mash-ups, so he created his own sport. Let’s call it Speed Mashball. I don’t think he’s the best Speed Mashball player he could be (he’s definitely gotten better since the Night Ripper Tournament), but with no competition stepping to the plate to kick a “goober-ball” (we will discuss the rules and jargon of this complicated athletic metaphor later), Girl Talk is the undisputed gold medalist. And by using every sample known to man (and every a cappella downloaded from Jam Glue), he basically outmoded the entire circa 2003 mash-up sport.

We can put Girl Talk under the umbrellas of musique concrete or loop-based pop music itself, but these titles further confuse Gillis, making him out to be some kind of outsider or misunderstood auteur. Truth is, however, Girl Talk is first and foremost a campus favorite, a party rocker, that serious DJ flown in for the Kappa Alpha party who you go and ask if he has any De La Soul; he screams at you indignantly “I just played some!” and then you go back to looking for where Carrie Ann went off to. Unlike Matmos or Pierre Schaeffer or anything musique concrete, Girl Talk needs “the critics” as much as Tay “Chocolate Rain” Zonday does — which is to say, not at all. Dude’s likely got every weekend for the next year booked without all the ink spilled from the pens of eggheads.

As a second cousin, Girl Talk has that guy who sped-up all the Beatles albums to fit in a single ten minute file. But that particular music auteur gets no love from Pitchfork, no respect as “an artist.” Must be his subpar Street Team.

THE LEGOMANIAC

Can a process truly be called “repurposing” or “recontextualizing” when Repurpose and Recontext is built into the content’s genetic code? When it’s all part of the master plan? Disco and funk producers didn’t intend for their drum breaks to become the stuff of rap samples — yet with Girl Talk compositions, one wonders how much of Gillis’s ease is a testament to his technical prowess, and how much is just an articulation of the fact that pop music has become increasingly standardized, its parts more or less interchangeable. All major rap singles, for instance, come with an instrumental and a vocal a cappella; the verses are mostly all the same length, about 16 bars; the choruses are all more of less the same length of time too. It is understood within the architecture of pop and hip-hop music these days that the song is waiting, begging even, to be mashed up.

A modern audience likely won’t find anything remotely violent or controversial or confrontational to Girl Talk presenting this information either. Rock has coexisted with hip-hop has coexisted with noise. Our ears are better-than-ever equipped to handle these kinds of recombinations. Girl Talk has a moment on Feed The Animals when he puts a rap over the French disco-house track “Music Sounds Better With You,” and another one when we hear Lil Mama over Metallica’s “One.” It’s telling how little these tracks sound out of the ordinary, because ten years ago I suspect they would have. Just last year, Kanye took Daft Punk’s electro track “Harder Better Faster Stronger” and put rapping over it, called it “Stronger,” and it went to #1 on the Billboard Pop 100. Discounting the precedent of the Beastie Boys, Jay-Z’s best-selling Black Album in 2003 was filled with Lil Mama/Metallica-type moments. In the public imagination, these artistic decisions are no longer scandalous.

We’re seeing this in other situations, as the idea of user-generated content delights our commerce so — that the line between Ultimate Fan and Actual Artist is rendered the same in terms of exchange value. In 2008, Girl Talk is pop music’s Ultimate Fan. But the extent to which the music he’s working with is so portable, so building-block ready, makes it seem like he’s not making art so much as merely following industry directions: Step by step, like he’s putting together a Lego spaceship. There is no violence in this process, in other words; he’s hardly repurposing much of anything. Instead it’s like a video game in which Gillis has found the warp level — yet keep in mind, somebody somewhere had to program that warp level precisely so that it would be discovered.

THE 21ST NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER

And as the Ultimate Fan, Girl Talk exists as a mover not of music but nostalgia. He is the guy at the party who says, “Remember slap bracelets?” Dude: How about devil sticks?

Although there are things to hate about the whole “mass nostalgia” angle, who can gainsay the fact that the first major role of our new internet-based culture is to dig back in the near past and scream, “Yo, you remember this shit?” — whether it’s 1970s toy commercials on YouTube or Super Mario Bros. mycology sets on BoingBoing or funny Russian Speed Racer overdubs on Some Awful Thing. There is no way VH1 could have a “nostalgia for this week” show unless they felt the pressure to one-up the Internet where it’s all nostalgia all the time. Girl Talk fits into our national cultural mood extremely well. Gillis is the musical equivalent of “Best Week Ever.” And I am sure that even that show could be legitimized as “a perfect manifestation of what McLuhan and Warhol augured” rather than Lowest Common Denominator TV.

(A personal note from David: As someone living in the far Orient and generally ignoring recent American “popular” music to listen to David Brooks and Mark Shields battle it out on podcasts, I am either the least or most qualified person to make a judgment on Girl Talk. I had no idea Kayne West made music; I just thought he was that whiny Fauntleroy in shutter sunglasses always hanging out at colette in Paris. Forget art. The question is, without a public hungry for the references, is Feed the Animals anything at all? Does Girl Talk hold up as “music” without all the extratextual information? If you had no idea about mash-ups or hip-hop or “No Diggity” or “Epic” by Faith No More would you really be all that impressed? It would just be a long stream of unstructured pop drone. Imaginary straw-men that have lived in a underground bunker for fifty years would totally hate Girl Talk!)

To extend the earlier Lego metaphor: Just as bloggers have two basic options — write original content or become a central link warehouse — musicians now can either mold the musical blocks for other “secondary” artists or build the “spaceship” from the publicly available kit. But these are not equal options. I doubt that anyone will ever sample Kayne’s “Stronger.” It’s a dead-end, a cultural vasectomy.

A REALLY EASY WAY TO CONNECT TO PEOPLE

“The whole basis of the music is that people have these emotional attachments to these songs,” Gillis told Pitchfork. “Being able to manipulate that is a really easy way to connect with people.”

If Girl Talk has done anything, his dead-end project is a reminder of how fiercely dominant Western pop music has become. This is a capitulation, an audio essay even, of the last 25 years of American pop music: loop-based, interchangeable parts that, turns out, are more similar than maybe we’d like to admit. The “isn’t it funny how ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ sounds like that Boston song” moment is taken to its darkest, veil-lifted extreme. That we’re back in the Tin Pan Alley, and all pop music might actually be the same after all. That the difference is truly manufactured, that the concerns of each song are not interesting. Taking cues from the Grand Wizard Theodor: pop music is not art, but sound design.

Therein lies the insidiousness. Adorno pulled no punches. But Girl Talk poses as a pop optimist. He loves pop music — all pop music. It’s all so unique. It’s all just so great to him. Implicit in his project is that: It’s all so similar to him too. That it all sounds the same in the end. That listening to a bunch of songs we used to care about in his refracted, rejiggered form is, at its heart, the same exact thing, compositionally and otherwise, as listening to a brand new song by a brand new musician. Why bother, right? This project, worse than any covert corporate sponsorship, he calls a celebration of pop music. What he himself doesn’t know is we already had a name for it: la danse macabre.

“I come to Akihabara…” / “I came to Akihabara…”

Sunday, June 8, 2008. A man drives a truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, killing three. He emerges from his vehicle and goes on a stabbing rampage that leaves four others dead before he is finally apprehended.

He tells police, “I came to Akihabara to kill people. It didn’t matter who they were. I came alone.”

The Japanese media attempts to brand the perpetrator as a fan of anime and manga — an otaku. Fuji TV reveals that the killer, an impoverished 25 year old temp worker at an auto components factory, liked to sing anime theme songs at karaoke. A Tokyo newspaper headline blasts the “Evil Deeds of the Akiba Otaku.”

By the June 10th, the story goes worldwide. The Sydney Morning Herald labels the crime to be the work of a “manga enthusiast” and a “comic book killer.”

Yet real evidence is hard to find. The killer had only drawn a single manga style illustration in his high school yearbook. Police recovered a mere handful of items from his small apartment, including an assortment of anime and video games.

They number exactly seven in all, the same number as the “Akihabara Massacre” death toll.

On June 13, the Tokyo Public Safety Council indefinitely suspends the long standing Sunday hokoten tradition in Akihabara. The streets will be reopened to traffic and pedestrians will no longer be permitted free reign of Chuo-dori until further notice. Police presence (and the random bag checks they bring with them), is noticeably increased.

On September 24th, Japan has a new head of government: Asō Tarō. The international fan press is quick to dub him “The Otaku Prime Minister” on account of a widely reported love of manga.

Years earlier, he makes headlines by holding political rallies in Akihabara where he addressed the crowds as “My fellow otaku.”

October 26: the new PM returns triumphantly to the area and says, “I can cheer up when I come to Akihabara.”

He is also quoted as saying, “We’ve got to brighten up Japan. You’ll never pick up girls unless you have a bright attitude. So don’t be having a ‘Japan’s future is looking dim’ look on your face. Have a positive attitude if you wanna pick up girls.”

On December 7th, 2008 the Mainichi Shimbun and the Yomiuri Shimbun report that a 21 year old unemployed man suspected of murdering and dumping the body of a five year old girl in Toganeshi is an anime and manga fan. His room, decorated with posters from anime intended for young girls, also contains bookshelves filled with manga from the series Precure, Saint Seiya, and Bleach.

Only the Anime News Network website follows the story outside of Japan.

“This guy just killed Akihabara the way Charles Manson killed the Sixties. And we’re all under arrest now…” I wrote on my blog earlier this year. I still don’t know what I meant by that.

Kato Tomohiro

Asō Tarō

Katsuki Ryo

As the kanji of the year suggested, 2008 was a year for change. Change, of course, was the message of U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama’s campaign, but in Japan, change seemed to mostly refer to the teledrama CHANGE, starring male idol Kimura Takuya as Asakura Keita — a schoolteacher pressed into political service after his politician father’s death (this is Japan, after all). The naïve and idealistic teacher is propelled to the premiership by the political fixers of the ruling party, who think his popularity can save their flailing organization. Naturally he rises above the murk of the political world and delivers change Japan can believe in.

The story could not be less connected to the reality of Japanese politics in 2008.

Japan started the year governed by Fukuda Yasuo, who spoke of the need for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to listen to the people. He, however, resigned as prime minister in September, speaking of how he was “different” from the people (which prompted a Japanese internet meme). His replacement Asō Tarō was elected LDP president — and with it, prime minister — by a landslide in the party’s emergency election. Mr. Asō — best known outside Japan for his manga obsession and his all-too-frequent gaffes — was able to convince the party rank-and-file (who rewarded him 134 out of 141 LDP prefectural votes) and the party’s Diet members that he was in touch with the Japanese people and that only he could restore public faith in Japan’s long-time ruling party.

This has not quite happened. Far from being in touch with the concerns of the Japanese people, Mr. Asō may be the most insensitive yet. He has been dogged by reports that he frequently spends his evenings drinking in luxury bars. He spoke poorly of doctors and the elderly, important constituencies in a rapidly aging society. These miscues, while crude, will probably not make or break the LDP in the next general election, but Mr. Asō’s inability to respond effectively to the gathering global crisis currently consuming Japan just may. As 2008 ends, Japan finds itself in recession once again, but the LDP has been hesitant in formulating a response. In large part this is because the Asō government is a prisoner of past decisions taken by LDP governments; namely, the government’s hands are tied by a national debt totaling roughly 180 percent of GDP — by far the largest debt/GDP ratio in the OECD. Mr. Asō is also suffering from the mistakes of his immediate predecessors: Abe Shinzo’s disastrous response to missing pensions records contributed to the LDP’s defeat in the 2007 elections for the Japanese Diet’s upper house. And Mr. Fukuda poorly managed the roll-out of a new health care system for citizens over seventy-five. Both have battered the LDP’s support among broad swathes of the public. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), already in control of the upper house, is poised to perform well in the next election, even in regions that have long been LDP strongholds.

That being said, the prime minister who has most profoundly impacted today’s LDP is none other than Koizumi Junichiro. Mr. Koizumi’s term as prime minister ended in 2006, but his impact continues to the present. Mr. Koizumi waged open war on the “old” LDP — the party of public works pork, postal patronage, massive koenkai (politicians’ personal support groups), and government-by-factions and zoku giin. He sought to reform the party and the cabinet to strength the position of the prime minister, while changing how Japan spent money on public works in order to undermine what he called the “opposition forces” — i.e., LDP politicians of the old school. The battle over postal privatization tied together all of these threads.

But Mr. Koizumi left before he could complete his project to remake the LDP and nation. And in doing so he may have dealt a death blow to the LDP, perhaps as he intended.

Mr. Koizumi left an LDP torn into pieces. His electoral coattails created a strong reformist bloc within the party: the so-called Koizumi children. At the same time, however, Mr. Koizumi’s departure emboldened the opposition forces, who under Abe, Fukuda, and Asō have worked to reverse or stall further structural reforms and isolate the reformist bloc within the party. Divisions within the LDP is mirrored in the public at large. In urban districts, where Mr. Koizumi enjoyed great success — and where a number of the Koizumi children have their seats — voters are dismayed by the backsliding in the LDP and will likely turn back to the DPJ in the general election required to be held by September 2009. In less populated districts, however, voters are aggrieved over Mr. Koizumi’s reforms, having watched influxes of money from Tokyo dwindle and waited for the government to do something to reverse the precipitous decline of Japan outside Kanto. (Given the demographic makeup of rural Japan, these voters are undoubtedly also alarmed at government mismanagement of the health and pensions systems.) These dynamics contributed to the DPJ’s 2007 victory — Ozawa Ichirō, the DPJ’s president, is a product of the Tanaka Kakuei machine that fortified LDP rule in these areas, and he ably exploited the dissatisfaction of both urban and rural voters.

The civil war within the LDP may also finally be coming to a head. As 2008 reaches its denouement, the LDP’s reformists — who have grown ever more discontent at their isolation within the party and fear for their electoral lives if they run under the banner of Mr. Asō — may finally be prepared to break with the LDP. Watanabe Yoshimi, a leading Koizumian and a crusading administrative reform minister under Abe and Fukuda, has openly criticized Mr. Asō’s leadership and suggested that he may try to topple the government and form his own party. Other prominent reformists have criticized Mr. Asō, suggesting that Mr. Watanabe might be able to lead enough reformers out of the party to strip the government of its parliamentary super-majority and trigger a general election.

In short, while it appears that Japan experienced no change whatsoever, 2008 has indeed been a year of change. Not merely a change of prime ministers, but a change in the comparative standing of the LDP and the DPJ. Decay could be considered change as well. It is far from clear how the LDP’s current crisis will resolve. 2009 may bring monumental change to the political system: the LDP breaking in half, a new reformist party’s becoming the key to forming a government, the DPJ winning power in a landslide.

One way or another, Japan needs political change. The latest economic downturn will only exacerbate the problems already facing Japan. It will make it all the more difficult for the government to provide pensions and other social services. It will delay the government’s efforts to pay down Japan’s national debt to more sustainable levels. It will swell the already swollen ranks of Japan’s temporary workers, who now constitute nearly a third of the labor force. And it will do little to encourage younger Japanese to marry and start families. Contrary to the political philosophy of TV drama CHANGE, changing leaders — or ruling parties — will not make these problems go away. Even Mr. Koizumi, the closest Japan has come to a truly dynamic leader, was forced to compromise in his desire for reform. Change is difficult, and it will not emanate solely from Nagatacho.

Voting the LDP out of power, however, could still be an important first step in changing Japan by making its political parties more accountable to the public and stimulating new ideas for how to solve the growing list of problems that darken Japan’s future. Rather than placing blind hope in the “Japanese Obama” — whoever that might be — or a particular party, the Japanese people should strive to build a more responsive, transparent, and accountable democracy. That would truly be change.

The Japan Kanji Proficiency Examination Association (日本漢字能力検定協会) have announced their 2008 Kanji of the Year: 変, meaning both “strange” and “change” (and even “rebellion“).

I had high hopes for this year after the sneering cynicism of 2007′s winning kanji, 偽 (fake), but KotY voters clearly aren’t yet prepared to abandon basket-of-puppies territory. Not that they aren’t representing some sort of Zeitgeist — @nifty got exactly the same results polling bloggers — but when both Obama and Aso qualify as examples of the same phenomenon, it’s clearly “change” defined extremely broadly.

Tansho Miki (丹所美紀) observes [and Scilla Alecci translates], 変 by itself feels much closer to “strange” or “mistaken” than “change,” which, she argues, applies to Aso perfectly.

Runners up included 金 (money), 落 (fall), and 株 (stock), for obvious international reasons; 毒 (poison) and 食 (food), reflecting ongoing popular anxiety over food safety; and 不 (un-), which is straight-up nihilism — those who selected it invoke compounds like 不安 (uncertainty), 不幸 (misfortune), and even 不気味 (creepy).

Related: Pink Tentacle’s essential annual rundown of the year’s top 60 Japanese words.

Doomsayers rejoiced in late 2008: Japan is officially in a recession.

This Time article places part of the blame on the Japanese people’s "structural pessimism" — a catchy phrase from Shirakawa Hiromichi, chief economist at Credit Suisse Japan. As the term suggests, the Japanese suffer from a general lack of confidence about the Japanese economy and the nation’s future, and as a result, are weary of big spending. Global surveys and studies (like this and this) tend to back up this idea of the Japanese people being relatively dour. Forrester Research shows Japan’s "technology optimism" to be one of the lowest in the world — odd for a country that for so long embodied the promise of a plugged-in future.

Now I am sure there are lots of fancy micro- and macro-economic ways to explain the current situation that do not involve sweeping generalizations of the population’s mood, but since Shirakawa brought this up, I feel like we should take a deeper look. It’s easy to blame this mass psychological disposition towards pessimism on some innate and unbending cultural characteristic. All those enka songs are in minor keys, right? And Kabuki is not one for happy endings. Must be something in the water. And listen to the phrase “structural pessimism”: that doesn’t sound like it’s going away anytime soon. Japan would be much better off suffering from something like “faddish pessimism.”

I wonder though: okay, the Japanese public have an aesthetic lean towards the bittersweet and tragic, but maybe, just maybe, the current pessimism is mostly a result of what can be called the national narrative.

Think about Japan’s post-war story. The defeated nation goes from total annihilation and its first-ever foreign Occupation in the 1940s to becoming the second-largest non-Communist economy by the 1968. This was an economic miracle, and things only got better from there. By the 1980s, the forward trajectory of the high-growth years catapulted Japan to almost rival the United States in terms of economic success. Maybe Japan’s total GDP would never surpass the United States, but the average citizen knew a consumer power that made Americans look like peasants.

Turned out, however, that most of the conspicuous prosperity was all built on air, and the long post-Bubble recession of the 1990s sent the Japanese Icarus crashing to the sea. Although the country was technically in "recession" during the Nineties, the “Lost Decade” corresponded with a cultural renaissance: import fashion sales continued to grow until 1996, magazines peaked in 1995, and the music market expanded up until 1999. Like most consumer technology, the emerging mobile market was light years ahead of the United States. Sure, there was a pesky recession, but the vibrant cultural and high-tech atmosphere helped distract from the economic worries. People were still out spending on superfluous lifestyle goods. If recession was this fun, who needed economic progress? Most importantly, the ’80s hubris had helped erode the inferior complex towards the West, meaning that less people were so worried about that former benchmark of "catching up."

Optimism and pessimism are all expectation games. Lifestyle-wise, the ’90s were not so bad for most Japanese despite the newspapers full of doom-and-gloom. The real problem for Japan started in 2003, when the economy was nominally growing. As Roppongi Hills opened and the New Rich became media celebrities, everyone was primed for a return to ’80s economic fun. Most quickly realized, however, that this unprecedented long-term economic expansion did not improve the lifestyle of the average worker. The rich got super rich, but wages were stagnant for most. Young people got jobs, but they were now hired as “non-regular employees” with 40% of the benefits of the Waseda-graduate “regular employee” sitting right next to him and doing the exact same job. And moreover, culture — the ice cream filling to the social infrastructure’s waffle cone — plunged into oblivion as almost all markets for cultural products (magazines, video games, TV, fashion, music, lifestyle vehicles) nosedived and lost relevance. What could be less inspiring than the feel of stagnation and decline in midst of long-term "economic growth"?

So Japan is in recession now, and most rightly feel, if 21st century economic growth was that bad, is there even an light to the end of the current recessionary tunnel? The United States was saved in the 1990s by innovation in the information technology fields, but the Japanese have little optimism here and have no examples of how Japanese leadership on the internet will improve the economy. The best Vegas bet Japan can make is on robots, but I have not seen Asimo doing much new lately. There are dire long-term demographic issues, worries about the need for mass immigration, and a highly-ineffective political system rarely known to kick up dynamic and wide-scale action. Two Prime Minister from the eternally-ruling LDP have stepped down before a year in office, and Aso has lost support. What in the world are the Japanese people supposed to be optimistic about?

Ōno Susumu (大野晋), Old Japanese specialist and one of Japan’s best-known linguists, passed away in a Tokyo hospital at the age of 88 on July 14 this year.

Ōno made his academic name with important work on early Japanese writing and phonology in the 1950s, and his subsequent publications include new scholarly editions of various classics, Iwanami Shoten’s early Japanese dictionary, and popular bestsellers like Nihongo renshū chō (『日本語練習帳』, “Japanese exercise book”). He also famously testified during the Sayama Incident trials, voicing his doubt that the defendant had written the (orthographically bizarre) ransom note.

You can view Ōno’s œuvre as a marvelous reef accreted during his lifelong attempt to answer the question which, he occasionally observed, had driven him since his undergraduate days: “What is Japan?” However, unlike similarly-motivated nihonjinron authors, Ōno believed that the best way to address this issue was to examine Japan’s historical relationships with other regions and cultures, searching for connections and similarities. If that occasionally led him to see things that other academics generally agree weren’t there — like his infamous support for the Dravidian hypothesis, with particular reference to Tamil — well, it didn’t diminish the value of his other scholarship. And hey, it’s always good to be reminded of the need to read academic work critically.

Of course, Ōno was also a popularizer. Despite his personal dislike of modernized kana and similar philologically unsound post-Meiji developments, when he wrote for non-academic readers it was always in a clear and unpretentious modern style. The Q-and-A format of Ōno Susumu no nihongo sōdan (『大野晋の日本語相談』, “Ōno Susumu’s answers on Japanese”), a collection of newspaper columns in which Ōno answered readers’ questions on the Japanese language, is a showcase for the Ōno approach: patient, generous, and always eager to show people the cabinet of wonders that Japonic linguistics can be.

As L+L editor I have failed miserably to organize the posting of some sort of “Best books of 2008″ list at Néojaponisme this month. Fortunately, this is the internet, so I’m going to crowd-source it instead. Please go crazy in the comments section, electing a King of Books by popular acclaim and thrusting a rude crown of yongs upon its weary brow. I hope that allowances will also be made for queens, dukes, stewards, etc. (Participants in this thread, I choose you!)

In the meantime I have decided to plug a 2008 book that I think more Japanese language and literature nerds should be down with: Yakuchū renju shikaku (『訳注聯珠詩格』, “An annotated translation of Lianzhu Shige“). This is — bear with me — a modern paperback edition, with modern notes and editing courtesy of Ibi Takashi (揖斐高) for Iwanami Bunko, of an Edo-period edition, with contemporary translation and editing courtesy of Kashiwagi Jotei (柏木如亭), of an early Yuan poetry anthology called Lianzhu Shige (『聯珠詩格』, “Poetic forms [arranged] like a strand of beads”), edited by Cai Zhengsun (蔡正孫), based on an earlier anthology by Yu Ji (于濟).

Why is it so great? Two reasons: Ibi’s afterword, which compresses a cloud of detail encompassing everything from Chinese history to Edo-period approaches to translation into a mere 25 gemlike pages, and Kashiwagi’s translations into the Edo vernacular, which are an unadulterated delight.

I wrote about this on my own blog earlier in the year, but it needs to be said again: this is a great book for anyone interested in the Chinese influence on Japan’s literary scene. You get Chinese, Edo-period kundoku, Edo-dialect translations (更無 → sappari nai; 成末 → dekita ka dō da), and modern scholarly notes, all on the same page. I’ve been enjoying this since it came out, and I don’t intend to stop any time soon.