Rumor has it that Japan’s most beloved female singer Koda Kumi is dating Japan’s most talented dance group vocalist Nakai from Japan’s most lovable replacement for Hikaru Genji — SMAP.

Now this confuses me a bit, since I was operating on the gossip that Koda Kumi was determined to get married by the age of 25 and had a long-term “non-celebrity” boyfriend who manages some sort of drinking establishment. If I had set myself a date for marriage at 25 and had only a few months left to go, I would probably stick with the boyfriend of four years and not switch over to a slave to an entertainment agency that does not let any of its employees get married (unless, of course, they knock up someone famous. Retirement and death are also acceptable excuses for matrimony.)

Not to mention that the timing on the Koda-Nakai romance is suspicious when viewed from the angle of organizational relations. Here again, Avex and Johnny’s Jimusho have come together to make a model romance and thrust their stars into the pages of gossip weeklies. Last time they tried this, they got seven whole years out of the relationship between Hamasaki Ayumi and TOKIO heartthrob Nagase. This ended about a month ago, so in my delusional paranoid understanding, a meeting was called, two candidates were chosen and the management companies sealed the deal with a handshake: Kuu-tan, meet your new fictional beau. Nakai, go ahead and tell your friends about this.

The great thing about these mock relationships is that they don’t get in the way of real sexual priorities. Even if Nakai goes off and does what he wants, it’s not like magazines would dare write a story about the girlfriends of SMAP members. If Johnny’s Jimusho Youth Brigades get photographed at a wild sex party, the press will graciously black the eyes out to secure deniability. I mean, Hamasaki Ayumi didn’t let her faux relationship to Nagase get in the way of her real engagement to Futura 2000’s son back in 2004.

With so much of this celebrity gossip being a mix between press releases on one side and completely unreliable sensationalism on the other, I find it very difficult to tell which stories I am supposed to believe for the artist’s sake and which I am supposed to ignore. A few weeks ago, I heard a second-hand story that the Friday article about Babel-babe Kikuchi Rinko dating a foreigner was based on dubious information directly from the Kikuchi camp. The “foreigner” had met her once, but was of the old school that considered meeting someone different than “dating.”

Long story short, we public have no real allies in this information war. For a long time, there has been a defense of the Japanese news system that important investigative stories do come out, just not in the newspapers or on TV. Most famously, a weekly shukanshi broke the Lockheed Scandal rather than the mainstream media. Great: information cannot be completely controlled, but if I was an elite trying to keep reigns on power, I would be overjoyed that any non-approved, non-press club information could only find a home in totally unreliable magazines that mix investigative reporting, intentionally leaked stories, and pure fiction.

I guess I am going to keep believing that this Koda-Nakai thing is a total hoax, because that is equally believable as the alternative.

Bonus Topic: Did anyone ever see the MTV show about Misono — Koda Kumi’s little sister? The premise was that she had gotten so fat that her management company refused to promote her music, so she went on a diet to lose weight to win her career back. Turning lemons into lemonade, that management company helped make the humiliating exercise of forced dieting into an extremely dignified reality TV show. She apparently gained all the weight back, because just maybe, she has naturally has an endomorphic body type and the weight wasn’t a problem to start with. But may I suggest that she has no real hereditary claims to automatic pop success anyway? Her equivalent in the world of homicide would be the little brother of the guy who claimed he killed Jon Benet.

At State Fairs, they have those “Put Your Picture on a Magazine” booths and 350 lb. fathers-of-three walk away with a personalized “Dwayne Wins the Superbowl” cover of Time (or Timely). I was pretty sure this hilarious convention didn’t exist in Japan, but looky here: some very mediocre-looking girl made herself a fake Pinky cover in a mall somewhere and the editors of the real Pinky accidentally used it for the front of their 12/06 issue. Wait, wait, my bad, that’s just Koda Kumi… She’s a popular idol singer in Japan. I forget the reason why.

Now I hate to be judging celebrities on their personal appearance and natural attractiveness, but we are working within an industry that strips all artists of any original personality traits and rights to creative exploration in order to market them as commodities. And we consumers have been asked to not look too critically at voice talent or songwriting skills and just take the record companies at their word regarding the artists’ overall cultural value. But there is no way we can avoid judging these commodities on physical appearance if that is the one remaining criteria up for debate. I and many others are going to naturally question how this particular subpar star got to where she is, seeing that there are thousands of decent-looking, no-talent girls in the industry to choose from who would be happy to sing unmemorable Eurobeat songs for the dwindling CD-buying public. The Machine, however, has decided in eerie Lynchian fashion that “This is the girl,” and we will have to sit through a storm of magazine covers and TV specials until “they” find someone else or she foolishly breaks up with her production office CEO beau. [Ed.: This last idea is based on normal industry patterns, not Koda’s actual story.]

On a slightly related note, I saw prepackaged idol Matsuura Aya on “Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ” last night where she halted the conversation and told some new Yoshimoto female manzai group to their faces, “You guys just aren’t that funny” which was incredibly tactless but kind of right on. Idols are not supposed to be so honest nor critical nor wiseasses. What is going on in this country?

Now that Cornelius (Oyamada Keigo) is finally releasing his new album after five years of quiet laboratory work and being the Japanese Music World’s Greatest Dad¹, everyone is suddenly interested in taking another look at Shibuya-kei as background to how Oyamada can release an album of aimless electro-acoustic tinkerings and automatically make the media world go into a frenzy. Subsequently, I was invited to write a piece in today’s Japan Times about the movement to go along with their Cornelius interview (most likely because Momus turned it down.) If you have read my “Legacy of Shibuya-kei” pieces (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), the content of today’s article should be very familiar to you.

Recruit’s free-paper R25 had the same idea as the Times, and their new issue — which can be picked up off the floors of rush-hour subways starting today — has a “long interview” with Oyamada. Oddly, they spend the entire interview talking about his original activity with Flipper’s Guitar rather than the new album. But since the magazine is about “stimulating” men in the business world, the article is most interested in Oyamada’s anomalous success as somebody who never cared about success. A very ’90s idea, indeed.

Things I learned from the R25 interview:

* Oyamada used to be in a Jesus and Mary Chain and Cramps cover band in high school, and none of his fellow students had any idea what was going on.
* Oyamada was in the hospital recovering from a traffic accident when he first heard about the success of the first Flipper’s album Three Cheers for Our Side.
* After FG broke up, the first thing Oyamada did was music for hair care product TV commercials (I knew he did print ads for Uno.)
* He never really took his business seriously until signing to Matador in the U.S. and going abroad.

The article also emphasizes the wide effect of Oyamada’s aesthetic sense (審美眼) on Japanese youth culture, and the context makes it clear that Flipper’s Guitar was one of the first popular musical acts in Japan to explicitly reference obscure Western bands that were not even big in their home countries. Oyamada gives the impression that he himself was very surprised that the music industry would care about what they as total music nerds were doing in their spare time:

I was influenced by really small English indie labels, and I was active in a tiny scene that probably didn’t even make up 100 listeners all across the country. So I never thought that the music I was doing could become a job. I was pretty sure we were all otaku and that itself was fun. So even if the record companies started to talk to us, I didn’t think more of it than “Oh, they have some weird people over there too.” We just thought about putting out one album for posterity’s sake. (記念に一枚)

This historical picture paints pre-Flipper’s Japan (circa 1988) as something completely different than what exists now. Did Flipper’s Guitar singlehandedly bring the widespread love of obscure foreign indie and underground culture to the Japanese pop economy, or was it just the soundtrack for a coeval broad consumer movement? Seeing that Flipper’s did a large part in introducing so much to their legions of fans, I find it hard to remove them completely from the cause-and-effect. Surely the media environment was right for a diversification in aesthetic sense from the monolithic (and boring) Bubble tastes, but Oyamada was the guy who jump-started the whole phenomenon.

Yet there is something dangerous about using this narrative in a recruitment-related magazine in 2006. On one hand, the Oyamada story is great for illustrating that Japan’s true heroes are those who are more interested in pleasing their own fickle tastes than doing everything in the least-common-denominator mode to reach eventual business success. I hope, however, that the kid who plays bass in his Green Day-tribute band doesn’t get the wrong idea about employment being an natural extension of indie nerdism. Cornelius succeeded because Japan had the world’s most vibrant, wealthy consumer culture and was primed for someone with superior taste to lead them to the world standards for cool. But the country already completed that march to the extremes a decade ago, and now the powers-that-be are trying to shepherd everyone back to more easily-understandable local festivals (which conveniently keep money and power in their hands). No one ever again will succeed like Cornelius — at least for a very long time.

I am pleased to see Shibuya-kei being treated as an important historical era. And as much as I do not think his latest album is as inspiring as his earlier output, I think Cornelius’ success in the ’90s gives him the legitimate right to live out the rest of his years as a venerable war hero.

¹ — When I lived in Sangenjaya, I would frequently pass the King Ape playing with his son Milo.

Being halfway ’round the world and therefore chronically nescient of au courant vagaries in the common culture — in just one recent example, I hardly knew young troubadour Robert Kelly had now moved into making the operetta “Trapped in the Closet” — word has only now reached my Oriental covert about the jesters contriving their own brand of chortles with the Yacht Rock project.

This serial manages to tickle, mauger low levels of thespian prowess and shoddy aural reproduction. But naught for mere irony nor reference back to former jukebox platters of our salad days. We, my compatriots, have swam into a new ken (forgive me, Keats) of “Heracles comedy” in which jokes cease to be things within themselves, but mere reflections upon the preposterous and astounding efforts of the creators. Just as Colossus at Rhodes bewildered ancient Greeks solely through an intimidation of size, our delight with Yacht Rock must stem from the makers’ incredulous erudition about extremely unctuous popular songs (in their cant, “smooth”) verdant in the mid ’70s to the early ’80s — including such bygone hit-makers as Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers, Toto, Hall & Oates, and Loggins & Messina.

Whether it be rockist sensibilities denouncing all deviation from the traditional neo-lyre/bass-lyre/kettledrum arrangement or an objective disapprobation of the songs’ hollow constructions, this genre has fallen out of favor, like Leon Czolgosz in Anarchist circles post-Buffalo, out of sight and mind, with nary a paladin coming forward to bequeath a posthumous legitimacy. First and foremost, unlike punk and prog and new wave, this Yacht Rock field created few scions in the fag end of the century. Not even a plash of this production vocabulary carried on into later musical evolutions, nor did bastards materialize to carry the tricot into the dawn without official blessing. A comparison to the “Soft Rock” of the ’60s may be apropos, but the Grover Cleveland beards, overall malaise of the stagflated political and social climate, and embarrassing transgressions of the movement’s alumni tend to put posterior eulogizing beyond the pale. (We now apperceive Kenny Loggins as the man sailing into the Top Gun “Danger Zone” — not as the dapper youngster on a docked yacht singing with Jim Messina.) For anyone with aught sense of risibility, Christopher Cross would be the butt of myriad jokes — if we could remember who in Hades he was!

Indeed I laugh at the queerness of the “smooth” oeuvres and their newfound classification — a celebration of our Linnean prowess to attribute sporadic cases of a terse past outbreak as a new strain of consumption, dengue, or impetigo. But moreover, I go goobers over the very idea of excess knowledge about the mundane, that someone out in the world would fashion and form plot details based on true-life Yacht Rock trivia — e.g., that Van Halen was produced by the Doobie Brothers’ producer, a morsel used in Episode Nine. Bully to anyone who can remember that Michael McDonald was mercilessly pommeled on SCTV and then employ this historical crumb to attribute human motivations for Toto “pacifying” Michael Jackson with “Human Nature.”

In our futurity, we may decline to relish craft, and instead, rejoice from these new International-Network wonders of the human spirit. Yacht Rock’s Toto may not be funny in toto, but the idea of such blithe dedication to forlorn music may keep us exulting in the morrow.

Yoshi from OK Fred just sent me this news clip of a March 1995 NHK evening news report on “Shibuya-kei.” (Note the male newscaster’s hilariously outdated reference to shibukaji — a late ’80s clothing trend that had already been over for years at the time of the broadcast.)

The gist of the story is that HMV and Tower Records essentially created a new genre in the Japanese music market: Shibuya-kei was the first hougaku (邦楽, Japanese music) to sound like yougaku (洋楽, Western music). Until that point, most kids bought music strictly according to performances on network television programs, which are decided by organizational relations between the TV networks and artist management companies. Suddenly in Shibuya, buyers started recommending a host of unknown bands from tiny labels on the basis of subjective quality. Subjectivity on a mass scale breeds diffusion and chaos, but when centralized within two main stores in one area, this selection practice ended up creating large-scale, visible consumer patterns. For a short while, if Ohta Hiroshi liked you, you could suddenly sell 100K copies.

These days, Tower Records and HMV have taken on a supermarket mentality — almost anyone can “rent” floor space regardless of musical quality. These stores’ buyers still probably make good selections, but there’s too much clutter, too many options, too many branches, too much diffusion. In the end, this zaps away their taste-making authority. Pitchfork Media may be currently enjoying a similar level of power, but the level of their impact on the (fringe) music market depends upon their monopoly over authority. Too many Pitchforks means less mass commercial viability for bands.