I did the least Japanese thing ever: I got cable TV.

Through some weird promotions and unclear machinations, I would actually save money by adding cable to my broadband package.

Back at my former residence, I enjoyed watching cable once and a while, eating breakfast over a little MTV, the occasional Shiina Ringo special on Space Shower TV, old dubbed episodes of The Monkees, observing the total deterioration in J-pop on Sony’s MOTV video countdowns (no, not “Music Television” but “Music on Television.”)

So this was more of a return to cable, rather than a new adventure. A sequel. Just when I thought that I was out, they pull me back in…

I click on Space Shower TV and am greeted by the new Shiina Ringo video. I remember her, but I had completely forgotten that they still make music videos.

As somebody who spent a good chunk of his youth obsessed with Japanese pop music, I have enjoyed the last few years of total and utter market decline because J-pop is now so thoroughly mediocre and bad that you can completely ignore it and not miss anything. No one else is listening, so why should you. There is no pressure to keep up. I mean, do you worry about what’s going on in the Professional Bowlers Association?

In the 1990s — uh-oh, that decade again! — Japanese pop music went through a massive renaissance, and even if looking back Kahala Tomomi wasn’t exactly the height of creative exploration, J-Pop mattered. Knowing the latest hits was crucial for karaoke. Melodies drifted through the streets of Shibuya. Hit songs could make hit products and vice versa.

The market for recorded music has completely tanked in Japan (much like the U.S.), but the low numbers do not reveal the full story of evaporated influence.

The best-selling star of our era is Koda Kumi — whom I pretty much loathe. But, it’s not just me. Tantei File found that Ms. Koda is the celebrity the public most wants to disappear. See what is happening: J-Pop is such a total niche market at this point that the top star can have absolutely no public support and still reign as queen. An Oricon #1 right now is about as impressive as being the best backgammon player in Brevard, North Carolina.

Oddly, however, the main music TV shows — Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ and Music Station — still get pretty good ratings. Just no one is going out and buying the songs featured on the show. Crazy, but perhaps consumers are considering these idols and tarento as TV stars and not musicians who deserve to win their hard-earned money. I like Yamada Yu and all, but do I really want to shell out ¥3,000 for her “music.”

Since almost nobody in Japan has cable and music videos get very little time on the air, the question is, why even make a music video in Japan? The question seems to only be one of propriety — i.e., because a star artist has a video. You need the clip for the 10 seconds on CDTV’s countdown (they still have that show, right?), but that’s it.

The music market in Japan works in a very organized way: fans faithfully buy their favorite artists’ new releases. Very few songs have slow-building grassroots support or crossover appeal to a wider public. For an established artist whom the public has already made a decision on, a video is not going to attract new fans. No one is going to start listening to the Ulfuls if they aren’t already. The music video has become little more than a very expensive version of a fan newsletter — sounding the clarion call for the true believers to buy the single or album out of duty.

With record budgets declining, video quality is declining. With interest in music declining, MTV and Space Shower TV are so desperate for ad sales that they let the labels dictate their programming. This makes for some very poor viewing.

But hey, the good news is that the pop music structure in Japan is so decrepit, corrupt, and meaningless that underground music feels once again… underground. My favorite bands won’t ever be on TV, but what would that get them anyway?

Sometime in my junior year of college, either Harvard Business School or Harvard Law School — I forget which one and am too lazy to Google — threw a conference on digital rights management and music with sponsorship from such amazingly long-lived and influential companies as Riffage.com and EMusic.com. They invited musicians Chuck D and They Might Be Giants to be special panelists, and a few of the artists in attendance gave a special concert at the Cambridge House of Blues with entrance limited to conference registrants.

My suitemate Phil somehow scored tickets to this special show and graciously invited me to come along. I had spent years 15 to 17 trading bootleg TMBG Dial-a-Song tapes across the early Internet and yet had never managed to see them perform live. Even though I was far from the throes of TMBG fandom at age 21, I was hardly going to say no.

So Phil and I walked over to the House of Blues and are greeted with an empty room filled with around 150 law dorks. With plans for a late-night show in Brooklyn the very same night, TMBG go on first — at like 6:30 pm — an hour before anyone really thinks about enjoying music. Oddly, only about 40 of these law dorks are the kind of dorks who like They Might Be Giants. I am conflicted about the atmosphere: on one hand I love that I am watching They Might Be Giants play the kind of tiny venue usually rented for funky wedding parties or drunken alumni blasts where ex-young men from semi-secret societies get up on stage and jam, but I also feel bad for They Might Be Giants since this must be the smallest and least gratifying gig they have played since the mid-’80s. John F barks at the soundman the entire time about his monitors, because seriously, what are we all doing here?

After 45 minutes of going through the motions, TMBG file off stage, and the conference folks all head back to the bar to get MC hammered. The next band are some white Southern guys I have never heard of — Spoon. Who’s Spoon, right? I am not sure why they were at this conference in the first place, or in Cambridge, or asked to play with TMBG, but soon they are on stage and start playing away like this is SXSW and we care. Even with the dimmed lights and the bass waves vibrating the air, the entire audience remains at the back of the room near the alcohol. Not a single person returns to the stage nor even bothers to turn around and dignify the band by facing forward. The guys are playing song after song, and literally, not a single person comes within a 2 meter area of the stage. (Hey, I don’t know who these dudes are either.) Britt Daniel starts to get visibly irate and offers an honest plea to the crowd in the way back: Hey, you guys should listen. We are a really good band. No one heeds his orders, and they eventually finish their set. I spent the entire time trying to figure out how they were going to use a phrase sampler sitting on top of an organ, which ended up being used solely on one song and inaudibly at that.

Spoon departs as quietly as they came in, and the crew sets up two turntables: DJ Spooky is in the house. That Subliminal Kid — a man who is aptly and un-ironically labeled “the world’s most pretentious man” by Momus — had been around campus a year before when he gave a “lecture” at the Carpenter Center for our most elite semi-hipsters in the VES department that literally proceeded like: “Using your hands as an instrument… Manipulating the media… Tactile… like… Valentine de Saint-Point… Futurist Manifesto… Here let me show you (Five minutes of scratching) This record is really rare. I am going to pass it around.” I think he was nervous and could not find the mental strength to create any sort of arguments out of his silver-tipped bullet points, but the whole thing involved more pointless name dropping and lightweight obliqueness than a Bible thrown off a cliff.

So Paul Miller comes on, and the law school guys are pumped. They have spent the last two hours ignoring Spoon and getting their drunk on and they are ready to party. Everyone collects around the stage, and within minutes, Paul Miller drops on “Pump Up the Volume” by M/A/R/R/S to huge applause and high anticipation. But in signature DJ Spooky style, he decides to do all sorts of illbient dubby echo shit to the track, making it totally and completely undanceable. The conference attendees, however, are either complete Philistines who don’t understand why this is like Valentine de Saint-Point or just too ethanol’d out to care, and they just start getting DOWN to Pump Up the Volume..ume..ume..ume..ume..ume…….emu… emu… EMU.. ume… wicca-wicca. Like drink in one hand, bad white guy frat party, knees-forward, butt-out jammy dance to ridiculously over-theoretical music noise.

After about 10 minutes of this, I had to go home.

Some of you may still be outraged by the drug- and nudity-based exploits of 20 year-old American actress and singer Lindsay Lohan, and for those of you who say, “Yes, that’s me,” I urge you to sit down immediately. For in Japan, young stars are up to a level of debauchery and delinquency that shakes the whole foundation of society.

Kago Ai — the 19 year-old infantile idol and last recognizable face of the crumbling Morning Musume/Up Front Agency empire — has been forced out of the entertainment business. Her transgression? Getting caught smoking in public for the second time. You see — the legal age for igniting and inhaling the tobacco leaf is 20 in Japan. Had she been in her second porn film, that would have been perfectly legal.

(In case you feel the need to immediately change Kago’s page on Wikipedia, you can rest assured that somebody’s already taken care of it.)

Kago has also been dating a 37 year-old man, which does not look especially good for a young idol singer in her position. Had she been a real first-tier star, she would be one of the many secret lovers of her 65 year-old talent agency boss and would only be kicked out of the entertainment world once he discarded her for someone much younger. Cigarettes and a disrespectful, non-organizational outlook on love took years off of Kago’s career.

ZAKZAK sees her last career move as becoming an “Akiba-kei” (Akihabara-based) idol. Apparently getting thrown to the geeks is the lowest rung on the ladder.

At Rip Slyme headquarters…

Pes: Yo, yo, yo. ‘Sup, ’sup, ’sup.
Su: What?
Pes: Sorry. I mean, hey, can I have your attention everybody? Fumiya — stop sampling for a minute. We need to plan out the video for our brand new single “I.N.G.”
Fumiya: Wait, I thought we decided on a different name.
Pes: Ryo-Z thought it would be cooler if we named it after the Internationale Nederlanden Group insurance company.
Ryo-Z: Yo, I said AFLAC. No wait you said AFLAC. I said I.N.G.
Pes: That’s what I said. Anyway, we need a video.
Ryo-Z: Alright, I got it right here. (Takes bite of comically large sandwich) Get this: we are in suits. We are like advertising executives.
Su: Keep going.
Ryo-Z: We are selling the Sony Vaio computer. They’ve got all these colored versions now. So the video is us selling pitches for the Sony Vaio campaign, pitching to the old guys across the table. And there’s a bunch of cheerleaders.
Pes: I like it. Sony Vaio.
Fumiya: Wait, wait. Sony’s never going to go for that. We can’t just use their computer without permission.
Ryo-Z: Look, I don’t care what it takes, we have to convince those guys to let us use the computer in the video. Record sales are down and if we don’t have a hot video, we are never going to make any money.

At Sony Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan. An oriental melody floats through the air. Rip Slyme enters the building and STEP to the reception desk.

Receptionist: (trembling with fear) Ex… Excuse me, we can’t let you in without an appointment.
Ryo-Z: We don’t care about appointments, lady.
Su: You’re fired.

Rip Slyme crash through the doors to the corporate boardroom where the President of Sony and his male Secretary are sitting and drinking brandy. The President removes his monocle and does a double-take. They both move away from the fireplace and step off the polar bear rug.

President: How dare you roustabouts enter in such a ramshackle manner!
Ryo-Z: Listen, Granddad. We want rights to use your Sony Vaio computer in our new music video.
President: Music video?! I wouldn’t even know what such a thing would be if it on happenstance existed!
Secretary: Let’s hear them out.
Ilmari: Times have changed. The people have spoken — the people in the streets. The streets have spoken. And they have spoken that they want us to use your Sony Vaio computer in our music video. We are inventing a whole new art form — from the streets.
President: I highly doubt your record company would like that! You are not even on Sony! You’re on Warner! Humbug!
Ryo-Z: I’ll take that as permission granted. (High-fives Pes and winks at Ilmari.)

Rip Slyme exits.

President: I certainly don’t think our computer sales will be helped by having such ruffians shill it so crassly upon the television box.
Secretary: I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy, but part of me thinks that this may actually be a good idea. Kids are different now. And maybe for the music business itself to succeed, Rip Slyme need to show their audience that they are up with trends and down with the “hood” — as they are wont to say.
President: You sound like my grandson. Fine. Let them go and use the Vaio. Just know that I am blaming you when our shareholders find out!

At American state fairs, they have those “Put Your Picture on a Magazine” booth 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 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. So 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, all of whom 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. She instead got into a pretend relationship with SMAP member Nakai.]

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 wise-asses. What is going on in this country?