Rumor has it that Japan’s most beloved female singer Koda Kumi is dating Japan’s most talented dance group vocalist Nakai Masahiro 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 Tomoya. 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. 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, naked women and pure fiction.

So 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.

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.” Totally different.)

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 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.

If you haven’t read Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, you should — because he perfectly explains why SXSW doesn’t really work as an event for discovering new music:

A recent series of studies, titled “When Choice is Demotivating,” provide the evidence [that more choice is not better]. One study was set in a gourmet food store in an upscale community where, on weekends, the owners commonly set up sample tables of new items. When researchers set up a display featuring a line of exotic, high-quality jams, customers who came by could taste samples, and they were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one condition of the study, 6 varieties of the jam were available for tasting. In another, 24 varieties were available. In either case, the entire set of 24 varieties was available for purchase. The large array of jams attracted more people to the table than the small array, though in both cases people tasted about the same number of jams on average. When it came to buying, however, a huge difference became evident. Thirty percent of the people exposed to the small array of jams actually bought a jar; only 3 percent of those exposed to the large array of jams did so (19-20).

SXSW too has a large number of exotic, high-quality jams — 1300 to be precise. And most of these bands plays multiple times.

In three days, faced with somewhere around 900 options, I saw two bands total.

The Mae Shi, For Example

On Friday night, I went to see The Mae Shi‘s showcase gig. They played for only about 25 minutes, but it verged on life-changing. The boys started the gig spread into the crowd, and since the venue had a poor man’s version of stadium-seating, they started chanting their first song in unison all around us. Finally descending upon the stage, they rocked and socked — with brief costume changes but without annoying inter-song banter — until we were all rocked out.

Besides the fact that the Mae Shi is a totally swell band, once had 6000 MySpace friends before MySpace conspired to destroy their MySpace page, and had their unbelievably great new track “Run to Your Grave” on Pitchfork’s Forkcast recently, there could not have been more than 75 to 100 people at the show.

Austin is the “live music capital of the world,” and I am assuming “live music” to connote “rock bands with guitars” that play four-minute rock songs. I never got the feeling that art-rock is really a good match to the proceedings.

And Kiiiiiii

Which leads us to assessing the value of bringing Kiiiiiii to SXSW — a band who in my completely subjective, horribly biased, and subsequently worthless opinion are one of the shining stars of the Japanese indie music scene. They played first at Todd P.’s backyard party in the drizzle for an energetic gaggle of hipsters local and glocal (Brooklyn, represent), which went generally well and made a nice intro for Juiceboxxx to come on and start knocking over plastic chairs. (Did he get off from school to perform or was he playing hooky? Truant they’ll all say, quoth Milhouse.)

The Beauty Bar gig later that night was a mixed affair. Short on time, no sound checks allowed, maybe 100 people or so, but a strange mix of patrons. Some guy immediately stole a kazoo off the stage, tried to blow on it for 10 mins, failing to make any sort of noise, then pocketed it and started walking away, before I asked him whether “I could get that back.” I got it back. This is what managers are for.

Reviews were mixed.

“I got a chance to see “Kiiiiiii” on said birthday. It was very energetic and fun. I have thier DVD so I can get really drunk with friends and re-live the halcyon.” – “Edward”

“Yes, those two Japanese girls are energetic mad, and they sure do make a spectacle of themselves. But with one singer and one drummer and no support musicians, the performance was, at the very least, thin. The old fart in me appreciates method where madness is concerned, and Kiiiiiii pretty much tells method to fuck off. I left after 15 minutes.” – Musicwhore.org

“KIIIII: I can’t believe there was hype for this band. This was one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen. Japan’s gotta bring more than this.” – Bandwagon

Nothing, however, beats this pithy summary:

“We kicked off the festival by seeing a crazy Japanese band called Kiiiiii who were 2 harajuku girls that performed with guitar and drumas a-la White Stripes, and included strange covers of Boney M’s Brown Girl In The Ring and We Are The World in a style that was only slightly recognisable, but totally hysterical.” – Jude Adam

Kiiiiiii does not have a guitar player.

With 1300 bands, hype is critical as it is the sole guide for navigating the surplus of gig choices. Hype at SXSW, however, is not expanded through performance as much as aggregated and consolidated. In a sea of so many choices, there is nowhere to accidentally see a band and start loving them. You either love or hate whom you have already set out to see.

Before I left for Austin, my friend Nick S. mentioned it was “great” that Kiiiiiii had managed to get on the Crystal Castles bill, but shows at SXSW aren’t “shows” in any traditional sense, where patrons stick around and see the other bands. If a gig ends at x:40, you’ve got 20 mins to make it to the next venue to see the next band on your list or have a slice of pizza. I doubt anybody stayed around at Beauty Bar after Kiiiiiii, and even if the crowd sized stayed the same or increased, the Venn diagram would show a very small overlap between the crowds.

All in all, Kiiiiiii got a blip on the radar by showing up to SXSW — mainly from placement in the massive list of 1300 bands and subsequent discovery by myriad bloggers. Whether the actual performances did anything for macro-promotion, I have no idea.

Japanese Cool

JETRO — the Japan External Trade Organization and government organ — threw a party on Thursday of SXSW week called the “Matsuri-Japan Bash” to nominally support the exportation of Japanese music to the rest of the world. I certainly salute the idea, but they sided with the Japan Nite event, which is a non-curated, pay-to-play showcase. Any Japanese band with $6000 to spend (on top of the $1000 in airfare for each member), can be a part of the famous Japan Nite.

Since nobody behind this operation seems to have any idea to bring Japanese bands with some semblance of appeal to American indie rock audiences and instead let big labels throw them some bands, we got a weird mix of newcomers, old-timers, and garage bands on holiday. HY are light poppers from Okinawa and favorites of 18 year-old Japanese female college students who “like” “music.” Go!Go!7188 are kind of a sub-Shiina Ringo rock band from Toshiba/EMI about whose existence I had completely forgotten. No one Japanese I know will consider Sony’s six-girl teenage ska band Oreskaband an actual band and not an elaborate marketing scheme. In case you didn’t get enough horns, Pistol Valve — an all-girl teenage brass band — came along as well.

I know I am being snobby and selfish here, wanting Japan to present a well-curated hipster cool instead of putting forward “pay-to-play” as a national cultural trait. And hell, some guy who actually took the trouble to see Kiiiiiii — a non-Japan Nite band — thought that “Japan’s gotta bring more than this,” so I doubt I can speak for all American fans of the Japanese music. But with this national-sponsorship of Japanese gross national cool, I am still troubled that the aesthetic mismanagement of selecting the “representatives” has no led to a degeneration of the “Japan” brand — maybe not for the audiences, who I am sure enjoyed the young teenage sound of an all-girl ska band — but for Japanese artists themselves. If anybody had bothered to say, how do we promote Japanese bands in the US, they would have called Shugo Tokumaru, who probably would have gone to SXSW and ignored Japan Nite for a better showcase with no national-affiliation and support from the official trade bureau. Dear Bureaucracy, maybe the best way to promote Japanese music abroad is to not get involved at all.