Part Two: Organizational Characteristics of Jimusho — Size and Keiretsu

In Part One we looked at labor relations within Japanese entertainment industry management companies. This time, we will look at the jimushos’ relations to each other. As we will see, the industrial field of Japanese entertainment offers less than perfect transparency, and our general understanding must come from a mix of industry accounts backed up by third-party verifications — where available.

Small size firms

For being so powerful within the entertainment industry, most jimusho are relatively small companies. For example, moderate-sized record label EMI Music Japan (formerly Toshiba-EMI) has over ¥1.667 billion in capital. Meanwhile, Burning Production — the management company said to dominate the industry — only has a mere ¥20 million (source here as the current corporate website for Burning lacks almost all company information). Burning Production itself has a very limited number of talent, almost none of whom are particularly young. It is almost fair to say that Burning’s talent list appears at first to be a bit underwhelming for an agency reputed to be so powerful.

Another key characteristic is that almost all jimusho are privately-held companies, with the exception of Avex, Hori Pro, Amuse, and Yoshimoto Kogyo (which the major TV stations will soon buy out together). Without being publicly-traded on stock exchanges, the companies have no legal impedance impetus to reveal information about earnings. We have no way of knowing how much money is coming in and out of these companies. For example, despite decades-long domination of the pop charts and television dramas, young male idol purveyor Johnny’s Jimusho still controls its image as a mysterious, family-run enterprise with only the slightest presence as a “business” — one with growth, acquisitions, etc.

So there are thousands of relatively tiny privately-held artist management companies across Japan, with Hiroshi Aoyagi (author of Islands of Eight Million Smiles) estimating 1,600 in Tokyo alone. Oricon Nenkan 2005 listed 975 operating in Eastern Japan. We can easily say there are around 1,000 in the country who do significant levels of business within the industry.

The keiretsu system

1,000 firms makes the Japanese entertainment management business sound like an industrial field with heavy levels of competition and diversity. This number, however, is a misleading figure. Although most of these companies appear to be independent, they are in reality organized into very hierarchical keiretsu-type organizations.

The keiretsu are the key to understanding the jimusho system, but unfortunately, this is also the most oblique characteristic of the field to measure and observe. While some jimusho openly admit formal subsidiaries (Topcoat, for example, is part of Watanabe Productions), in the vast majority of cases, there is no official or otherwise publicly-revealed relation between companies in the same keiretsu. This becomes a major problem for objective reporting and analysis. Insiders and insider publications like Cyzo refer to certain talent agencies as being part of the Burning Keiretsu, for example, but there is no evidence on paper or public pronouncements from Burning itself that this corporate group exists. And most actors and models within these agencies may have no idea that their small firm answers to a larger one.

Wikipedia Japan in the past had a long internal debate as whether to acknowledge the mythic “Burning Keiretsu” or not. In the end, Wikipedia editors killed the article as the mass media has never confirmed its existence. Yet, most industry insiders — and talent in my acquaintance within the jimushos alleged to be in the Burning Keiretsu — talk about the Burning Keiretsu being real. For example, Fujiwara Norika of agency Someday is widely understood to be part of the Burning group. Same goes for Nakayama Miho of Big Apple or Mizukawa Asami of Atlantis. Without this knowledge, all of these firms look to be independent, and therefore, in heavy competition. Yet, the real structure is that the boss at the main agency at top of the keiretsu doles out work to each of the subsidiaries and makes final decisions about which talents get what projects.

The best insider account of how these jimusho are organized into hierarchies was a website called Geinokai Sogo Kenkyujo. Unfortunately the site went dark a few years ago. (A cached copy here). Many of the site’s allegations about the Burning Keiretsu, however, can be confirmed by looking at publishing rights transfers or cataloging the specific jimusho who use Burning’s official subsidiary Proceed to build their web pages. On the other hand, many claims — such as the idea that Nagara Production controls a group overseeing most Visual-Kei bands and the Being/Giza group — have almost no public record and are essentially insider information that we must judge by our assessment of the author’s credibility.

According to industry contacts, membership to a keiretsu can also be set by a simple phone call: the “boss” from the parent company calls a new management company and asks whether the new jimusho is in the group or out. Most subsidiaries, however, are formed by managers inside the group branching out and opening up their own agency.

What does a small company get in return for being in a part of the keiretsu? Being in a keiretsu means use of the larger company’s network and power — at a price. Without any formal capital relations, we can only speculate on the nature of “payback” to the parent company — anything from complicated “consulting service” schemes to cash in envelopes to the more common and (completely legal) transferral of publishing rights. This is not to say that the relationship is necessarily illegal, but we in the public have little way to measure how the companies interact.

Proving the keiretsu exist

So how can we prove the insider accounts that these keiretsu do exist? The most effective way is to look at the transfer of publishing rights in the record industry. Many small companies alleged to be part of a larger organization will give their talens’ publishing rights to the “parent” company. Oricon shows that most of the alleged members of the Burning keiretsu did give Burning Publishing their rights back in the 1980s. (For whatever reason, this practice stopped or stopped being recorded by Oricon in the 1990s.) Southern All-Stars’ jimusho Amuse famously gave the band’s early publishing to Burning, which was speculated as a way to be “let inside” the industry. Amuse is no longer part of the Burning keiretsu, but Burning still owns the rights to “Katte ni Sinbad” and other early SAS songs.

Let’s take the example of Avex Trax — the incredibly popular record label with a management company wing. Geinokai Sogo Kenkyujo alleged that Avex was a member of the Burning Production keiretsu, which seems odd in that Avex is a much larger company than Burning on paper. Why would Avex need to be in Burning’s group? This seems like a ludicrous claim when viewed from outside the industry.

The publishing rights database on JASRAC, however, shows reveals how the relationship between the companies may possibly work. Burning owns an enormous number of songs from artists in the Avex management company, including mega-hits from Hamasaki Ayumi and Every Little Thing. (Here is a list of all the artists Burning owns publishing from.) From a purely rational business perspective, Avex should have no reason to give up publishing rights, in that it has its own highly-profitable publishing company. This transfer of rights best makes sense as a “tribute” to the top company in its hierarchy. (Another strange thing is that Burning’s ownership of these Avex rights has never been disclosed on the Oricon charts, which always prints the owner of publishing during the time of the song release.)

The “odd” behavior of keeping firms small and separate

So why do the major jimusho in the industry work in this non-transparent, small-firm structure rather than just expanding the size of their own firms? This is not behavior seen in most industries where firms want to grow in size, hold an IPO to raise cash, and possibly acquire other firms.

The small size has certain perks. In a private email exchange, Néojaponisme commenter Mulboyne pointed out that the Japanese tax code generally encourages company formation rather than corporate expansion and that the service sector suits a multiple-company structure. Having this structure helps the main company avoid paying tax. This does not necessarily mean that the companies are engaging in tax evasion, but it lessens the tax burden. This, however, puts them on a different level of corporate legitimacy than, say, Sony, Toyota, or Nintendo.

This structure also allows the major jimusho to control the industry without audiences having any idea of what is happening. For example, the three main models of magazine CanCam during its peak in 2007 all came from the K-Dash keiretsu, but on paper Ebihara Yuri and Oshikiri Moe were from Pearl while Yamada Yu was from K-Dash proper. This arrangement made it look less like a monopoly to people outside of the industry.

The small size also fits with the somewhat unique jimusho culture of avoiding the public eye. In general, the giants of the industry, who sit atop the keiretsu structure, rarely give interviews to the media, show up in front of the camera or otherwise leave traces of their existence. There are basically zero public photographs of Suho Ikuo, the head of Burning Productions and so-called “don” of the industry. (Lately, a single grainy image has appeared on the net.) Same goes for Tetsuo Taira, once of Rising Production (now Vision Factory), who spent some years in jail for tax evasion. Johnny Kitagawa of Johnny’s Jimusho is also famously reclusive. (Tatsuo Kawamura of entertainment group K-Dash — and pro wrestling management — tends to appear in public more often than his peers.) These business leaders tend to fit the image of the kuromaku — the man behind-the-curtain. This is a very different culture than Hollywood’s extravagant industry moguls like David Geffen. But even holding for American ego-centricism, there is something a bit eerie that the Japanese industry’s most powerful men (and they are almost always men) work so hard to make sure the public does not know who they are.

What the keiretsu structure means

If we go ahead and assume that the industry is run in these keiretsu groups, we then can understand how there can be heavy oligopoly even in a field with a large number of firms. Essentially, only the top jimusho groups have access to placing talent on TV shows, in commercials, and in other high-profile work. As I stated above, the main bosses of about a dozen groups dictate to the media and advertising agencies whom from their keiretsu they want used rather than having an open audition process, where even small firms can provide upcoming talent. (Even the bit roles in Japanese TV shows are usually fleshed out by junior members of the stars’ agency.) The keiretsu arrangement allows the jimusho to control access to hundreds of celebrities, which in turn gives them market power in transactional relationships between themselves and the media. If the media does not want to use a new star, the boss can then threaten to pull all of his talents from use in that media.

The end result is that new stars who score big advertising campaigns or TV spots for their debut singles almost exclusively come from one of the big jimusho groups. This means that independent jimusho who are not aligned with one of the big keiretsu are essentially locked out of the more lucrative parts of the industry system. There are always spots on TV for “popular” talent who come from outside the keiretsu system but they are always “last hired, first fired.” In other words, they only get access to the media after they have proven success at a grass-roots level, and they are not invited back if they cease to show popularity.

The end result is that innovation or change in talent type must come from the big groups, and ultimately, the men at the top of those few companies make the decisions about which entertainers appear in the industry. Deductively-speaking it does not make sense that the jimusho would launch stars who would pose a threat to their business model.

Next time, we will look why the jimusho have become so powerful and how the system’s needs — rather than the market’s — determines what kind of star the jimusho pushes.

Each country or cultural region has a uniquely-structured industry responsible for producing, promoting, and distributing the products that make up what we consider “pop culture.” In the case of Japan, there is a single organizational category most responsible for the form and content of pop culture: the artist management company, called colloquially jimusho (“office.”) The jimusho wield a powerful cultural influence on all fields that require performers — television (variety and drama), advertising, music, modeling, gravia, and films.

I will argue in this series that much of the content produced in these specific fields conforms to the business needs of artist management companies much more than it is created in response to audience desires. The opposite is also true: Non-jimusho controlled fields such as manga and indie music have enjoyed much more freedom of expression. In the case of manga, placement of certain titles within magazines is often tied directly to consumer feedback, meaning that competition is alive and well and consumers play a large role in guiding the industry.

With this in mind, we aim here to get a full understanding of the jimusho system in order to understand the structure in which Japanese popular culture is produced. Seeing that there is little written formally about the jimusho, we offer this multi-part series on Japanese artist management companies.

A note: This series is not meant as an “exposé” but a collection of the most reliable information about a relatively secretive industry for the purpose of sociological and business analysis. We welcome any corrections and additions.

Part I – What are the Jimusho? Roles and Labor Relations

The main role of the jimusho is essentially to “manage” the careers and schedules of artists, entertainers, athletes, and celebrities. They, however, claim a much deeper hold on the industry than simple management. The jimusho create stars much more than they just help maintain their fame. The stronger jimusho plan out every part of the performer’s persona, style, mannerism, and career. Most jimusho also have publishing wings, creating long-term revenue streams from songwriting related to their stars. Many idol management companies — such as Johnny’s Jimusho — finance and produce the master recordings of their singers, relegating record companies to pure distribution roles. This also means the jimusho can capture a large percentage of money made from CD sales.

The first important thing to understand about Japanese jimusho is the relation between labor and management. These companies are sometimes called “agencies” but they do not normally use “agent relations” — i.e., where stars hire the jimusho to act on their behalf. In the United States, William Morris and CAA perform agent services for 10% of the deals they broker, but stars have the ultimate power in that specific relationship as they are allowed to change agents or agencies at any time.

Japanese jimusho, on the other hand, hire their talent as salaried workers. They pay their “employees” a monthly salary, which usually starts at the relatively low ¥200,000 and can be re-negotiated on a yearly basis. (That being said, many famous stars have not been able to significantly raise their salaries to match the revenues they have brought to the company.) In exchange for the salaries, the artist relinquishes rights to 100% of their media appearance fees, copyright royalities, publishing payments, and any other income. Yes, 100%. If an artist secures a lucrative commercial contract, for example, this will not be reflected in his/her salary as any kind of bonus.

Management companies claim rights to this income, however, on the logic that they invest large sums in building up a young star. Hiroshi Aoyagi, author of Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic Production in Contemporary Japan notes that the price of producing an “idol” singer can cost upwards of ¥30-40 million. The companies provide new talent (although most often charge for) lessons in singing, acting, dancing, manners, speech, and other skills required for celebrity status. Jimusho create appealing stage names, change appearances (sometimes even fronting money for plastic surgery), and provide clothing and cosmetics most flattering to the talent. Only when the talent makes their formal debut does the company see any returns. Therefore this high risk business model requires that all eventual income go directly to the management company.

Now many stars are able to negotiate an income increase in light of greater sales, but those who cannot unfortunately are not able to move to a different management company. While stars in the United States can change their agents and personal managers at a whim, Japanese stars cannot freely move management companies. In my own survey of 1300 popular musicians between 1985 and 2004, only around two dozen changed management companies. In other words, it is not a free market where Japanese stars can look for the best management deal. It is a “closed system.”

How do the jimusho keep stars in their stables? As a way to ensure that talent do not leave for other agencies for better deals, the jimusho have informal agreements to blacklist any talent who “defect” to other companies or go independent. With each star being an “investment” — both in terms of training but also of use of the management companies’ established media and industry connections to become famous — the jimusho have an economic incentive to curb their talent’s mobility. This secures profitability for their initial investment.

There is only one accepted way of changing jimusho: moving up to a more powerful organization. Horizontal movement or going independent are essentially verboten. Larger jimusho, however, can steal talent from smaller ones. We saw this with Kanno Miho, for example, leaving the small Tani Promotion to enter big player Kenon.

Like most aspects of the “closed” jimusho world, this blacklist is rarely detailed in specific terms. The case of mega-star Suzuki Ami, however, offered a very strong example of the blacklist in action. As reported by Steve McClure in Billboard, Suzuki attempted to leave her management company AG Communications after its CEO Yamada Eiji was arrested for tax evasion. Her parents cited “damage to her reputation” and received legal approval to break her contract with AG. Despite the legal right to go independent, the industry appeared to have conspired behind-the-scenes to punish her actions. All her advertising contracts mysteriously dried up, and later when she released her own music, she could not find basic distribution for the CDs nor television airplay. In effect, she was frozen out of the industry. She only came back in once she signed a new deal years later with Avex Entertainment. Not all blacklists are permanent, but they can “disappear” a star right at his/her peak, which is normally a death blow to a long-term career. Suzuki Ami never really recovered.

Cabal-like blacklists like this fail in most markets because there is such high incentive for companies to “break” the agreement and steal the profitable talent. The strongest jimushos’ power over the market, however, may be adequate to scare away anyone who wishes to scoop up ronin talent. And the blacklisting may not require wholly negative action. For example, YouTube star Magibon recently made allegations that her former jimusho would call up and offer Magibon’s clients their pick of the agency’s stable of famous stars to work in the place of Magibon. This could be considered a “positively-reinforced” blacklist.

The end result of this labor relation between talent and their jimusho is that the management company has full control over their salaried employees. And with the jimusho world working together to discourage movement, talent cannot use labor mobility as a way to break the agencies’ power. And with investments into master tape production, jimusho do not just hold power of their talent but within the industry as a whole. We will look at the source of jimusho power in later installments.

Next time we will look at broader organizational characteristics of jimusho: specifically, small size units structured into keiretsu hierarchies with a single company at the top of the ladder.

There is a standard protocol for Japanese record labels when their artists are arrested on drug charges or for any other anti-social acts: they pull all of the artists’ CDs from stores. When Makihara Noriyuki was arrested for amphetamines in 1999, Sony dutifully removed the singer’s records from record stops. This kneejerk reaction even applies ex post facto: when guitarist Suzuki Shigeru of ’60s hippie band Happy End was arrested for marijuana in February of this year, all the classic Happy End records — perhaps the most canonic recordings of Japanese pop music history — became unavailable through major commercial channels.

The idea is not just that these recordings are “tainted” by a drug using artist, but that companies must self-censor their catalogs to make sure that the offender does not profit during the criminal proceedings. But this behavior also conforms to a Japanese cultural principle: 「臭いものにふたをしろ」”Put a lid on things that smell.” In other words, companies want bury anything controversial as soon as possible. By removing the CDs, record labels feel like they are quietly erasing any legacy of the criminal artist’s existence.

So when Sakai Noriko was arrested for amphetamines in August, her record label Victor Entertainment — as is the convention — took all of her albums out of distribution. And in this digital age, Victor also had to remove all her songs from iTunes. But here’s where the label messed up: they forgot to remove Sakai songs that showed up on compilation albums.

Horror! There were free-floating Nori-P songs out there on iTunes. Surely the Japanese people — who we are told again and again have a low moral tolerance for drug use — rose up in outrage against Victor, Apple, and Sakai for the oversight. Or maybe in more predictable Japanese style, everyone just ignored these offending tracks.

Actually, that’s not what happened at all: Sakai’s 1995 hit “Blue Rabbit” (「青いウサギ」) was the number one song on iTunes for the week.
Continued »

Tsumura Kikuko 津村記久子 – 『ポトスライムの舟』 (Potosu Raimu no Fune, The Lime Pothos Boat). 2009. Winner of the 140th Akutagawa Prize, for late 2008.

The title story is the winner: a novella that could be translated as “The Lime Pothos Boat.” This title (despite sounding like something Angel Investigations might have fought in Season 2) combines two of the key motifs in the book: a lime pothos plant the narrator has growing in her garden and a Papuan outrigger canoe she sees in a travel poster.

The protagonist — rarity of rarities, an Akutagawa Prize-winner written in the third person — is a thirtyish woman named Nagase. She’s working four jobs, all of them low-paying and part-time, taken after quitting a corporate career due to harassment from her boss. Neither the details of this harassment nor the trauma it inflicted on her are ever quite spelled out, but it still affects Nagase several years later when the book begins, and not just because the event ruined her chances to make it as a career woman. In fact, we come to suspect that she works four jobs not just to make ends meet, but also because she’s made herself a workaholic, trying to escape the thoughts that come to her when she’s idle.

This idea puts the story into the stream of recent Prize-winners examining the lives of women in the workplace (see Aoyama Nanae, Itoyama Akiko, even, in a way, Kawakami Mieko and Daidō Tamaki). But it goes in a different direction from those stories, partly in that the book is not entirely focused on the protagonist Nagase.

One of the things Tsumura gains by breaking away from the first-person fixation of most A-Prize bait is the chance to create more than one actual character. The story is seen through Nagase’s eyes, but we get to know several of the women around her, including her mother, three of her college friends, and one of her coworkers. The result is a sort of composite portrait of two generations of women living in the age of divorce and more-or-less full female participation in the economy.

They show a diversity of experiences when it comes to love life. Nagase and her college friend are single. Nagase’s mother is divorced, and another of her college friends separates from her husband in the course of the story. A coworker is contemplating divorce. The third friend stays silent, but is clearly feeling trapped as a full-time homemaker. Everybody but the last-mentioned is working. But Nagase is really working.

We follow Nagase for a whole year. As the story starts she sees the aforementioned travel poster — an advertisement for an around-the-world cruise that catches her imagination. She works out that it would cost the equivalent of a year’s wages from one of her jobs, so she decides to save those earnings and live on what she makes from the other three. If she can save the money in a year, she’ll take the voyage, she tells herself, although it’s likely that the trip itself is less important than the idea of having something to work for.

In the meantime, one of her college friends, Ritsuko, leaves her husband and brings her kindergarten-age daughter to live with Nagase and Nagase’s mother in their large Nara home. Much of the story concerns Ritsuko working through her problems, and Nagase’s mother bonding with Ritsuko and her daughter. A lot of this happens just out of Nagase’s ken, as she’s always working and is therefore somewhat shut out of the lives of the other people in her house. These sections of the novella are deftly handled, conveying Ritsuko’s situation without weakening our sense of Nagase’s work-imposed fog.

The story climaxes with Nagase collapsing from overwork, which forces her to take time off for the first time in years. We might expect that this would also force her to confront her own reasons for overworking, but she does not really dwell on the issue. She does begin to despair about saving enough for the cruise, but eventually gets a couple of lucky breaks, allowing the story to end on a note of hope. (Although we don’t find out if she actually goes on the cruise.)

What about that lime pothos? As I mentioned, this and the boat motif tie the work together — the story works on the renga logic of Kawabata as well as on the teleology of plot. The boat motif clearly comes from the travel poster and reminds us of what the narrator desires. The pothos is harder to identify. It’s an extremely hardy plant: you can clip off stems and put them in a jar of water and they’ll just keep growing. Nagase does this repeatedly, until there are pothos clippings at two of her workplaces as well as all over the house. I think this hardiness is the key: like Nagase, her mother, Ritsuko, and many of the other women in the book, the pothos can thrive without much encouragement.

They’re survivors, in other words, although that makes the story sound more clichéd, and in fact, more decisive than it is. Nagase, at the end, may or may not actually be thriving. Maybe having enough money will allow her to take that trip — but will it do her any good, if she can’t get over whatever trauma was driving her to work herself half to death?

As I wrote earlier, the story ends on a note of hope, but also on a note of irresolution — a typical strategy for Japanese Serious Literature. This, however, works in Tsumura’s case: The story captures a snapshot of its characters at a certain moment, with only bare hints of what comes before or after. These hints, however, are carefully chosen, highly suggestive, and aesthetically rich.

But “Potosuraimu no fune” significantly differs from the typical A-Prize story in other ways. The plot is more linear than most, with fewer flashbacks and far more plot events. In fact, this story offers a variety of novelistic pleasures we don’t always expect to find in Japanese fiction — vividly realized secondary characters and carefully constructed scenes — as well as pleasures we do expect to find there — delicately modulated moods and intriguingly open-ended use of poetic motifs. In fact, this the best written Akutagawa story in some years. All the way through, you feel as if you’re in the hands of a master writer of fiction, somebody who knows precisely what she’s doing.

The omake story in the volume, “Jûnigatsu no madobe 十二月の窓辺” (At the Window in December), is quite complementary. It’s about a woman named Tsugawa working in a company for a difficult boss, and how she decides to quit. There’s no formal connection with “Potosuraimu,” but we might as well be reading about how Nagase ended up where she is in that story.

Like “Potosuraimu,” “Junigatsu no madobe” is third-person, long on plot, and short on flashbacks, with several neatly suggested characters (almost all of them female). It feels very timely, given the renewed interest so-called popular culture has taken in the last few years in exploring the work environment — particularly from a female point of view and often with an eye toward revealing the bullying and abuses that take place there. Think Haken no hinkaku and Hatarakiman.

“Junigatsu no madobe” is closer to the former than the latter, with none of the suck-it-up-it’s-good-for-ya of Hatarakiman. Rather, it’s a gripping exploration of the bruised psyche of a bullied employee. What does it do to her? What does she do about it? The focus is always so tight on Tsugawa that we never get any distancing perspective. We don’t know, for example, if she’s really incompetent at her job, or if her boss is really unreasonable, or both; we only know how it makes Tsugawa feel to have to face this situation day after day. It gets claustrophobic; it gets painful. That’s the point.

As with “Potosuraimu,” Tsumura gets her point across through carefully constructed scenes and a plot that features far more suspense than you might have thought proper in junbungaku. There’s a subplot about a series of assaults taking place in the area around Tsugawa’s office, and while the story never quite turns into a mystery, the violence in the background serves nicely to enhance the depressed, desperate mood of the story.

The piece is ostensibly about women in the workplace: Tsugawa’s a would-be career woman, and her boss, the bully, is a woman too — real Devil Wears Prada stuff. But really, this story is universal, just like Haken no hinkaku and Hatarakiman. Men have to put up with their psyches being systematically crushed by the company hierarchy, too. Maybe it just takes a fresh perspective to see it.

Both stories make a strong case overall that Tsumura’s one to watch.

On February 20, 1909, French newspaper Le Figaro printed a piece called “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” on its front page — written by a relatively-unknown 32 year-old Italian poet named F.T. Marinetti. (I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the full text.) The bombastic and incendiary tract sent shock waves through the European artistic community in its call for a total upheaval of preexisting artistic convention. The poet advocated the demolition of museums, libraries, and traditional morality. And in the ruins, Marinetti wanted to foster a new aesthetic called Futurism that would embrace technology and the modern psychology of the machine age, echoed in the famous line that “a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Although Picasso’s cubist paintings had ushered in the age of modern art years before Marinetti’s writing, the Manifesto articulated the Modernist ethos as a philosophy for all artistic pursuit, and in the process, provided a high-energy clarion call for the subsequent century’s avant-garde artists, social visionaries, trouble-makers, and all-around punks.

One hundred years later, Marinetti’s Manifesto no longer succeeds in épater les bourgeois, and many of its core ideas — once intended to stab directly into the eye of the aging establishment — sound like romanticized justifications for powerful forces of reactionary evil. The Futurists’ push to “glorify war” sounded righteous in the nationalistic atmosphere of the early 20th century but almost instantly became abominable as millions were slaughtered in the trenches of the Great War. Marinetti’s misogyny (“contempt for women”) and racism (comparing factory sludge to the breast-milk of a Sudanese wet nurse, for example) have not accompanied the arc of progressive Western society. Even Marinetti’s cavalier espousal of “the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness” takes on a sinister ring as we seek to hose down the conflagration of the Bush presidency. Marinetti is often roundly dismissed as a proto-Fascist. True, he was an early supporter of Mussolini. And even if we counter that the poet eventually felt betrayed by his old pal when Fascist Italy took on a necrophilic infatuation with ancient Rome, you can still draw a straight line between the idea of Futurist “cleansing violence” to Nazi and Fascist Europe. And in our new battle against environmental depletion, Marinetti is again on the wrong side of history. He loves industrial waste and factory exhaust — his verse potential PR copy for the defenders of polluters on K Street.

The Manifesto does, however, contain sympathetic and benevolent ideas, but these have lost their impact for a totally opposite reason. Futurism now suffers from its success: the last century has been Marinetti’s. The Italian poet’s revolutionary embrace of automotive beauty is no longer novel in the shadow of dime-store hot-rod culture and widespread SUV mania. Marinetti’s preference for youth and novelty has morphed into the central philosophical engine to consumerist culture. Creative destruction is not just for poetry, but guided American capitalism to international dominance. Technology has permanently nestled into creative culture and can no longer be cleanly removed. The power-drill pulse of gabba music, for example, would surely overshadow the wildest ambitions of Russolo’s intonarumori. Like all great cultural innovators, Marinetti has seen his legacy suffer by being successfully subsumed. His angry manifesto now graces a million creased textbook pages — the kind of yellowed volumes he would want drowned in a diverted Venetian canal.

And like all prophets, he was completely wrong about the future. The Manifesto does not make specific predictions, but Marinetti tied the particulars of the Futurist aesthetic to his own historical circumstances. The idea of cacophonous technology is pure nostalgia: ancient dynamos may have been ear-piercing, but our cornucopia of truely life-integrated personal gadgets make no external sound at all. Marinetti heard the future as a bang, but the art of product design has offered a century of softer and softer whimpers. Our latest and greatest vision of the future wants technology to design itself out of the picture: eco-consciousness is poised to erase the modern era with the same scorn as Marinetti feels for classical times.

And yet, the Manifesto can still be a useful corrective for any contemporary artist and writer and thinker, with applicable lessons for this deeply Futurist-inspired future. Despite the familiarity of the Manifesto’s convictions, I still swoon in its romantic energy. Even in translation, Marinetti’s prose jabs against familiar rivals with the speed of a master pugilist, almost proto-gonzo. Thank god for the historical detail of good newspaper placement, or otherwise he could be easily charged with unbearable pretension and self-indulgence. But it is exactly Marinetti’s choice of romantic idealism over cynicism that allows the text to still feel alive today. His belief in belief comes in stark contrast to our sour generation, who protest equally at no one and everyone, spit at meaning, conviction, and hope. Ha, you say: these “suspect” virtues recently elected a president! That may be true, but they are still fundamentally unwelcome in the corrosive culture of cool that permeates every part of the youth culture experience. We are stuck in a strange corner: worshiping the romantic idealism of the past while immediately tearing down anyone attempting a modern analog.

The word “futurism” now regrettably refers mainly to Alvin Toffler types, sober armchair sociologists trying to predict coming waves of complex patterns for an audience of Sunday afternoon dreamers and long-term stock analysts. Marinetti had no aims on Nostradamus, but instead, aspired to be a kamikaze pilot nosediving towards stale convention, walking the walk, dreaming of poetic suicide — and yes, counting the days until “younger and stronger men” would throw him “in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!” So what would Marinetti think of our rotting shell of a pop culture, still looking to its 1960s Old Masters, judging all success against the unrepeatable case studies of Lennon/McCartney, Zimmerman/Dylan, Keroauc, slouching against the canonical ideas of 20th century art under the legitimizing banner of post-modernist sampling and pastiche. Marinetti’s call for constant artistic progress still inspires! But alas, the irony: when we waste “the best part of our strength in a useless admiration of the past,” this time Marinetti is part of the problem. To love Marinetti is to bury him. You cannot just kill your idols, but you must also burn your “Kill Your Idols” T-shirt.

Calls for Neo-Futurism will go unheeded, and I doubt I will see a day when artistic manifestos are screamed to the world from the front pages of a major daily news publication. The Futurist Manifesto, in the end, never embodied an eternal, absolute, and ahistoric philosophy, able to be adopted afresh by every waking generation, but instead is merely a single, well-executed love poem to the future of Marinetti’s present — a grip of the razor edge and sharpened point, a vivid dream of routing a long list of gray demons and sagging enemies, an artistic mission to realize the perfect human community. Marinetti seems more charming in the haze of hindsight — a contemporary version would rightly feel like an obnoxious demagogue — but admit your admiration: who does not dream of standing on the world’s summit and launching once again an insolent challenge to the stars!