At Book Off last week, I picked up an English translation of Tsutsumi Seiji’s Japan’s Consumer Society: A Critical Introduction 『消費社会批判』. Tsutsumi is, for those who do not know his legend, the man behind the Saison retailing group and its sophisticated retail chains Seibu Department Store, PARCO, Loft, Mujirushi Ryohin (MUJI), Wave, and Seed. He is also a former Marxist and award-winning poet/novelist who used his industrial power to support avant-garde artists such as Terayama Shuji.

The title of Tsutsumi’s book is a bit misleading: The volume is mostly abstract and theoretical, quoting Barthes, Bourdieu, and Baudrillard rather than talking about the specifics of Japanese consumer society. Written in 1996 — just as the Bubble had popped and the consumer market was about to peak — Tsutsumi offered many critiques to the Japanese industrial system. He, however, sounded most worried about Japan’s lag in the information technologies. When framed within the context of mobile phones and video games, this may have seemed like a silly concern. The following facts about the state of computer usage within Japan, however, grabbed my attention:

[A] 1993 study…of the diffusion rates for personal computers in the office showed Japan at 9.9% and the United States at 41.7%. Looking at Internet-connected systems as of January 1995, Japan had only 96,632 compared to the United States’ 3,179,170, and the gap is widening year by year. (174)

This data reveals a very significant difference in the centrality of the personal computer and Internet within the two perspective societies — even when held for population.

Of course, Japan eventually “caught up” and now boasts an impressive Internet diffusion rate. Thanks to highly-evolved mobile phones, even non-PC users can connect to the Internet (or its i-mode simulacra). Yet when you look at the “cultural development” of the Net, Japan still feels stunted. The most obvious example is that a very niche site like 2ch still works as the central hub for Net cultural creation and sets the overall tone, despite the core users’ non-mainstream values such as obsession with little girls and bitter neo-right-wing tendencies.

These computer diffusion numbers from 1995 help explain what is happening: Internet culture does not just rely upon the current state of usage but a compounded set of familiarities and expectations about the medium forged over a broad historical period. If less than 10% of the working Japanese population used computers in the 1990s and very few families had computers at home, that means that most Japanese people are not likely to be comfortable with computers nor communicating through them. Even those who have embraced computers in the last decade do not have a lifetime of knowledge about them from which to pull.

Personally speaking, my father’s work on math and statistics meant we always had a PC at home — from a TRS-80 to a Mac Classic II. Part of my joy of using computers and belief in the power of the Internet comes from my good fortune of being exposed to both PCs and the Net at an early age. And I do not think my case was that rare.

Conversely you cannot expect a population without these experiences to somehow make a full psychological embrace of the medium. This is especially true for older Japanese who likely never used computers at work nor saw their peers and neighbors use them with any kind of regularity. And based on the relative recentness of PC diffusion, we should expect that the top decision-makers in Japanese companies — who have always traditionally been in their 50s and 60s — do not have a deep-seated familiarity with the computer.

In this sense, I would argue that while Japan has caught up in terms of infrastructure, the idea of using computers as a social and communicative tool is still very young within a great majority of the population.

The new fonts I designed for Onitsuka Tiger, Kirimomi Geometric Sans and Kirimomi Swash, are now available for free download on Néojaponisme.

For the past year I’ve been working on a new type design project with the Japanese sports fashion brand Onitsuka Tiger in conjunction with my online journal Néojaponisme. I sat down with some folks at Onitsuka Tiger’s office in Tokyo to pore over the company’s vast archives of print advertising from the company’s advent in 1949 through around 1977, and to draw inspiration as I pleased for the design of a pair of digital fonts that help tell the story of Onitsuka Tiger as a brand.

Looking through the hundreds of ads, catalogs, brochures and assorted other materials, it became immediately clear that there was a bigger story to be told — the Onitsuka Tiger materials span the technological and cultural development of Modern printing. The typography and graphic design of Onitsuka Tiger’s assorted printed materials provided a myriad of potential jumping-off points that span both Japanese and Western history, revealing a startling series of commonalities as well as interesting divergent moments in time.

From classical influence to highly futuristic, there is a huge gamut of interesting sources to pull from. Onitsuka Tiger’s printed promotions started in the age of metal typesetting, took advantage of phototype compositing in the 1960s through the 1980s, then entered the digital realm in the the late 1980s. As a Japanese company that marketed domestically and abroad, the marketing department had to be aware of typographic trends internationally, and this was reflected in their printed materials. From the prevalence of American Type Founders typefaces used in early advertising mixed with hand lettering to incised prototype katakana and hiragana to the Helveticization of the globe, Onitsuka Tiger’s printed matter functions as a cultural and aesthetic survey of popular styles and unique approaches to graphic design.

The two fonts created for this project are:

Kirimomi Swash

A display typeface which is rooted in both classical form and the sharp edges of photoype lettering. The typeface looks back to the historic forms of French typefounder Jean Jannon for it’s base, as well as the curved terminals and weighty serifs of the work of William Caslon. The various interpretations of their work throughout history have been applied to give each letterform presence, stability and rigidity. Sharp phototype swashes culled from the logo for EMPEROR, a line of golf shoes released by Onitsuka Tiger thirty-plus years ago have been applied to give the face a timeliness of the Modern/Postmodern era, offsetting the historical skeletal frame.

Kirimomi Swash is first and foremost a display face, and in order for it to function gracefully, a number of ligatures and alternate characters have been included. It is intentionally not designed for text setting, as that would require a smoothing-out of the most prominent elements, and the result would most likely be a typeface that while potentially being useful, would not stand out in a crowd.

Kirimomi Geometric Sans

A sans serif inspired by early geometric typefaces and the horizontal directionality of phototype text, yet designed to render immaculately on-screen and in print. This geometric sans owes a deep debt to Roger Excoffon’s 1962 typeface Antique Olive, as much as to contemporary interpretations of Paul Renner’s Futura, the near geometric rounded characters pinched and squeezed for readability.

Antique Olive’s S and s were indicative of brush track twists, having an overly large top story giving it the appearance of almost being upside-down. While many continue to question this move, as Antique Olive was meant to be the French contender for the sans serif crown being vied for by Univers and Helvetica and “failed” due to it’s strong personality, these strong nuances help convey a vivacity and liveliness missing from so much of contemporary sans serif type design. Excoffon’s idiosyncratic moves are mirrored in aspects of Kirimomi Geometric Sans – the scooped top of the lowercase i and j mirror their dotted elements; the whole face has a very large x-height; and terminals are sliced off, creating a distinctively sharp visual impression. The sliced serifs and terminals give the face a horizontal thrust that pushes readers’ eyes forward in lines of text.

Aspects of Kirimomi Geometric Sans veer wildly from these inspirational starting points: the lowercase a being double-storied, the optical “dazzle” of it’s predecessors toned down, and the entire typeface carefully kerned for optimum results in text setting. A number of alternate capitals and ligatures are included for the best possible results, including OpenType auto-substitution for all OpenType-enabled applications.

A number of pattern-making glyphs have been drawn and included in lieu of traditional typographic ornament within each of these fonts. Contemporary font technology allows the deployment of pattern elements in a regulated environment, allowing designers to control the amount of space in side bearings. When typeset and leading/line-height is adjusted, one can create smooth, even patterns, choose coloring and adjust scale quickly without having to resort to external files.

Both fonts are offered in OpenType format, the industry standard font format and will operate smoothly cross-platform. If used with applications such as the Adobe Creative Suite, users can easily access the multiple alternate characters that are included.

Both fonts also feature @font-face CSS webfont kits in the download, allowing users to deploy the fonts in lieu of system fonts on personal websites. (The webfont kits were generated using FontSquirrel, a very handy service for generating @font-face code in an easy, friendly manner.) The webfont kits include sample CSS and HTML files so users can implement the Kirimomi Fonts in an easy-to-understand way.

Download the fonts here:

Kirimomi Swash
Kirimomi Geometric Sans

The past few months I’ve been working on a new type design project with the Japanese sports fashion brand Onitsuka Tiger in conjunction with Néojaponisme. I sat down with some folks at Onitsuka Tiger’s office in Tokyo to pore over the company’s vast archives of print advertising from the company’s advent in 1949 through around 1977, and to draw inspiration as I pleased for the design of a pair of digital fonts that help tell the story of Onitsuka Tiger as a brand.

Looking through the hundreds of ads, catalogs, brochures and assorted other materials, it became immediately clear that there was a bigger story to be told — the Onitsuka Tiger materials span the technological and cultural development of Modern printing. So I will be putting together a series of posts and essays here on Néojaponisme that document both the development of the typefaces and their cultural relevance to the continuum of type design.

The typography and graphic design of Onitsuka Tiger’s assorted printed materials provided a myriad of potential jumping-off points that span both Japanese and Western history, revealing a startling series of commonalities as well as interesting divergent moments in time.

From classical influence to highly futuristic, there is a huge gamut of interesting sources to pull from. Onitsuka Tiger’s printed promotions started in the age of metal typesetting, took advantage of phototype compositing in the 1960s through the 1980s, then entered the digital realm in the the 1990s. As a Japanese company that marketed domestically and abroad, the marketing department had to be aware of typographic trends internationally, and this was reflected in their printed materials. From the prevalence of American Type Founders typefaces used in early advertising mixed with hand lettering to incised prototype katakana and hiragana to the Helveticization of the globe, Onitsuka Tiger functions as a cultural and aesthetic survey of popular styles and unique approaches to graphic design.

The two fonts created for this project are:

• Kirimomi Swash

A display typeface which is rooted in both classical form and the sharp edges of photoype lettering.

• Kirimomi Geometric Sans

A sans serif inspired by early geometric typefaces and the horizontal directionality of phototype text, yet designed to render immaculately on-screen and in print.

These digital fonts will be available for free download in the upcoming month.

Popular culture may be imploding in Japan, but this has been good news for the otaku. With not much competition from the trend-minded consumer habits of normal human beings, the otaku have become the most influential player in the market. The few cultural breakthroughs of the last few years have come from this long-standing subculture’s deep psychological need to interact with people in mediated ways, from obsessing over idol collectives, making songs powered by vocaloids, collecting toys, anonymously writing online about their newest favorite anime featuring little girls, and following every moment of Cooking Idol Main.

To get a better sense of what is going on lately in otaku culture, Marxy of Néojaponisme sat down with Patrick Macias — editor of Otaku USA and author of such books as Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo — and Matt Alt — author of Yokai Attack!: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide and Ninja Attack!: True Tales of Assassins, Samurai, and Outlaws — in a cold basement, warmed only by the glow of an old kotatsu.

Listen to the hour-long discussion on the past, present, and future of otaku culture and what it means for us non-otaku.

Download: On Otaku: Marxy x Patrick Macias x Matt Altt
General Néojaponisme Podcast RSS Feed: .rss

Related Articles:
• Matt Alt translation of seminal 1980s article “What Kind of Otaku Are You”
• Matt Alt translation of seminal 1980s article “Can Otaku Love Like Normal People”
• Podcast with Patrick Macias on Japanese style and fashion: Harajuku Requiem
• Podcast with Patrick Macias on Japanese recessionary culture: The Tonkatsu Tapes

Kacie Kinzer‘s Tweenbots made the internet rounds earlier this month on sheer charm. Unlike the awkward double-jointed humanoids in mainstream robotics labs learning to gingerly pour cups of tea for the elderly, Kinzer’s Tweenbots are just boxes on wheels with stylized smiles and taped-on notes indicating a destination and asking for help in their quest to arrive there.

And most of the time, they get it. Kinzer claims that as “not one” Tweenbot got lost or damaged as it made its way through the city. As she puts it:

[T]his ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone.

In other words, Tweenbots are masters of amae, the art of childish, irresistible dependency. This has intriguing implications for human-robot interaction even if the Tweenbots themselves are more art project than anything else.

It might seem surprising that this idea should come out of the US. Wasn’t Japan the country gradually filling up with roly-poly companions along the lines of those in Tezuka Osamu’s Astroboy and other manga, while the American market favors no-nonsense machines that are faceless, creepy, or both? (Relatively thoughtful example of this narrative: “Why Should We Be Friends?” in Newsweek last year.)

When you think about it, though, Japan’s superstar robots already rely on amae in a very deep and existential way. An AIBO isn’t quite as helpless as a Tweenbot, but it was very carefully designed to appear to be. (Even the sound design was contracted out to Takemura “Child & Magic” Nobukazu.) ASIMO speaks like a child, looks like a whimsical space elf, and acts like a clumsy servant. You could hire a human to do what the ASIMO does much more smoothly, and it would probably even be cheaper — but people forgive the ASIMO its failings because it seems to be trying its hardest to please.

A Roomba, on the other hand, relates to two things: furniture and dirt. It isn’t even designed to simulate awareness of humans, let alone deference. (You can imagine a Roomba doggedly cleaning a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Wall-E-style, but can you imagine an AIBO frolicking there?)

Tweenbots are closer to the Roomba pole than the ASIMO one. They, too, are insects blindly following one very simple algorithm: “move forward while looking cute”. They don’t interact with humans; humans act on them. That humans interpret this as an interaction is an artifact of the human programming to be suckers for cute, helpless creatures. People get attached to their Roombas, too, naming them and treating them like pets, despite the fact that a Roomba literally cannot distinguish a human from an end table.

An AIBO or an ASIMO performs amae, while a Tweenbot embodies it. In robotics, specialization usually increases efficiency, which means that a Tweenbot’s amae comes cheaper and easier. But it also makes them a developmental cul-de-sac: they are designed to need us more than we need them.

This is not the case for the ASIMOs and AIBOs of the world. The hope for them is that they will one day mature into new models dextrous and capable enough to allow us to indulge in amae. Let’s be brutally honest: the manga model for robot-assisted aged care is less Astroboy than Doraemon, the robo-amae fantasy par excellence. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an old man pleading for a takecopter — forever.

Until then, though, we indulge them like the children they are, indulging their weaknesses, applauding proudly when they manage to stand upright unsupported, and waiting patiently for them to grow up — something which Tweenbots, like Peter Pan, will never do.

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!

Recently there has been a fascinating media circus over the referral to prosecutors (charged without being physically arrested) of 18 internet users on suspicion of making false accusations towards a fairly minor comedian. While this may be the first case of several individuals charged at once for so-called enjo (炎上) flame attacks, the case relies on the same-old “the internet is scary!” whining from mass media dinosaurs.

For almost a decade now, internet users have been falsely accusing comedian Smiley Kikuchi of involvement in the horrific “concrete girl” murder/burial in 1989 (I previously mentioned the murder case on MF here). His talent agency was forced in the past to shut down a “bulletin board site” due to the flood of misplaced malice directed toward the tarento.

Kikuchi was mistakenly accussed of being one of the murderers due to being a similar age to the criminals (born in 1972) and hailing from the slummy areas of Adachi-ku where the crime happened. According to Smiley himself, the rumors showed up verbatim in a “taboos of the entertainment industry” book, which his tormentors then used to back up their claims. It did not help Kikuchi that he has based his whole comedy career on being a jerk. His own jimusho bills him as “a suspicious person you’ll never forget once you’ve seen him,” and Wikipedia summarizes his comedic stylings as “getting laughs by saying mean things with a big smile on his face.” Not exactly a charmer.

Now after setting up a new blog with Usen-affiliated Ameblo earlier last year, Kikuchi enabled comments between January and April, using a system specially designed for celebrity bloggers. All comments appeared immediately on the site but were then subjected to moderation, usually resulting in harmful comments being deleted after 15 minutes. During this time Kikuchi was apparently still inundated with the age-old accusations in the comments section, until he finally suspended blogging in May (it is back up now). Though Ameba initiated a pre-clearance moderation system in May, typical of blogs for websites such as the New York Times, Kikuchi has explained that he filed a complaint with the police after he started receiving threats offline and began fearing for his life.

Before I start throwing around criticism, let me first express general support for the idea of holding people responsible for these obviously libelous comments (of course, this assumes that there is no chance these commenters are somehow right). And those arrested sound like they deserve the treatment they are getting: they acted like “net stalkers” who made it the mission of their extremely petty lives to torment a minor comedian with no regard to the facts.

By all appearances, the 18 flamers were fingered because Smiley went to the police for help with the general problem of death threats, and the comments section of his blog happened to be where this group of alleged idiots left behind clear evidence. In other words, these people were arrested not because of the internet, but because they were a core group of stalkers who caused real harm.

But because the words “internet”, “anonymous”, “defamation”, and “jimusho talent” appeared in the same sentence, the mainstream media has decided to indulge in willfully-ignorant paranoia. Right off the bat — possibly out of deference to the Ota Production, who represents top talent including girl-group AKB48 — major media acted in unison to refuse to even name the celebrity the 18 people had defamed. But the open secret became an open fact when Smiley himself admitted to being the one behind the charges and offered a detailed explanation on his blog, simultaneously posted on the top of the Ota Production website. As evidence of the mass media’s take on the issue, I present this Feb. 6 Asahi Shimbun editorial in its near entirety — a masterful example of the typical attitude:

What if you become a target of groundless defamation and are labeled “a murderer” on the internet?

The damage would probably spread beyond cyberspace. Perhaps others might eye you with suspicion in everyday life, and the situation could affect your work.

Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department decided to send papers to prosecutors on 18 people across the nation on suspicion of libel for posting messages on a male comedian’s internet blog wrongly calling him a murderer.

Apparently, the police move is meant as a warning against such serious slander.

Furthermore, police sent papers on a woman on suspicion of intimidation for posting a message threatening to kill the comedian.

It is extremely unusual for police to collectively target individuals over entries on a blog. The situation underscores the extent of malicious messages in cyberspace.

Some people start groundless rumors to abuse and defame others close to them. Others may attack a well-known personality on the internet because they don’t like what he or she has said. Sometimes, what starts out as fun escalates into hostile attacks. The situation is all the more troublesome because there are others who incite such action.

But the people targeted are helpless.

…

One disturbing trend is that a broader range of people are irresponsibly posting slanderous remarks. The 18 people facing charges this time include a female senior high school student and an employee of a national university.

In 2007, police across the nation received nearly 9,000 reports of Net-based defamation. In South Korea, an actress who was slandered on the internet committed suicide. The situation can no longer be overlooked.

Behind the trend is the characteristic of Net society in which people can easily say anything without identifying themselves. But it is an act of cowardice to hide oneself and make abusive or untrue statements one-sidedly without giving the targets a chance to defend themselves.

Of course, we wish to recognize in a positive way the role of the internet itself. Everyone can express his or her opinions to the world. Thanks to this medium, opportunities for expression and speech have opened up extensively. We must firmly protect such opportunities.

But that is all the more reason why we need to be responsible for our words. Abusing others without reason is different from properly expressing one’s opinion. If we want to criticize others, we must calmly state our ideas based on facts. Unfortunately, such a custom has yet to take root in the ever-expanding Net society.

This time, police moved in response to a complaint filed by the victim of abuse. But to create a sound Net society, the public as a whole must make an effort. It is time for both schools and homes to properly teach how to use the internet and drive home the responsibility of message writers.

There you have it — whenever someone says something mean on the internet, the target becomes a “helpless” victim, even when the cops step in and arrest 18 perpetrators. Most TV commentators expressed nearly identical views about where our sympathies should lie.

What might not be immediately clear to the middle-aged men at the editorial board who have never held employment outside their firm, vicious comments and abuse simply come with the territory. If we are going to have an internet, we have to deal with the bad eggs who want to muck things up. And without (1) discussing the particularly pernicious nature of this case and (2) mentioning that rowdy commenters are common and need to be moderated, you paint a picture of a completely unruly and incorrigible internet population, which just is not the case.

If blogs and the internet consisted of nothing but nasty comments and abuse, no one would enjoy reading it. Most people find their own most comfortable way to use the internet, even without blogging, but there always exists the risk of some unpleasantness, not too far from everyday life.

In addition, the operators of blogging tools work tirelessly to try and balance the desire for active and open discourse (and blog-based brand promotion) while managing the inevitable bad apples who spoil things for everyone else. Ameblo clearly messed up here, but they have been working to improve. But to fan fears of the internet without considering this balance is just short-sighted. With the growing importance of online ad revenue to the likes of Dentsu (who just announced it is taking on a 100% stake in its online ad subsidiary), I am sure it is only a matter of time before the mass media are asked to call off the dogs.

Some often claim that there is no “custom” of rational, fact-based argument on the internet, but I disagree. My Google Reader is full of great Japanese bloggers, and just about all the major Diet members are actively arguing their positions on their blogs (often with comments turned off). Quite the contrary, the mainstream media tends to report rumors and float politicians’ and bureaucrats’ trial balloons at a very marginal service to the public. Why should we sit here and listen to lectures from people who carry the water of the rich and powerful and actively aid a highly closed and non-transparent governance system?

Dealing with irresponsible anonymous commenters is one of the great challenges of the internet age, and in Japan the enormous forum site 2ch has been symbolic as a hotbed for this sort of behavior. The Japanese legal system’s flaws have been exposed as those harmed by 2ch have attempted to seek justice. Despite dozens of civil judgments against 2ch founder Hiroyuki, he has yet to pay one yen in damages or make any serious effort to stop the flow of libelous content. It has been recently rumored that Hiroyuki quietly shifted ownership of the site to a Singapore-based company to avoid future headaches. One area where 2ch has been cooperative is in open threats to commit murder or other serious crimes, but that’s about it. So considering the wide berth given to commenters on 2ch and similar sites, regulating comments can seem ineffective. In fact, police cooperation in prosecuting the most egregious cases of harassment is a positive sign that the internet is getting safer, but that’s a point that would likely fly over the heads of the mainstream media internet-phobes.

When editorial writers and TV commentators rush to criticize the internet at every turn without first stopping to understand, they are only trying to protect their own short-sighted business interests. Simplistic internet paranoia was behind Mainichi’s boneheaded reaction to the WaiWai scandal, and it’s this behavior that will further alienate their audience. While the internet has often been a negative development for the mainstream media institutions themselves, the free flow of information has undoubtedly positive influences on society as a whole. There may be unfortunate side effects such as the Smiley Kikuchi episode, but the day the TV stations and newspapers realize that the internet is their friend will be a major step forward.

(Thanks to J-CAST, which got this story spot-on, for most of the facts underlying this essay. Keep outperforming the mainstream media and one day the same people who disparaged the internet will be begging you for a job!)

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

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

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

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

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

I’LL BE YOUR WHATEVER YOU WANT

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

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

HE WISHES HE WAS A BALLER

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

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

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

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

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

A NITPICKY DIGRESSION B/W BEFORE THEY WERE GIRL TALKS

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

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

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

ROMAN CANDLE IN THE WIND

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

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

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

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

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

I’M GONNA ADD SOME BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

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

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

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

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

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

DJ HERO

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE LEGOMANIAC

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

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

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

THE 21ST NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER

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

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

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

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

A REALLY EASY WAY TO CONNECT TO PEOPLE

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

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

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

American tech company Texas Instruments produced one of the first working prototypes of a transistor radio, but it was Japanese company Sony that turned the concept into a marketable product and spread it across the world. Similarly, Japanese scientists did not discover the semiconductor, but Japanese companies dominated the market in the 1980s, until the reemergence of Intel. For most of the 20th century, the stereotype was “the West invents, Japan perfects.” With TVs and cars, this adage still holds true today: Japan owns the high-end television market, and Toyota is looking like it will easily outlive General Motors.

NTT was the first company in the world to market a mobile phone, so maybe the previously-explained industrial dynamic is not relevant to the world of keitai denwa. Almost a full year after it’s initial release, the American iPhone finally made its well-publicized Japanese debut in mid-2008 — to a relatively tepid response. A lot of techy customers lined up in front of Softbank stores to buy the gadget, but I would not say that the iPhone has made much of a dent in the broader mobile phone “culture.” There were some complaints that the iPhone ignored Japanese users’ favorite features, but now that the software added “emoji” characters and the ability to attach a 1seg TV tuner, perhaps the phone can entice more mainstream users. I do not believe that the normal mobile phone customer — read: the normal Japanese person — necessarily will ever jump on the iPhone train. I suspect, however, that enough mobile users have seen or played with a real-life iPhone to know that this is the most fancy, luxury offering in the market. Certainly, Softbank and Apple want you to believe that.

Take this in for a second: the idea that a non-Japanese phone would be the most impressive model in the Japanese market is pretty staggering. Until the iPhone’s debut, Japan and Korea produced the most highly-advanced and elegant phones on the planet, hands-down. Sure, Japan lost its total domination of video game systems and portable music devices in recent years, but they still had a two-year advantage on phone functionality. The iPhone leap-frogged out of Cupertino and ruined the whole game. 1seg is the last weapon in the Japanese arsenal, and you have to love watching daytime “wide-shows” to care about that.

Now if the old “copy-cat” narrative of Japan held, we would probably see Japanese companies all clamoring to put out their own iPhone clone. So far we see very little movement in this direction — especially compared to Korean phone makers LG and Samsung, who are clearly biting a few nice features from Apple. Softbank’s Touch Diamond X04HT steals a bit of the touch screen magic, and Docomo has its PRO series HT-02A that even features iPhone-esque little icons at the bottom of the screen. But these phones do not perfect the iPhone idea: they just tack the most obvious features onto the old paradigm. And this is after a full year of being able to reverse engineer the sucker and develop a copy. So are Japanese companies incapable of making a phone with both elegant industrial design and user interface? Isn’t this the country of “timeless craftsmanship” and Zen and beautiful gardens, and therefore, world-class engineering prowess?

I am sure there are more intelligent opinions on this topic, but my gut feeling is that there are two reasons for a lack of iPhone one-ups. First, there seems to be a prideful refusal to admit that the iPhone is such a big leap ahead. Sony refused to make an iPod-like device for several years, and even now, they are not really putting their heart into making a rival product. Japanese companies may have fallen under the weight of their own success: for the last twenty years, they have been the premier electronics giants — with no one to copy but themselves. Going back to the scrappy underdog “copying” of the 1950s feels a little… post-war.

Hubris, however, is more of a subjective judgment than a primary motivator. The main reason probably has more to do with the Japanese phone industry having a lot of entrenched interests in the current system. Let’s face it: a nation of iPhones would be a financial disaster to the monopoly powers. All that money poured into i-mode would just be wasted. Imagine if users could browse the normal web and not some proprietary network. Oh, the humanity! Instead of being charged ¥10 every time you look up some crappy text-only page on a tiny screen, you could borrow someone’s WiFi and look up things on real-deal Google — for free. And God, imagine the moral horror of downloading applications from a free market of independent developers.

Okay, okay, I am a sarcastic partisan, but I, like many, miss the days of being blown away by the Japanese tech lead. Going to Yodobashi Camera now is still visiting a alternate future, but not necessarily a brighter one.

Japanese companies had a good run as skilled copycats. They also had a good run as the global tech leaders. This current stage of making second-rate laggard products at high prices does not seem like a good long-term position. Sony is “entertaining the future,” but maybe they should start entertaining the present. I don’t really need a mp3 player that randomly rolls around on the ground, but I find my iPod Touch useful.

On the first of October, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (松下電器産業株式会社) officially changed its name to “Panasonic Corporation” (パナソニック株式会社). This should not have been a huge surprise — they’ve been talking about their plans to take on Panasonic as a global name for years. They made the change in North America three years ago. The official announcement of the Japanese change was made back in January, and even the company sign got changed a few days earlier. The nomenclature unification, however, does mark the end of an era for the company. In a couple of years, even the iconic National brand will no longer exist. With consumers all up in the internet, the benefits of having multiple brands for in-store Three-Toaster Monte are outweighed by the hassle of, well, maintaining multiple brands of identical appliances.

Word on the tubes is that Panasonic even changed the lovably-dorky company song (“Let us fill with love, light, and dreams / the morning the future we are birthing”; full lyrics posted in this thread). Don’t worry, though, the new song is just as endearing: “Let us believe in graceful science, believe that this dream shall become the future.”