Culture Post: Has this Tofu gone bad?
CRISIS
Why is J-pop failing in America?
No, seriously, why is Japanese popular music fecking failing in America?
"What are you talking abooooot?!" I can hear you say. "Japanese music is totally hot right now! Dir En Grey was on MTV and Hikki did an album here and The Pillows were very well-received!! You can't even walk through a convention without running into some Gackt-wannabe and three-fourths of Mini Moni!"
Yes, and you know what those conventions are actually FOR?
That's right, bitches.
So answer me this. How is it, if Japanese cartoons and comics are such the big thing among a growing sector of America's youth, and you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a Narutard (and frankly, I would approve of more Narutards being hit by dead cats), and the Japanese culture has clearly caught the attention of this growing fanbase, how is it -- HOW IS IT -- that Sony, who is the goddamn Eight Hundred Pound Gorilla of modern entertainment (IN JAPAN), can send their music division to America, to sell Japanese music, for HALF the price you would be importing the damn CDs, and then that company division STILL has to undergo a "strategic re-arrangement"?
The mind boggles.
Now, I'm not trying to bash that hard on Tofu Records' current transitional state. It's not like they went bankrupt or anything, but it's clear that things are not diddly-oh happy in the company, and that should be worrisome to anyone in the West who enjoys the Japanese musicks. Maybe they could have had a better CD catalog. And they could have promoted better. But the issues lie deeper than how the company is run. On a whole, there's something wonky about how the music sells, in general. I mean, these guys and Geneon are pretty much the major Stateside distributors for J-music right now, and they're kind of ... barely treading water. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get, like, a Yoko Ishida album and two anime soundtracks any given financial quarter.
That's sad.
That's pathetic.
At the very least, you can trace the [legit, US-distributed] anime and manga boom to the turn of the 21st century, coinciding with two key advances in format: on the animation side, the advent of the DVD; on the comics side, the unflipped $10 volume. There is no similar analogue for Japanese music sales in the United States. In fact, the sucky thing is that J-music is pretty much piggybacking on anime in the first place anyway (hence the reference to Yoko Ishida, and soundtracks). This does not apply to ALL fans of the music, obviously, but it applies a lot. For many, their first exposure to Japanese music was probably a theme they heard from some cartoon. Because cartoons and comics are Japan's gift to the world.
CONTENT
And that's the explanation to the situation, right there. You ask, I ask, "Why are Japanese cartoons and comics hitting it big while their music is having trouble picking up? IN AMERICA?" And I will say, it's because those visual mediums are Japan's gift to the world. It's all in the content. Japanese cartoons and comics offer something that no other cultures have in those mediums. They offer rich, expressive, highly stylized worlds that cater to ALL demographics, but especially to kids and teenagers (a lucrative demographic if there ever was one), and even in the kids department there's some wild, awesome stuff. On the other hand, Japanese music—while still expressive and unique in its own way—offers something that most Western cultures DO have. Only different, but in concept, still the same. Rockers, rappers, idols, singer-songwriters, nothing that isn't already familiar. So.
What I really want to say, then, is this: the difference—I think—is that Japan had Osamu Tezuka. And Tezuka decided he wanted to draw.
Osamu Tezuka (ca. 1955): I'm going to take visual story mediums and transform them into vehicles of sophisticated artistic and emotional expression.
(Translation: I'm gonna make Japanese cartoons and comics AWESOME, bitches.)
Japanese pop musicians (ca. 1955): Oh, we're just going to sit around and copy what the West does, except in our own language, and... uh... spit it back in their faces.
*spit*
The West: We don't want this! We have this already!
Imagine if Osamu Tezuka had decided he wanted to be a songwriter.
We'd be humming along to mind-blowing 70-minute multiple-key-change epics, but also, there'd be a lot of doctor songs. In Japanese.
CONSUMER
You know what else. I'm going to tell you something. The other reason why Tofu is on the fritz. Why the CD rack is stuck with Yoko Ishidas and anime soundtracks. And it's because. J-Music fans are not geeky enough.
"What?! I'm plenty geeky! I have Morning Musume's complete discography in 320 kbps! I have video clips of every X-Japan performance EVRAR! I run my own personal server where you can torrent every NHK Kouhaku Utagassen since TV was invented!"
Go tell it to someone who cares, PIRATE.
See, this is part of the problem. Not the whole problem. But maybe you don't understand what it means to be geeky. When the American fandom of the modern Japanese visual arts was born, it came from sci-fi dudes a generation ago watching 7th-copy tapes of Urusei Yatsura that Mike brought over from his friend who was stationed in Okinawa. (Or something like that. This is a well-known otaku meme.) And, okay, they were taping shows off the TV, and making copies, and fansubbing, and this was because they loved the medium. They were trying to distribute this stuff, get it out, get it into people's hands and into their heads, because of love.
I look at the modern J-music fandom I see people who just want free shit off the Internet.
There is no love. Just greed. (Unfortunately, this is happening in the visual arts too.)
And they're not sharing their files with you to get the word out, they're doing it to even out their Upload/Download ratio.
Even the ones who claim to import all the legit products from Japan, well, how is that building the LOCAL fan community? You've just chucked down US$30 a CD, US$35 a photobook, whatever, and NONE of that is helping to build stateside distributors of Japanese music. You've just bypassed Tofu and Geneon and whoever else and then you wonder why they're floundering. But then you don't care because you're just going to go order more stuff off YesAsia and Amazon.co.jp ANYWAY, or swing by Kinokuniya, again.
And also. When I say not geeky enough, I mean, the music fandom is filled with too many of these mainstreamers who turn tail and hide as soon as someone accuses them of geekery. Now, cartoons and comics have been geeky for DECADES, which is why when a Japan-loving variant of that fandom was born in America, they didn't care that they were seen as obsessive. But you brandish the word "wota" or "otaku" at Billy Bob AyumiHamasakiIsMySecondWife and it's like you've just poisoned him, because he just LIKES Japanese music, okay, but please don't lump him in with those lightstick-waving freaks, and suddenly that love, that passion for the medium, is tempered by embarrassment, and cripples the growth of the fandom.
Whereas you look at the post-college-age founding fathers and mothers of the anime and manga scene: programmers, engineers, sysadmins, physicists, librarians, historians, polymaths in general, just lots of people in intellectually challenging fields because that's the kind of people who adapt easily to fanciful, imaginative, fictional worlds. And these kinds of people have two things going for them:
1) They're good at, oh, organizing stuff
2) They've been picked on by the "cool" kids all their lives
Because of (2), they don't care about the public perception of their unusual interests, and are proud to show them off, and because of (1), they end up putting together conventions to cater to those interests. You pull up any weekend of the calendar year, save for the major holidays, and there WILL be a North American convention for Japanese cartoons and comics, somewhere, somehow. Now how many conventions or festivals are there just for Japanese popular music? Count. Come on, I'm waiting. I'll even give you some of the "general purpose Asian culture" events if you're that desperate. Keep going ... yeah ... find any yet?
Told you J-music fans weren't geeky enough.
There is no visionary, no John Ledford or Carl Horn of Japanese music, who's saying, "Wow, this stuff is great, I wanna make a company and get this out to people"—there's just no one out there like that, who's willing to put themselves on the line for the sake of love and look like complete nerds so that others will come to understand that love as well.
And if you're too scared to show your freakishly obsessive love for an artform, how will you ever get anyone else to love it?
CONCLUSION
I think Tofu can be saved, although it's hard to say from their current situation how much "saving" they really need. And if people want them to be saved in the first place. I know, however, that they cannot live on L'arc and TMR alone, and they need to diversify, find the pulse of what music fans want, and stay visible. Not just to fans of Japanese visual arts, but to those with any interest in Japanese culture, and the music, and both. You gotta get out there and say, "HEY, there's a company, in America, that you can buy Japanese music from, so you don't have to pay all the shipping fees and markups! Really!" Although that only works if they have the records people want. So they need to work on that as well—it's Tofu's job to find out what listeners want, and it's the listeners' job to TELL them, not just hock around online and share download links.
Unless there's some miracle revolution waiting in the wings of audio technology, I don't expect J-pop to boom in America the way Japan's visual arts did a half decade ago. But it certainly shouldn't have to fail. There's no reason it should have to fail. However, it'll take the effort of distributors, AND consumers, to decide what they want out of the medium and get it right.
Why is J-pop failing in America?
No, seriously, why is Japanese popular music fecking failing in America?
"What are you talking abooooot?!" I can hear you say. "Japanese music is totally hot right now! Dir En Grey was on MTV and Hikki did an album here and The Pillows were very well-received!! You can't even walk through a convention without running into some Gackt-wannabe and three-fourths of Mini Moni!"
Yes, and you know what those conventions are actually FOR?
That's right, bitches.
So answer me this. How is it, if Japanese cartoons and comics are such the big thing among a growing sector of America's youth, and you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a Narutard (and frankly, I would approve of more Narutards being hit by dead cats), and the Japanese culture has clearly caught the attention of this growing fanbase, how is it -- HOW IS IT -- that Sony, who is the goddamn Eight Hundred Pound Gorilla of modern entertainment (IN JAPAN), can send their music division to America, to sell Japanese music, for HALF the price you would be importing the damn CDs, and then that company division STILL has to undergo a "strategic re-arrangement"?
The mind boggles.
Now, I'm not trying to bash that hard on Tofu Records' current transitional state. It's not like they went bankrupt or anything, but it's clear that things are not diddly-oh happy in the company, and that should be worrisome to anyone in the West who enjoys the Japanese musicks. Maybe they could have had a better CD catalog. And they could have promoted better. But the issues lie deeper than how the company is run. On a whole, there's something wonky about how the music sells, in general. I mean, these guys and Geneon are pretty much the major Stateside distributors for J-music right now, and they're kind of ... barely treading water. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get, like, a Yoko Ishida album and two anime soundtracks any given financial quarter.
That's sad.
That's pathetic.
At the very least, you can trace the [legit, US-distributed] anime and manga boom to the turn of the 21st century, coinciding with two key advances in format: on the animation side, the advent of the DVD; on the comics side, the unflipped $10 volume. There is no similar analogue for Japanese music sales in the United States. In fact, the sucky thing is that J-music is pretty much piggybacking on anime in the first place anyway (hence the reference to Yoko Ishida, and soundtracks). This does not apply to ALL fans of the music, obviously, but it applies a lot. For many, their first exposure to Japanese music was probably a theme they heard from some cartoon. Because cartoons and comics are Japan's gift to the world.
CONTENT
And that's the explanation to the situation, right there. You ask, I ask, "Why are Japanese cartoons and comics hitting it big while their music is having trouble picking up? IN AMERICA?" And I will say, it's because those visual mediums are Japan's gift to the world. It's all in the content. Japanese cartoons and comics offer something that no other cultures have in those mediums. They offer rich, expressive, highly stylized worlds that cater to ALL demographics, but especially to kids and teenagers (a lucrative demographic if there ever was one), and even in the kids department there's some wild, awesome stuff. On the other hand, Japanese music—while still expressive and unique in its own way—offers something that most Western cultures DO have. Only different, but in concept, still the same. Rockers, rappers, idols, singer-songwriters, nothing that isn't already familiar. So.
What I really want to say, then, is this: the difference—I think—is that Japan had Osamu Tezuka. And Tezuka decided he wanted to draw.
Osamu Tezuka (ca. 1955): I'm going to take visual story mediums and transform them into vehicles of sophisticated artistic and emotional expression.
(Translation: I'm gonna make Japanese cartoons and comics AWESOME, bitches.)
Japanese pop musicians (ca. 1955): Oh, we're just going to sit around and copy what the West does, except in our own language, and... uh... spit it back in their faces.
*spit*
The West: We don't want this! We have this already!
Imagine if Osamu Tezuka had decided he wanted to be a songwriter.
We'd be humming along to mind-blowing 70-minute multiple-key-change epics, but also, there'd be a lot of doctor songs. In Japanese.
CONSUMER
You know what else. I'm going to tell you something. The other reason why Tofu is on the fritz. Why the CD rack is stuck with Yoko Ishidas and anime soundtracks. And it's because. J-Music fans are not geeky enough.
"What?! I'm plenty geeky! I have Morning Musume's complete discography in 320 kbps! I have video clips of every X-Japan performance EVRAR! I run my own personal server where you can torrent every NHK Kouhaku Utagassen since TV was invented!"
Go tell it to someone who cares, PIRATE.
See, this is part of the problem. Not the whole problem. But maybe you don't understand what it means to be geeky. When the American fandom of the modern Japanese visual arts was born, it came from sci-fi dudes a generation ago watching 7th-copy tapes of Urusei Yatsura that Mike brought over from his friend who was stationed in Okinawa. (Or something like that. This is a well-known otaku meme.) And, okay, they were taping shows off the TV, and making copies, and fansubbing, and this was because they loved the medium. They were trying to distribute this stuff, get it out, get it into people's hands and into their heads, because of love.
I look at the modern J-music fandom I see people who just want free shit off the Internet.
There is no love. Just greed. (Unfortunately, this is happening in the visual arts too.)
And they're not sharing their files with you to get the word out, they're doing it to even out their Upload/Download ratio.
Even the ones who claim to import all the legit products from Japan, well, how is that building the LOCAL fan community? You've just chucked down US$30 a CD, US$35 a photobook, whatever, and NONE of that is helping to build stateside distributors of Japanese music. You've just bypassed Tofu and Geneon and whoever else and then you wonder why they're floundering. But then you don't care because you're just going to go order more stuff off YesAsia and Amazon.co.jp ANYWAY, or swing by Kinokuniya, again.
And also. When I say not geeky enough, I mean, the music fandom is filled with too many of these mainstreamers who turn tail and hide as soon as someone accuses them of geekery. Now, cartoons and comics have been geeky for DECADES, which is why when a Japan-loving variant of that fandom was born in America, they didn't care that they were seen as obsessive. But you brandish the word "wota" or "otaku" at Billy Bob AyumiHamasakiIsMySecondWife and it's like you've just poisoned him, because he just LIKES Japanese music, okay, but please don't lump him in with those lightstick-waving freaks, and suddenly that love, that passion for the medium, is tempered by embarrassment, and cripples the growth of the fandom.
Whereas you look at the post-college-age founding fathers and mothers of the anime and manga scene: programmers, engineers, sysadmins, physicists, librarians, historians, polymaths in general, just lots of people in intellectually challenging fields because that's the kind of people who adapt easily to fanciful, imaginative, fictional worlds. And these kinds of people have two things going for them:
1) They're good at, oh, organizing stuff
2) They've been picked on by the "cool" kids all their lives
Because of (2), they don't care about the public perception of their unusual interests, and are proud to show them off, and because of (1), they end up putting together conventions to cater to those interests. You pull up any weekend of the calendar year, save for the major holidays, and there WILL be a North American convention for Japanese cartoons and comics, somewhere, somehow. Now how many conventions or festivals are there just for Japanese popular music? Count. Come on, I'm waiting. I'll even give you some of the "general purpose Asian culture" events if you're that desperate. Keep going ... yeah ... find any yet?
Told you J-music fans weren't geeky enough.
There is no visionary, no John Ledford or Carl Horn of Japanese music, who's saying, "Wow, this stuff is great, I wanna make a company and get this out to people"—there's just no one out there like that, who's willing to put themselves on the line for the sake of love and look like complete nerds so that others will come to understand that love as well.
And if you're too scared to show your freakishly obsessive love for an artform, how will you ever get anyone else to love it?
CONCLUSION
I think Tofu can be saved, although it's hard to say from their current situation how much "saving" they really need. And if people want them to be saved in the first place. I know, however, that they cannot live on L'arc and TMR alone, and they need to diversify, find the pulse of what music fans want, and stay visible. Not just to fans of Japanese visual arts, but to those with any interest in Japanese culture, and the music, and both. You gotta get out there and say, "HEY, there's a company, in America, that you can buy Japanese music from, so you don't have to pay all the shipping fees and markups! Really!" Although that only works if they have the records people want. So they need to work on that as well—it's Tofu's job to find out what listeners want, and it's the listeners' job to TELL them, not just hock around online and share download links.
Unless there's some miracle revolution waiting in the wings of audio technology, I don't expect J-pop to boom in America the way Japan's visual arts did a half decade ago. But it certainly shouldn't have to fail. There's no reason it should have to fail. However, it'll take the effort of distributors, AND consumers, to decide what they want out of the medium and get it right.
6 Comments:
how about because the anime and manga which is doing healthy business in America is translated into English, and J-music is not? Americans don't like things they can't understand.
This one of the best blogs I have seen on this subject. Having really discovered Morning Musume and similar groups only last summer, it is hard to believe just how breathtakingly excellent they are. Sony is stupid, for example, to make Morning Musume and Hello! Project DVDs available to the U.S. -- but for Region 2 only! OK, so I got my region-free DVD players, oine for my laptop and the other for my TV. It's the principle of the thing! There is a burgeoning market for Asian music in the U.S. (yes, led by anime, but a market nonetheless) but Sony doesn't want the world to really know about Morning Musume lest it sweep the country and squeez out the worthless Britneys and Aguileras of this cointinent. Now ... I feel better.
http://www.writingup.com/blog/Radicalpatriot
You, sir, are a genius.
Re: the first comment--it's not like I'm an expert on the topic, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of the people who do buy anime are watching it subbed. In Japanese. In a language they may or may not understand.
I would be more likely to blame the lack of sales on the lack of any marketing whatsoever. Like you mentioned, Pata, most people are going to hear about jpop through their new favorite anime theme song, and Tofu could make a killing by advertising the stateside release of said theme song's single/album/whatever in a sheet included with a DVD. But I've seen nothing of the sort and it kind of bites.
This post has been removed by the author.
Like you said, a lot of jpop and jrock have similar styles to western equivalents. You have to look at what western music doesn't offer at the moment. For example, when was the last time since the 80's you heard a good, synth-driven, solid english pop song that wasn't laden with hip-hop influences or R&B warbling?
I think the main jpop growth potential is in moe-moe denpa akiba pop. That and anime OP/ED tie-ins. Haruhi character singles, anyone? :3
I really have to question Tofu's marketing department, as this is the first I've ever heard of them(that I can remember).
That is such an awesome post!! I avoid a lot of J-pop because I don't really like pop music that much. I enjoy Yoko Kanno, Joe Hisashi, and the Char's Counterattack soundtrack, but I want more ROCK! Balzac, Penpals Pillows, non-visual Kei bands (although Balzac is really kinda in that, only in a Misfits way). Where's Loudness, EZO, and their new mellinium equivalents? I would totally support that. I'm guessing that like classic manga fans, I am just not in the demographic to support something like a NWOJHM, but that would be cool. I think you are right. We have all kinds of western music to keep us happy, plenty of pop. And, we can sing it in English, we know the words! That is perhaps another problem with Japanese music catching on. Outside of geeks, who is going to sing along to J-pop. Manga is translated by big companies, anime relies a lot on dubs to even out the sales, J-Music just doesn't have the same thing going for it. (like Leigh Walton said) I'd love to see more stuff though. I love new music from all over, and I would love to hear more music from Japan outside of pop and anime theme songs. I think I am in the minority though.
Post a Comment
<< Home