ymo discommunicates on Soul Train

I’m still on something of a YMO tear. Here they are in a 1980 shoot of Soul Train, showing and telling one of my favorite Japanese words, discommunication. It’s not miscommunication, which often results in wounded egos and trade frictions. The ‘dis’ is not the same ‘dis’ of dis-respect, it just means that whatever came out of your mouth or pen or vocoder completely bypasses where it’s supposed to hit. The utterance goes off into outer space, and sender and receiver both go their separate ways. One example I like is what Faulkner said, in a 1955 visit sponsored by the State Department, aka his anti-Communist tour: talking to his hosts was like two people running at top speed on opposite sides of a plate glass window. You get that feeling, more or less, in this clip.

Here Don Cornelius leads in to the q-and-a by admitting to no notion of geography. I’m not sure where I would look to find YMO on a map, myself, given their penchant for city songs (T-O-K-Y-O), as well as chinoiserie (Tong Poo) and more chinoiserie with goofy breathy French dubbing (La femme chinoise). But I think his point was that YMO seemed like they were from really far away, and that if he had at least read the Encyclopedia Britannica memo, he might have had a better take on the mystical whatever of their five-piece combo form.

DC actually gives a really good example of techno-orientalism in this exchange. Throwing up his hands (metaphorically) in bemusement at the discommunication, he horses around with drummer Takahashi Yukihiro–a famous glam rocker who used to be in a Yoko Ono parody band that turned real, called the Sadistic Mika Band. After the band intros, he asks Takahashi to explain “Einstein’s theory of relativity.” This is 2 years after the Walkman debuted, and the portrait of Japanese man-on-the-street as the next-door neighbor of rocket science is well on its way.

I have to say that I found YMO’s plant in the audience, the guy designed to break the fourth wall between the stage and the dance floor (“Japanese gentlemen please stand up!”), to be a bit odd. A guy in a 3-piece grey flannel-ish suit does not seem to help their own purported cause much—the de-mystification of exoticism (yellow magic, fetishism), and its postwar Occupation stereotypes.

The customizing of lyrics, in the Archie Bell song they perform, “Tighten Up,” is kind of great, though–the narration is provided by a pretty famous Japanese radio guy, Kobayashi “Snakeman” (in homage to “Wolfman” Jack) Katsuya. The plant gets so into the actual show, as the band performs, that he keeps dancing and forgets his lines, which is also kind of cool, so I guess the whole image does get a bit unhinged. The keyboardist, Aki’s, buoyant hopping is pretty great, too.

archaic YMO c. 1978

Some interesting interview footage with the three + members of YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra). The venue is the studio in which Solid State Survivor, the second album, was put together.

I say “+” because usually they have “fourth man,” the synth programmer MATSUTAKE Hideki on deck, but I’m not sure how many people are in the shadows here, in and among the gadgets.

Around 1:10 is a funny sequence where SAKAMOTO Ryûichi shows-and-tells how hard it is for a human to manipulate the piano keys fast enough to get the tempo he wants (it’s in Japanese, but you can see/hear clearly what is going on by watching the demo).

the yoshida brothers, neo-shamisen twins

I drove by Amoeba Records yesterday afternoon, and noticed that a guy was sitting on the curb outside playing the banjo in a very percussive way. Doh–! I had obviously missed the event he was riffing on, the in-store performance of the Yoshida Brothers (吉田兄弟), who are playing at the El Rey next week, touring the US and Canada, and may have actually relocated to LA.

The Yoshida Bros are two amazing neo-shamisen players–specifically, the Tsugaru-jamisen. The Tsugaru style of shamisen playing is often likened to the rough, crashing and merciless sound of the sea in that part of the country. Hear for yourself, and note the fauxhawk!:

They’re more known here for their Nintendo Wii tune. But the larger wave whose heels they ride on is worth noting. For about the last twenty years, there has been a revival of this rough, percussive style of shamisen, whose strings are thicker than the delicate ones used for court and kabuki music, and hit as much as pulled or plucked.

Tsugaru-jamisen derives from the very tip-top North of the country, Aomori prefecture, and was initially practiced in the late 1800s by itinerant blind musicians. Aomori is known, when it is known at all, for potatoes, rice, apples, tasty clear saké, migrant agricultural workers, high unemployment, and an extremely bleak sense of humor. It borders the colonial expansion territory of Hokkaido, and would be flyover country if your travels took you between Niigata and Idaho.

I’m not so keen on the neo-national red-and-white made-for-export kimono. To me, this scheme is more often associated with the controlled palette and geometry of Mishima-style cultural fascism (this is a still from the Paul Schrader Mishima movie, playing @ LACMA May 16).

This dumb-down is especially baffling to me, given the local nature of the music, which you can see in an NHK broadcast here. The song is a Tsugaru jongara bushi, one of the staples of the early mod repertoire which the Yoshida Bros have recorded in several different versions.

Their reach is actually kind of stunning. Their latest album apparently covers a Brian Eno number, and they do a pretty nice ambient spaghetti-western soundtrack with slide guitar, in “Morricone.” Their publicists seem to be lamely scrambling to find the right slots and “cool Japan” metaphors to describe the Bros–hmm, let’s see what’s in the virtual pirate crate here…

Clad in formal, ceremonial attire of kimonos and hakama pants, but sporting the dyed light brown hair that is trendy among Japan’s savvy youth, the Brothers play the age-old Tsugaru-shamisen-an instrument akin to a rustic three-stringed banjo-with the fervor of Jimi Hendrix.

I like “rustic,” as a tipoff to folky timelessness, found in the “age-old,” uh, nineteenth-century style of the Tsugaru jamisen. And “clad” as a verb meaning “to wear in a stiff, formal manner” as in iron-clad, def conveys the angle that these dudes don’t put their pants [hakama] on just one leg at a time, like you and me. But what really puzzled me was the Hendrix comparison–it’s like they said “hmm, 2 guys, not white…wait… playing a power instrument, hmm, let’s round up to Hendrix!” Last time I looked, the Yoshida Bros were acoustic musicians, all about rhythm and not improvisation, never sing anything longer than a single shout at a time. But there is that flag thing in common.