What's up with Kahimi?

[imomus]

Anyone who reads the Momus English-language Wikipedia page will learn that he's "had a reasonable level of commercial success in a number of countries, especially Japan, where he wrote and produced records for successful singer Kahimi Karie". This is confirmed by the English Wikipedia page on Kahimi Karie, which says:

"Kahimi Karie (カヒミ・カリィ Kahimi Karī), born Mari Hiki (比企マリ Hiki Mari, born March 15, 1968) is a Japanese female Shibuya-kei vocalist. Kahimi sings in English, French, and Japanese (among other languages) with breathy child-like vocals. Her music can be considered ethereal, whispery pop; a number of songs have been written for her by Momus. She also has a strong connection to Cornelius, who collaborated on many early works, and whose trendy Trattoria label released many of her EPs in the mid-'90s. Karie currently lives in Tokyo, Japan, though she spent much of her career in Paris. Two projects have been announced for release in July 2007. One is the live DVD Muhlifein; the other is the rarities collection Specialothers."

Victor did indeed release a Kahimi Karie live DVD and rarities compilation in July, but these have an elegiac, end-of-contract feel. Major labels tend to release compilations, live albums, cover versions and rarities collections when they haven't recouped and don't intend to renew an artist's contract. Kahimi has already released two Japanese Best Ofs, one at the end of her Trattoria years, another after three albums on the Polydor label. She's now released three albums on Victor -- records that are remarkably left-field and boldly uncommercial for major label fare.

The iconography of the new DVD sleeve is poignantly valedictory: a blurred Kahimi looks wistfully at a dandelion "clock", as if about to scatter the dead flower's seeds to the wind. I don't think we should worry that Kahimi will give up music, though, even if she doesn't continue with major labels. She's forged strong connections with musicians like Jim O'Rourke and Otomo Yoshihide. She'll still be able to make indie albums well past her 40th birthday.

It was as an indie artist that I first knew Kahimi, and the success of the songs I wrote and produced for and with her (one of them, "David Hamilton", features on the new live DVD) helped propel her to major league stardom. In the mid-90s Kahimi became the queen of Shibuya-kei, a movement known for eclecticism and for collaborations between Japanese and overseas artists.

I'm proud of the work we did together back then, but it seems that Kahimi and her management are... less so. Although "Momus" is mentioned pretty quickly on the English-language Wikipedia page about her, the Japanese-language Kahimi Karie page doesn't mention me anywhere. We learn that Kahimi watched very little television when she was young, that she was strongly influenced by Serge Gainsbourg, that she has a French bulldog called Gomez and uses Sisley organic cosmetics. Momus, though, appears to have been airbrushed out. Even the name of the first EP we made together, "I Am A Kitten (Kahimi Karie sings Momus in Paris)" has been shortened.



Now, I don't want to sound whiney or paranoid here. It isn't just me who's gone down the memory hole. All of Kahimi's distinguished foreign collaborators -- Philippe Katerine, Bertrand Burgalat, Olivia Tremor Control, Stereo Total, Add N To X, Gregory Czerkinsky, Arto Lindsay -- have disappeared from the narrative with me. We've also been airbrushed out of the biography on her official website. Her Japanese collaborators, however, are listed by name. (The exception to the rule is Jim O'Rourke, who worked on Kahimi's 2006 album and does get namechecked on her Victor profile page.)

I'm really not a complaining, campaigning type. To suggest that someone should go in and add my name -- in fact, the names of all of Kahimi's 90s gaijin songwriters and producers -- to the Japanese Wikipedia page seems to me petty and pointless. Sure, in theory Wikipedia is about exactly such details, and no page belongs to any one person. But in practice -- as Marxy never tires of telling us (and it's something he's actually right about) -- the Japanese entertainment industry is indefatigably oligopolistic. To challenge the tight relationships between artist management and media in Japan would be to indulge in Debito-ism. My experience is that you work in Japan under the prevailing conditions or not at all.

But here we come up against a conflict. I just hotlinked Wikipedia pages about oligopoly and Debito Arudou. Those pages would be considerably less useful -- hardly worth linking to, in fact -- if they contained only information written by oligopolists and Debito himself. Not only is collaboration -- the multiplication of voices and perspectives -- the wonderful root of the wiki movement, it's also very much what Shibuya-kei was all about. So while I wouldn't advocate adding the names of her 90s foreign collaborators to Kahimi's page, I do think it would be fine if it happened. Japanese Olivia Tremor Control fans, for instance, would be able to discover that the band made a record with Kahimi, and track it down. On the other hand, I have a dark sense that some hidden hand would remove the reference fairly quickly. The irony is that an entry written with so strong an official tone, once altered, would give the impression that the new information carried an official imprimatur -- something guaranteed to enrage the original authors.

What I would be interested to see, though, would be a Japanese Wikipedia Momus (モーマス) page. I'd be delighted if someone with good Japanese skills started one. It would differ from the English, French and German pages in emphasis, tilting towards collaborations with Japanese musicians like Mari Hamada, The Poison Girlfriend, Emi Necozawa and Ken Morioka, and filmmakers like Mika Ninagawa and Noriko Shibutani. Oh, yes, and it would mention that I worked quite a bit with Kahimi Karie, too! Well, you can dream, can't you?

Freedom of information is not something Japan is very good at. Reporters Sans Frontieres downgraded Japan in its Press Freedom Index from 37 in 2005 to 51 in 2006 due to "rising nationalism and the system of exclusive press clubs". Might "rising nationalism" even affect something so trivial as excluding the names of foreign collaborators from artist websites? And would that then make a theoretically open information system like Wikipedia more important as a corrective to over-tight press-management collusions?

Then again, Japan may be down at 51 for press freedom, but it's still number one when it comes to longevity. Maybe the secret of health, wealth and long life is not knowing about these things, and not giving a flying fig even if you do. It certainly makes for rock-solid sleep, I can tell you.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You would have never been writing (best-selling) hits for pop stars in Japan had it not been for the major changes in the industry starting in the late 80s with an influx of non-idol factory bands.

Not quite sure that's true -- weren't Stock, Aitken and Waterman huge in Japan in the 80s, with their own idol factory star system, using Japanese singers? Sure, Shibuya-kei helped foreign artists break in, and we in turn helped domestic indie stars go major (part of a worldwide trend in the 90s). But it was happening in the idol factory sector too. I personally try not to correlate questions of creativity too closely with business structures.

I find it odd that you would say that independent artists in Japan - who are still having to work around an oppressively bad and uncreative system - should basically "accept" their lot and not seek out alternatives.

I do say I think the truth is in between the two positions I outline a couple of comments up the page. But my stance is a pragmatic one, rather like the stance of Google in China. It's worth being there, and it helps to be there, even if you have to buckle down to a different way of working. Put another way, it's cold comfort to be "right" (even if you're not a cultural relativist and think your way of doing things is right) if you're not in work.

Example: it's against everything I'd experienced in the West that a management company should take the TV publishing royalties for "Good Morning World". But that's normal in Japan, and it was the precondition for the record being released, and on the record I took the publishing royalties. So it was worth it for all of us, even if it wasn't (by Western standards), "right". That's not "denying my own subjectivity", is it?

I don't see internal struggles on these issues at all. In fact, it was even hard to discuss it with Hisae -- she was totally "Japanese" in her reluctance to go against the grain and imagine alterations being made (by just anyone!) to what she saw as an "official account" on Wikipedia. I also don't see big movements from Japanese artists to challenge the relationships with their management companies, or the sudden influx of international lawyers. I think this "diversity" (itself a pretty un-Japanese idea -- that's surely implicit in all this talk of "rising nationalism", isn't it?) is a projection of yours. And, as usual, where your ideas fall down is in the crucial area of praxis-within-culture. (I'm sure there's a lovely German compound noun for that.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I also don't see big movements from Japanese artists to challenge the relationships with their management companies

Caveat: Hisae tells me SMAP are trying to get away from Johnnys, and that your recent gossip entry should have taken that factor into consideration as context.

[(Anonymous)]

How so? Even if they go independent as an internal subcompany within Johnny's (which is what they basically already are), why would the business practices of their new lifelong Johnny's employee boss be any different than Johnny's central? The whole model is based on strict control of images.

Marxy