Okaeri, Plastics!
Oct. 29th, 2007 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIn the Liquid Rooms in Tokyo tonight a historic reunion will take place: the Cornelius Group will be supported by a reformed version of cult New Wave band The Plastics. To refresh your memory, or to introduce you to The Plastics, here they are on NHK in 1980 performing "Copy":
[Error: unknown template video]
It's not hard to see who The Plastics were copying musically: bands like The B52s, Talking Heads, Devo and The Rezillos inform their sound. Here they are that same year performing "Top Secret Man" (although the New York live version, filmed a year later, is better).
From the look of the sketch of the reformed Plastics on the Liquid Room website, though, a crucial element will be missing from the Plastics line-up supporting Cornelius tonight: the central figure of the band's elegant and oshare female vocalist, Chica Sato.
Sato was working as a stylist in the late 70s when she ran into Hajime Tachibana (now a successful designer) and Toshio Nakanishi (later her husband, father of her daughter, and her partner in the mid-80s band Melon). To say Sato was chosen for her visual as much as her musical qualities would be to ignore the fact that everybody in Plastics
was oriented in pretty much the same direction: these were stylists, illustrators and designers who, for a couple of years, were in a fashionable New Wave band. A band that became, some say, the template for the Shibuya-kei acts of the 90s.
Maki Nomiya of Pizzicato 5, for instance, acknowledges the debt and the inspiration. "Probably young people wouldn't know this legendary band The Plastics," she says on her blog. "But when YMO and those technopop bands came out the most cool and fashionable band was Plastics and I was influenced so much by Plastics. I could even say that because I met Plastics I started to sing. Especially this vocalist Sato Chica-Chan was my idol. They were really the predecessors of Pizzicato 5."
So why isn't Chica Sato onstage with her old band tonight? Probably because she lives in London now. The handsome and provocative singer who once went bare-breasted on a Melon album sleeve now has grey hair. She does her own clothes line. I know this because last week I bought a pair of leggings she designed.
I got them for Hisae's birthday. It happened by accident: I ate lunch with a friend in a new Japanese restaurant called Life on Old Street. At the end of the meal I went downstairs to the loo, and in the basement discovered a curious Japanese goods store run by a prim and dapper gay man. I picked out the angular New Wave-patterned leggings (they also had a trad Japanese feel, like a kimono; the pattern was also available on headscarves), and as the man wrapped them up he mentioned that they were designed by a lady who used to be the singer in The Plastics.
Above you can see Hisae wearing them (while reading Midori Matsui's survey of Japanese art). Some may claim that the original spirit of The Plastics will be there on stage at Tokyo's Liquid Rooms tonight, but I'd say -- and I suspect Maki Nomiya would agree -- that an important part of it is right here on Hisae's legs.
[Error: unknown template video]
It's not hard to see who The Plastics were copying musically: bands like The B52s, Talking Heads, Devo and The Rezillos inform their sound. Here they are that same year performing "Top Secret Man" (although the New York live version, filmed a year later, is better).
From the look of the sketch of the reformed Plastics on the Liquid Room website, though, a crucial element will be missing from the Plastics line-up supporting Cornelius tonight: the central figure of the band's elegant and oshare female vocalist, Chica Sato.
Sato was working as a stylist in the late 70s when she ran into Hajime Tachibana (now a successful designer) and Toshio Nakanishi (later her husband, father of her daughter, and her partner in the mid-80s band Melon). To say Sato was chosen for her visual as much as her musical qualities would be to ignore the fact that everybody in Plastics
was oriented in pretty much the same direction: these were stylists, illustrators and designers who, for a couple of years, were in a fashionable New Wave band. A band that became, some say, the template for the Shibuya-kei acts of the 90s.Maki Nomiya of Pizzicato 5, for instance, acknowledges the debt and the inspiration. "Probably young people wouldn't know this legendary band The Plastics," she says on her blog. "But when YMO and those technopop bands came out the most cool and fashionable band was Plastics and I was influenced so much by Plastics. I could even say that because I met Plastics I started to sing. Especially this vocalist Sato Chica-Chan was my idol. They were really the predecessors of Pizzicato 5."
So why isn't Chica Sato onstage with her old band tonight? Probably because she lives in London now. The handsome and provocative singer who once went bare-breasted on a Melon album sleeve now has grey hair. She does her own clothes line. I know this because last week I bought a pair of leggings she designed.
I got them for Hisae's birthday. It happened by accident: I ate lunch with a friend in a new Japanese restaurant called Life on Old Street. At the end of the meal I went downstairs to the loo, and in the basement discovered a curious Japanese goods store run by a prim and dapper gay man. I picked out the angular New Wave-patterned leggings (they also had a trad Japanese feel, like a kimono; the pattern was also available on headscarves), and as the man wrapped them up he mentioned that they were designed by a lady who used to be the singer in The Plastics.
Above you can see Hisae wearing them (while reading Midori Matsui's survey of Japanese art). Some may claim that the original spirit of The Plastics will be there on stage at Tokyo's Liquid Rooms tonight, but I'd say -- and I suspect Maki Nomiya would agree -- that an important part of it is right here on Hisae's legs.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 12:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 12:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 02:31 am (UTC)Shibuya-kei, on the other hand, pretty much lost this anger and blended very well into the system. Konishi and Co. towards the end actually started to lose all the Internationalism for a straight-up celebration of Eternally Cool Japan. Flipper's Guitar may have had some anti-media vibes at the end of their career, but it seemed more like a "we are tortured and misunderstood artists" rather than a debasing of the system that paid their bills.
Marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 03:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 04:12 am (UTC)Yamaguchi: There's something I really want to ask you today. Almost all of the artists I've been interviewing lately in the course of my work have been major fans of yours. Kazuhiko Hachiya, Imai Toons, they all love you. And it's not just superficial. So why? Well, they all say you have so much style. Of course the way you broke into this business was just so cool. This is a theme I want to tackle on this page too, but there was a time in the past when Japanese people cared a great deal about style in everyday life. Having good taste was very important. But then with wars and so on over the last few decades, stylish lifestyles really had no place. Then more recently the younger generation have again become sensitive to the idea of living with style.
Tachibana: But before style should come "as a Japanese". It's no good emulating style that's originated somewhere else. That's what they don't understand. Although it's hard when TV has so much influence on society. Everyone has their own country, they want to think they're original. Each individual is such a tiny existence in this huge universe, but that's the very reason that every instant, every second for each individual, and each individual is so important. Like each person is their own cosmos. They have their own unique value. It's because they are who they are. If people don't understand this, it doesn't matter how much they try to follow someone else's style, it just doesn't suit them at all, it's inappropriate. When it's forced, it just ends up being bad taste.
So every person wants to be their own unique self. Human beings all want to live their lives in a way that's positive, that's forward-looking. Which is why modernization in the post-war period has meant becoming Americanized, Europeanized. Everyone wants to be their own unique self, but Japan is different from America or Europe. For those countries it was meant that they develop in their own original ways. Human beings all want to live with optimism in their hearts, to look to the future.
They're all the same in that way, but there are enormous differences between countries for which it's right to develop their own original cultures, and those for which it's not. There's a total lack of resistance in Japan to the idea that "if it's from somewhere else, it's gotta have style". It's laughable. But that's how it's become in Japan. It's weird. Hick guys and gals who belong out in the boonies, they all want to be black African-Americans. It's like "You wanna be black that bad?" It's ridiculous. Do you call it interesting, or just stupid? If you can laugh about it, you laugh. Although from one view, on one level, people may look at me and say "You're the type of guy that's encouraged the concept of foreign equals cool, the idea that a Western lifestyle is stylish". But it's not like that at all. I don't think that Hachiya or Imai see me like that.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 04:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 04:35 am (UTC)But the Plastics were making a point about the media system around them, calling "Popeye" etc. a "bullshit fashion mag," and at that point, they were not really in "the fashion-information complex," but trying to break into it. I would argue that the more they succeeded, the more the lyrics became kind of inoffensive "WE ARE JAPANESE" style stuff - especially with Melon. But at the beginning there was a critical edge, which Shibuya-kei almost completely lacked. Whether this makes them more interesting or not, the Plastics did have a somewhat confrontational side - at least at the beginning. It's hard to even see their pretty constant association of Japan/Tokyo with "plastic copies" as an affirmation of the mainstream culture around them.
Marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 04:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 04:43 am (UTC)So "politics" boils down to the tendency of ambitious young people to question the media industries they aspire to be part of, up to the point at which they're included in them?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 04:50 am (UTC)is it really as mindlessly apolitical as it seems to be or might those micro-gaps (micro-irony, micro-misundersrtanding, micro-diversity within homogeneity, etc) themselves be the very essence of politics?
it strikes me as absurd to so often see the same people who shout about the lack of a political dimension in japanese culture, pick one particular act and turn them into some sort of political heroes ,, and often, subsequently become dissapointed by those very same people.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 04:52 am (UTC)Waters, Yorke and Sting are only "political" in the sense of their endlessly restated refrain that "modern life is all a bit too much for me and I'm starting to feel sorry for myself".
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 04:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 05:45 am (UTC)"the elephant in the room that Marxy seems determined to avoid is that a lot of this material is about Japanese resistance to Americanization in the post-war period."
I am totally fine with you linking this idea with the Plastics. I still think this is WAY more directly spoken in the Plastics' lyrics than in anything in Shibuya-kei - a topic which you keep skirting around. The Plastics may be against "America" or whatever you want them to stand for, but looking at the lyrics on the first album (http://www.forte-intl.com/~ronald/plastics/lyrics/welcome_plastics.html), the main topic is clearly the "non-creative, robotic" technocracy of their own society. The song "Welcome Plastics" even seems like a dig at the naiveity of that original "Welcome Beatles" song.
Micro-texture is fine, but the Plastics are pretty much beating that explicit message of automaton society and overconsumerism into your head in multiple songs. And again, my main point which you are dismissing for god knows why, they and their followers quickly got subsumed into the system and stopped being so explicitly critical.
Marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 06:58 am (UTC)Marxy,
I think the trouble with your way of thinking is that you tend to value explicit, voiced political criticism at the expense of everything else, to the point where when discussing japan the only alternative to that becomes 'confucian conformism', or whatever you call it. one automatically has to assume an extreme position when faced with that.
while , surely from the 70s on, more so in the 80s all the independent vocal/critical people ended up shifting entirely within the system even a superficial psychological look at it, whether on a mass or on individual levels will show that it's not about betrayal or selling-out and two things will become clear. 1. the critical/revo thing was not quite what it seemed to start with 2. the 'system' far from being a hard conformist/confucian thing has its inbuilt critical/revolutionary mechanism. (in saying this i'm hardly praising the japanese system, i'm rather saying that the stakes are much higher than they seem)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 07:39 am (UTC)It should also be noted that when Toshio made the PlasticSex album a few years back as part of the Plastics' 25th anniversary campaign, he recruited none other than Miss Nomiya to be his vocal partner. That record featured songs about salarymen, mobile phones, his recent trip to India, and a critique on the whole No Wave/post-punk revival craze on "Downtown '82", a joke regarding the "New York Beat" film in which the Plastics are featured, which by that point was renamed "Downtown 81". Even during the Major Force days, Tosh never really shied away from having some sort of wry commentary on modern culture, though I wouldn't necessarily say that it was always Japan-centric by that point.
I think Melon was always meant to be a bit more style-centric in some ways, most blatantly evidenced by their spoofing the old Chanel No 5 logo by the "Deep Cut" period & transforming it into "Melon No 1"... I'd also say that Tosh had a major epiphany during the Melon period when he made the "Homework" cassette (in the infamous heavy-lead cover) after a trip through Harajuku hearing different kinds of music and film dialogue all playing together in a big soundclash - like Byrne & Eno during Bush of Ghosts, burgeoning hip-hop culture opened massive creative doors for him, whilst Tachibana went down a more ReR/Fred Frith/Residents-inspired path musically.
Most of all I think that with all of the projects (though perhaps less so for Tachibana, more for Tosh), the style and the substance meant just as much to one another and were complimentary. I don't think Tosh was ever explicitly anti-American culture; more than anything, he always seemed rather anti-British during the Plastics days - he's been in magazines and books saying how much he hated the New Romantic movement and British food, for example (there are plenty of examples in the tour diaries from the Plastics' "Hard Copy" box set alone)... though, interestingly enough, he ended up living in London for quite a long time.
Funny, I've been watching the live performance DVD included with the "Hard Copy" box SO MUCH this week, partly as consolation for not being able to see this. I was wondering if Chica was participating. In my opinion, it's not really the Plastics without Chica - 3/5ths plus Gota-san is still an amazing band (after all, the 3/5ths performing - Tosh, Hajime, and Ma-chan - ARE the ones who wrote and arranged nearly all of the songs), but as mentioned here, Chica is an irreplaceable part of the equation. I just wonder if Nomiya Maki is taking Chica's place at the show tonight.
-Mikey IQ.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 08:10 am (UTC)this is interesting about the plastics. i like how they were copying new wave music, and the song itself is called "copy." very pomo ironic, and uber-80s.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 11:20 am (UTC)The paradox built into this micro-politics, especially as it affects cultural identity, is that it's got ambivalence built in. Take the "anti-Americanism" in the lyrics of Melon or what Tachibana was saying in his interview. There's clearly a lot of attraction for America in Japanese culture (exactly the emulation Tachibana was criticizing there, which we all recognize). And even when there's a self-conscious enactment of Japaneseness-as-difference, it's very much within the wider context of "local differentiation of identity taking place against a backdrop of global standardization and sameness" (particularly when we're talking about the postmodern 80s and globalizing 90s). Hence you get the paradox that Melon lyrics make fun of how English-speakers view Japanese... in English!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 11:35 am (UTC)new fashion paris one
new wave london two
hello new york three
cheap hong kong four
spaghetti italian five
world time i don't need no time
world time no no no no time
world time destroy your time
horrorshow moscow six
guten tag berlin seven
aloha hawaii eight
soul swiss nine
plastic tokyo ten
Tokyo is only a tiny part of that; it's clearly global critique, not auto-critique. And it's clearly rather smitten, in the same way Robin Scott was when he listed the same cities in "Pop Musik (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2495373100219320355)" the year before.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 11:45 am (UTC)I don't wanna be plastic
I wanna be plastic
Warhol counts for a lot in this, of course; his non-critical critical attitude. But it's also a songwriting style perfectly suited to the anorexia-bulimia cycles of consumerism; in the verse "you you need anan, you need nonno, you need popeye, you need men's club..." but by the chorus there's "too much information". I think we really need to let that contradiction stand. It expresses "mixed feelings". It's irony well-used.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 12:23 pm (UTC)(from Hidefumi Ino's blog (http://blog.innocentrecord.net/blog/2007/04/london_1.html)).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 02:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 02:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 02:24 pm (UTC)It looks like he broke the nose of the last person who asked that!
Fraud, Creep, Parasite.
Date: 2007-10-29 02:32 pm (UTC)http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/17/3893/
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 02:37 pm (UTC)Based on the interviews and lyrics posted, I would say the only certain thing you can gather from these is criticism of Japan's lack of originality in terms of style. Tachibana says so in no uncertain terms.
As for the politics behind these views, you can only speculate. Personally, when I hear criticism of Westernisation from the Japanese, I instantly think of Japanese right-wing nationalism. That's not to say the plastics held right-wing nationalistic views.
An "Art band" criticising the fashion scene is always gonna contradict itself and have mixed feelings about the issue purely because an Art band and the fashion scene are both striving for exactly the same thing, they have simular stylistic values. They inevitably cross over at some stage. Nu rave is a fantastic example of this -- You have bands like the Klaxons, hadouken!, NYPC and SHITDISCO all being lumped together as part of the Nu Rave genre when in actuality they share very few musical similarities but in terms of fashion they share everything in common. Now that "neon irony" is cliche and even mainstream ie. The London 2012 Olympic Logo, The Klaxons have turned their back on nu rave, describing it as "joke that’s got out of hand". A typical back-lash response by yet another Art band trying to be indier than thou, which is exactly what you see with the Plastics, except the Plastics are much more honest with themselves about this contradiction and their mixed feelings. This self awareness makes them more real... but they still contradict themselves...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 02:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 02:58 pm (UTC)Marxy said "the Plastics did have a somewhat confrontational side - at least at the beginning."
A contributing factor to the Plastics percieved "pacification" might have been how they were recieved as opposed to them necessarily changing thier stance.
The best way I can demonstrate this is with Tracy Emin. Remember when she used to be really controversial and used to get tons of criticism? Now she seems to have a somewhat respectable image as one of Britian's more forward thinking artists. She hasn't changed, people's perceptions have. They've embraced her and her urine stained bed.
I really cant say if this is what happened to the Plastics, but I'm just demonstrating that sometimes it's not an individual becoming tamer but the majority accepting that individual's qualities.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 03:48 pm (UTC)"It's peripheral, she says. It's new. It deviates and wanders, rephrases and recodes. It's something that happens at the end of big narratives, something that embraces fluidity and indirection. It's how you live after the dominant, compelling stories are played out -- by exposing your personal fetishes, perhaps, making private jokes... It's personal and small and trivial, but not un-lyrical, and not without its own weird private rituals. It accepts fragmentation and relativism. It's interstitial and tactical (Matsui drops Certeau's name in her essay, of course) and obliquely, even autistically, defiant. The artists of Micropop have something in common with children, immigrants and consumers."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 06:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 06:54 pm (UTC)I kid you not.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-29 09:58 pm (UTC)And not in a good way!