The kids aren't alright ;-(
Mar. 31st, 2008 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
"Que es mas macho, pineapple o knife?" The bizarre question appears in the song Smoke Rings on Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave album. The surprise answer is that a pineapple is more macho than a knife. The quiz continues with a second question with an equally surprising answer: a schoolbus is more macho than a lightbulb.Today I have a question in the same vein. Which is more elitist, art or marketing? On the face of it, it's a no-brainer. The art world is clearly more elitist than the marketing world, because the art world is a tightknit knot of collectors, investors, artists and commentators speaking an abstruse jargon replete with -isms. The marketing world, on the other hand, is a bunch of people with clipboards asking folks on the street what they want then trying to give it to them. Marketing is clearly oriented to the mass, the mainstream, the grass roots, the people, the salt of the earth.
Of course, that's bullshit. Marketing is a lot more top down, a lot more elitist (in its own way) than that. The marketer's client is the company, and the company is beholden to the shareholder. The marketer's task is not to find out what people really want and give it to them, but to whip up desire for the pre-existing products manufacturers have decided to offer. At its worst, marketing is totally elitist: it speaks without listening, it uses slick babytalk, it exploits people's desires, giving them other than what they want and less than they deserve.
But I'm not a total cynic about marketing. When I first heard that Marxy had got a job in marketing I thought there might be a good side -- clipboard in hand, standing on street corners, he'd now be listening to the Japanese consumers he'd previously tended to denigrate, trying to ascertain what they want and ensure that they get it. This would make him drop the "everything Japan has done since Shibuya-kei is wrong" line which made his old blog Neomarxisme such an infuriatingly mean read.
Alas, far from it. Marxy's main concern, as a blogger working in marketing, continues to be the attempt to show that the kids are not alright, and that the grassroots Japanese creativity reported in the Western media is in fact either an illusion or concocted by a small elite. The message seems to be "Don't bother listening for the sound of the grass growing -- it isn't. Not unless we -- the marketers, the brands, the corporations -- pour fertilizer on it, that is."
This mostly seems to involve withering scorn for all Japanese examples of what marketers call CGM -- consumer-generated media. On the current page at Meta No Tame ("staff blog" for Neojaponisme) we get refutations of the idea that Japanese is the world's number one blogging language (in fact, Marxy tells us, 40% of Japanese-language blog sites are generated by spambots), and the information that a trend for barcoded gravestones doesn't come from consumers but from the manufacturer who invented them. We get the announcement that Marxy is talking at a conference at UCLA on the subject of "whether Japanese fashion styles are “bottom-up” or “top-down” and how fashion magazines play a part in setting trends". We get a review of a book about the Harajuku fashion scene, Style Deficit Disorder, which debunks the book's introduction, with its emphasis on grassroots creativity:
"The Harajuku of SDD’s introductory chapter is quite literally the most amazing place on earth: masses of youth successfully fighting to create their own trends at a “grass-roots” level in the face of an increasingly-irrelevant global fashion market pushing industry-decided clothing on a rigid seasonal basis". This won't do: Marxy isn't buying this picture of "grass-roots democracy, consumer-driven markets, an almost anarcho-syndicalist model of opinion leadership, Japanese influence on global culture, a sense of fashion liberty, Japanese cultural independence, and a freedom from dogmatic ideologies".
So keen is he to puncture and debunk too-kind, too-optimistic Western views of Japanese grassroots creativity that Marxy doesn't seem to notice internal contradictions in his arguments: Harajuku is not all it's cracked up to be, he tells us, because "brands and magazines play a massive role in setting Harajuku trends". In a withering piece about Nakameguro, though, Marxy says that Nakameguro isn't all it's cracked up to be for precisely the opposite reason: this time it's because "almost none of the major retailers in Japan have decided to put a store there". The kids aren't alright if top-down brands influence their trendy neighbourhood, but also aren't alright if those same top-down brands spurn their trendy neighbourhoods. The kids, it seems, just can't win -- and all because those starry-eyed foreigners keep saying they're great!
Actually -- and this brings us back to the marketing versus art theme, and the elitism question -- foreign commentators aren't saying that Japanese kids are uniformly great. That certainly would be projection, and wish-fulfillment. Rather, those of us interested in Japanese creativity have a different concern. Marketing people tend to disregard anything which is too niche, too marginal. Their concern is with getting products out of their niches and into the mainstream. For talent-spotters, though, one swallow makes a summer.
In the last seven days of Click Opera alone, I've endorsed the work of dozens of Japanese creators (Yurie Ido, Akio Suzuki, Atsuhiko Sudo, Kasuga Nakamatsu, Yoko Ono, Aoki Takamasa, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tujiko Noriko, Jun Togawa, Hanayo, Koji Ueno, Keiichi Ohta, Haruomi Hosono, Misora Hibari, Miharu Koshi, Otomo Yoshihide). What I haven't done is make any claim that these people are "the kids" or represent a democratic movement, a grassroots creativity. They're mostly professional artists and performers. Even if I were blogging about Japanese street fashion, I'd probably focus on Shoichi Aoki just as much as the kids he puts in FRUiTS.
I therefore agree, broadly, with Marxy's emphasis on the top-down; I'm an elitist too. The difference comes in our chosen fields of operation and preoccupation: I'm an artist championing artists, whereas he's a marketing spook giving props to... well, marketing spooks. But there is hope that he'll come over to the good kind of elitism, the artist kind that champions creativity rather than the marketing kind that denigrates the kids: the man has a new album out.
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Re: ignotum per ignotius
Date: 2008-04-04 05:05 pm (UTC)What we do when we blog is air our opinions in public. We want some debate. Some of us are controversial and skewed and even misanthropic in our views. We invite comments, and invite corrections, including personal corrections (like the one you're offering me right here).
Marxy attacks the kisha club system, and the likes of Johnny Kitagawa for their attempts to control and limit discussion of news and entertainment in Japan -- it would be ironic indeed if he turned out to want the same kind of controls and restrictions in the blogosphere.
So some of us respond, in public, in the blogosphere, to views published in public in the blogosphere. We are "the pajamahadeen". after all.
What complicates things in Marxy's case is that he's not just an amateur in pajamas. He's got all these blog venues now, shading from a professional blog his employers pay him to maintain and a site he edits which supplies Japanese media data for money to informal, semi-personal blogs where he jokes (http://meta.neojaponisme.com/2008/04/03/mcdonalds-refugee-camp) (rather insensitively) about diabetic tramps with his online friends.
He's got acutely nervous about fights from the personal end of these blogs getting him into trouble or disrepute on the professional end of the scale. As a result, I don't comment on any of his blogs any more. Others who were critical of some of his views have also left, and we've seen a small chorus of like-minded people remain to succor and encourage him. That seems to be the way he likes it.
But it has to be said that without someone to respond to his provocative views (which are in danger of becoming some sort of official orthodoxy on the state of Japan's youth) his blogs go very quiet and get very dull. Before this week's dramas he was talking about closing a couple down, or making them in some way "physical" (ie a book, I'd imagine).
I can't stop Marxy from becoming the next Debito or Alex Kerr if that's what's written in the stars, and probably I should just shut up about the whole thing -- I'm as bored and upset by it as everyone else is. Then again, I'd be sad to think that Marxy's dark views on Japan would go unopposed, and pass into print and standard opinion as facts, just because he got very upset when disagreed with, and just because he and his defenders try to personalize the whole thing. It's the sort of emotional blackmail Johnny Kitagawa would be proud of.
Re: ignotum per ignotius
Date: 2008-04-05 03:39 am (UTC)For what it's worth, I don't think you are but I would understand if you didn't like the description: it wouldn't surprise me at all. My point is that you also shouldn't act so surprised that your barbs aren't welcome.
Reading what you've said above, you say you are responding to his views but I say again that you go beyond that and attack the man. I used to enjoy reading Alin's comments - he's probably one of the people you refer to when you say others have also left - but he never tried to speculate about Marxy's private life and use those speculations to attack him.
Is Marxy upset because he is concerned you will damage about his professional reputation? I don't know and I suspect that's just another personal speculation on your part. I don't need such conjectures to understand why he he is upset and I wrote to make the point that nor should you.
Yes of course it would be better for people to engage Marxy. He has written so much that there are bound to be contradictions in his views which would be a rich resource to confront him. You came up with one yourself here and Marxy thought it was worth responding to. He even explained to you how you could have made the point without the personal attacks. He's in no position to put in any kisha club controls - how on earth could he? - but surely it's up to him if he decides to to keep his private life private.
Re: ignotum per ignotius
Date: 2008-04-05 05:16 am (UTC)When it comes to a judgemental analysis of the taste of a generation, the perspective involved in saying this taste is either good or bad -- improving or declining, for instance -- isn't just one you can discuss with reference to statistics. It also has to be a personal one. The claim that street fashion or pop music isn't qualitatively what it once was has to be a personal one.
But I completely agree with you that disagreements of this kind get progressively more futile and distasteful as they get more personal. I doubt there's very much mileage left in this one: I really, really dislike my particular role in it. I'm really an enthusiast -- what I love is discovering creativity and championing people who are original and interesting. It matters a great deal to me, for instance, that the Yurie Ido piece that ran the day before the Marxy piece made Yurie's day, and bumped up her YouTube video stats by a factor of ten.
And who knows -- maybe Monday's piece even sold a few Marxy albums. It certainly bumped up his comment hits, brought a few dormant commenters back to life, and led him to explain his positions in ways that his readers found useful (I particularly liked the "What, for you, is the ideal fashion system?" point). It hasn't all been a complete waste of time, then.