Love jam

[imomus]

Pop and porn have always been on a continuum with each other; sex, after all, is a major and perfectly legitimate element in most pop culture. The I Love Music forum currently has a thread going entitled Top Howevermany Transparent Sex Barely-Even-Euphemisms in Pop Music in case you need reminding of that fact. One of the many tragedies of the current Michael Jackson trial in California is the fact that, however it turns out, Michael will be culturally emasculated; he will never again be able to hiss and yelp out the sexual innuendos that once powered his music. Considering that he's a true genius of pop, and that the true genius of pop is sex, this will truly be a loss to the world, and a victory only for the new puritans -- the same people who reacted so violently to his sister Janet's "wardrobe malfunction" and made it part of their pre-election "culture wars" last year.



In Japan, a culture much less hung up about sex than the US, the continuum between porno and pop flows with much less turbulence. Culture stores like Book Off, Tsutaya and Village Vanguard shelve their stock with a smooth, unanxious transition from the "pure" to the "impure", the sexless to the sexy. Although there have recently been concerns in Japan about the too-easy availability of porn products to children, it's generally accepted that sex is part of the normal commercial landscape and doesn't do much harm. I'd say that, just as America's attitude has a lot to do with Christianity, Japan's is the result of their combination of a detachment religion (Buddhism) with a fertility and nature religion (Shinto).

Let's jam a bit further on this riff. When Avex recording artist Ai Otsuka released her Love Jam album last year, it was accompanied by a major poster campaign showing Ai's faced spattered suggestively with globs of jam. We don't need to call a semiologist to decode the sexual meaning of the Love Jam campaign, but just in case we missed it, porn site 100% Douga has Photoshopped the fig leaf (or should we say "the jam jar"?) of metaphor away entirely, reminding us that the fruit from which we make jam is nothing more than an attractive, glossy distribution system cunningly devised by strawberry plants to spread their DNA. They have quite a bit to teach us about pop marketing, those strawberries.

Comments

[evalien.livejournal.com]

I must be pretty innocent for not getting the sexual link in the strawberry picture. I thought it was very cute and associated it with sugar instead of sex.
I do hate all that sex in videoclips though. I find it very irritating and manipulating.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Fruit is not really about sugar, though, it's about seeds. Fruit is pretty seedy. Pretty and seedy.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I saw an advertising poster for a mobile phone (I think) on the London Underground. The idea was, the pictures it sent were to real that they came out of the phone. In this case, an attractive young woman had her face spattered with snow. I couldn't help thinking "Bukkake!" But maybe that's just me.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

That's 'so real', of course.

[evalien.livejournal.com]

haha,you're absolutely right. Have you seen the packaging on Maom...something sweets? I'll have to search for that. One moment...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Here's the very image (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/december20th016.jpg), Quentin. And here's Bukakke billboards (http://ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=5328358), the thread about it.

[evalien.livejournal.com]

http://www.werbeblogger.de/media/maom.jpg

[evalien.livejournal.com]

more than suggestive?

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

Just when I thought it was impossible for you to surprise me, you uploaded and started using a Kurt Russell/Escape from Distopian Metropolis of Your Choice icon.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's egging the pudding a bit, I'd say. Fruit is already sex on a stalk, you don't need to show it getting squelchy.

[vireoibis.livejournal.com]

The only problem with your otherwise right on comparison of sex and pop, is the fact that Jackson is a baby-fucker, not just a seller of sex and himself. Puritans, my ass, if he'd been screwing grown-ups, no one would care (well, the xtiofascists always care, but . . .), he is, after all a "musician" (and that's expected.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm glad I'm perceptive rather than just dirty-minded... I think.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, let's not rush to judgement, shall we? None of us know yet whether, or to what extent, Jackson is, as you put it, a "baby-fucker". I can imagine people saying of Oscar Wilde, a century ago, "The only problem is that Wilde is a sodomite, not just a seller or sex and himself..." If we burn every major figure in the history of the West who was drawn to children it's a big pyre, and at the end we exchange a heap of ash for the Greek philosophers, Lewis Carroll, almost the entire Catholic church, and a big chunk of rock 'n' roll.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

The Japanese do not have this relaxed approach to sex that you describe. Japan detaches sex from its procreative function more than any other country in the world. Sex is fetishised to the extent that they obsess over body parts, youth, nubility, rather than, say, fertility. Japanese men's worst fear seems to be a woman possessing an adult sexuality. That's why it's schoolgirls' - rather than, say, 'ladies'- knickers in the vending machines and they have no tradition of porn featuring MILFs, grannies, preganant or lactating women, like in the West. Jap porn is borderline paedophilic - even pubic hair is taboo.

They seem to be stuck at, or before what Freud describes as the 'anal stage' - they haven't even got to the phallic stage yet. No doubt you (or some of your tedious 'friends') will try and discredit me here for using a Western thinker's terminology when discussing Japan.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(And I see your latest blog entry raves about the Beats... hmm, Ginsberg, Burroughs etc often spotted in Tangier, no? Tangier known for... what, exactly? Must read Joe Orton's diary again...)

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

Are you comparing homosexuality to paedophilia?

Wilde could have run off to America and been sheltered by his rich friends, but decided instead to go to court and bring discussion of homosexuality out into the open - the real taboo not being the act, but the idea of an emotional relationship.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Who "obsesses over fertility"? I mean, even over on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pregnant (if it still exists) it's not really fertility that's getting them off, is it? And by the way, pubes have been acceptable for quite some time in j-porn. Mores change, which is why the "love that dare not speak its name" of 1890 may be quite a different thing than "the love that dare not speak its name" in 2005. What remains a constant, alas, is persecution of those who step outside of society's arbitrary chalkmarks.

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

preganant or lactating women,

Oh, I only wish it were the case that no hentai features preggers or lactating women.

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

Are you comparing homosexuality to paedophilia?

They've long been intertwined in the western imagination. It was only the late 1800s/early 1900s German push towards a medicalized conception of homosexuality that people really started disentangling them.

I don't know about America, but following Wilde's conviction a bunch of wealthy Englishmen suddenly disappeared under cover of night into France.

[vireoibis.livejournal.com]

Drawn to children and fucking children are two different things. Everyone's fantasy life is certainly their own business. Actions, however, are not. The testimony and evidence coming out of that trial, plus the fact that he's paid off at least one other family, leads me to believe he is a pedophile. This is what upsets people like myself who otherwise could not care less what he or anyone else does in the confines of his own home.
His sister (who, by the way, also believes her brother is a freak) and her boob was much ado about nothing. But the reaction was completely expected; far too many people equate nudity with obscenity, and a woman's breasts with only the gods know what, judging by the reaction. Apparently boobs are only for sexual partners and not for babies in these people's minds, and the beauty of nudity in the arts completely out of their understanding.
But i digress . . . all over the place.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in your take on the activities / proclivities of the Beats in Tangier.

[vireoibis.livejournal.com]

So because i like Burroughs (an understatement), who fucked teenage boys in Tangiers, i must approve of Jackson's virtual kidnapping of much younger kids for sex? Because Wilde was queer, he's the same thing as a pedophile? The problem here isn't the gender of the partners, it's the ability -- and yes, the legal ability -- to actually say "yes." 12 year olds do not.

[vireoibis.livejournal.com]

Burroughs is quite open about his activities in Tangiers, and elsewhere. Kiki is quite a large part of his life there. Kiki was also older, not forced. How ever i might think of this relationship, it is still not the equivalent of pedophila. To my knowledge, neither Ginsberg nor Burroughs were "chicken queens."
You are not complaining about the actions of Jackson, i am. You are complaining about the reaction of everyone else to the charges, as if he is merely being "persecuted" for homosexuality, and that's not the case.
Yes, i admit i listen to too much Court TV.

fetishized

[(Anonymous)]

From my experience in Japan fetishism abounds here...and I wouldn't describe it as relaxed. I would , however describe it as interesting, energetic, and creative. Schoolgirls are a very public face of it, but scratch the surface and there are a milion other varieties...from OLs, Cosplay, stockings, food, older housewives,public nudity, and my favorite...pantyline fetishes. Personally I think the focus on a piece of clothing that is seen as a shape through tight pants has a certain amount of subtlety and style. Not actually my cup of poison, but I kind of admire the taste of those interested in that niche.
A little off-topic, but related... Momus I was reading your recent comments at GlitchslapTKO and was surprised to see you question why Japanese men don't get off on blond round eyes or some such thing....very weird. I'm sure enough do to keep the Russian hostesses flowing into the country. My friends here have just as many different desires AND dissatisfactions within and outside their society as you or I might have with ours.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I just downloaded Martin Bashir's "Living With Michael Jackson" documentary, the one that's sparked off his current, probably terminal, spate of troubles. And while Bashir was challenging Jackson on his facial surgery, his sleeping habits, etc, I found him considerably more repulsive than Jackson, just as I found Kenn Starr more repulsive than Clinton. I kept thinking of Jackson as a trans-sexual being grilled about his operations. And I thought of all the pleasure and excitement his talent has brought to millions, there in the scales against the pain he may have brought to a few pre-adolescents (who seem more micro-managed by their parents than Jackson ever was by his father, and who seem more pained by his disappearance from their lives than anything he actually did).