Tokyo's Coolest Combo!

As most people know, my taste in music is questionable at best, having no real allegiance to a particular genre, as a music snob ought to. I may write about the lyrical stylings of a Shiina Ringo (the link is to her most recent single) or Regina Spektor in my academic work, but my Meizu is just as likely to be playing the occasional Pantera or Otsuka Ai.

But P5 (Pizzicato Five, above), are different somehow, though I suppose a lax writer, i.e. he who wields the verbal laxatives, would call them kitsch (is our language so impoverished we have to resort to German to describe these things?). Even so, there is a certain comfort in kitsch similar to the way scifi movies make it seem as if the future will be breathtakingly homogenous, though we know in our hearts that we carry the specters of our technological past with us wherever we go. The pure kitsch (smeared like the fluffiest, whitest frosting over everything crumby) seeks to do the same thing to the past. Oddly, then, what appeals to me about this gaudy trash is its seeming incongruity with the reality before our very eyes.

In Japan, the vanguard of kitsch is called, ironically, Village Vanguard, not the famous New York jazz club that spawned the careers of so many musicians and poets alike, but a trendy chain "culture store" selling the trappings of by gone eras: magic eightballs, mod furniture, spiked chokers, etc. I know it as one of the few places to get a proper Dr. Pepper when I want one, and I guess the Engrish stickers are pretty amusing too.

P5 are a thing of the past now, having broken up in 2001, but I still like to carry them along with me on my walks through that other Japan, where everything isn't either blazing neon or idyllic mountainous countrysides covered in mist. More often than not, it's a rusty honda someone left on their lawn, because it's too expensive to pay all the [bribes] needed to operate a used car for an indefinite amount of time.