自問自答 - Answering Your Own Questions

It's occurred to me that, in my rallying against the vast sea of craptasticness that is J-pop since the 80s, I have rallied many to my cause that do not fit this totalizing view of contemporary Japanese pop music, but never Mukai Shutoku 向井秀徳. Sure, if you step outside of the purview of Music Station, there are plenty of acts like Midori in the "hardcore" scenes that are worth paying attention to, but I focus on pop in my persistent belief that popular art doesn't have to necessarily equate with bad art.

I warn you in advance, the following is quite long, quite dense, and likely to incur a TLDR.



Mukai is not well-known outside of Japan but there is relatively infamous as the head of the now defunct band Number Girl (yeah, I know that looks like a penis on that dude's face, but it's actually a tengu mask), a prolific solo artist and producer, and currently as the "brains" behind the Zazen Boys. I bring jimon-jito to your attention in part because it poses an interesting problem. I know most of you don't understand the Japanese, and honestly it moves so fast I have a hard time keeping up. I don't really think comprehension is all that necessary to understand what Mukai is trying to do in this song. The way he seamlessly moves in and out of rhythm with what he's playing, between what I will call verse phrasing and prose phrasing, creates interesting tensions between the ease with which you can listen when his verse phrasing acquiesces to your rhythmic expectations and the ill-at-ease from having to experience his prosaic rambling over the top of a relatively straightforward chord structure on the guitar.

This song was once described to me as Japanese hip-hop to the extreme. I have to disagree; rap, freestyle or not, doesn't sound like this. There the primary concern is flow, the ease and deftness with which the mc moves from one phrase to another by constructing patterns of syncopated but related sounds and meanings. Mukai's song is about disrupting flow, the prosaic phrasings serving as a kind of vocal dissonance that actually intensifies the easy effect of the verse phrasing, the flow.

I think it's brilliant. It's rare you'd ever hear me openly praising someone, but there you have it. It's pop, and it's brilliant.