feat. Mummy-D et al.

I was more than happy to see the return to my ken of Mummy-D lately of the hip hop trio Rhymester, due in no small part to our girl Ringo-han. J-hop or J-hip-hop or whatever you want to call it has always been something of a mystery to me, much like its American counterpart, if only because it seems the more groups I listen to the less I seem to know what's going on.

Rhymester often beg comparisons to Jurassic 5, a comparison that while sometimes apt fails to account for the fact that J5's style is much more a throwback to classic b-boy styling. Most of their tracks can be reduced to lyric flow over clever mixes. Not that there is anything wrong with this, but it isn't very much like the much more melodic and occasionally instrumentalized music Mummy-D and company put out. If hard pressed for a point of comparison, I'd say they mostly resemble the Roots, but even that isn't quite right.



A song like "The Great Amateurism" is indicative of what I find infinitely more difficult to grapple with in J-hop both visuallly and musically than in our homespun variety. The video doesn't seem to quite understand the aggressive dynamics of the underground freestyle battle it portrays, as Mummy (on the left) and Utamaru (on the right) move in and out of solo and unison flows with relative ease. They don't seem to understand (or perhaps subtly parody) the hyper-aggressive individualism the rap battle is meant to manifest; at one point Jin (the DJ) even breaks in with a few rhymes. Obviously, American hip hop is as much a culture as it is a(n extremely broad) musical genre, and that this culture wouldn't precisely translate is understandable. Japan doesn't have the semi-segregated, urban often poor communities where hip hop was born and certain doesn't have a history of competitive freestyle. It begs the question then whether this transplantation of hip hop is a corruption (a misunderstanding) or an adaptation (an understood-all-too-well). Are the unison choruses prior to each individual flow a beckon to J5 style group efforts or a play to homegrown trends in J-pop where unison singing (especially amongst all-boy/all-girl groups) is the norm and harmony all but nonexistent?

The obvious answer is J-hop is a hybrid, but to what extent and in what ways remains a mystery, as disparate elements of the lyric performance seem to hail to both sides of the pond. Maybe, just maybe, boys and girls, it's meant to.