RIFF MARKET

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: W. DAVID MARX (MARXY)
A Bathtub of Oatmeal

To you people on the wrong side of the Pacific, Cornelius is just one of the ex-pinch hitters on the Matador roster - like a Japanese version of Fuck or the Fucking Champs without all the cursing. Here in Tokyo, Japan, where I live, the release of his first album in five years Sensuous last month felt like the closest thing to a "big cultural event" for the remaining under-35s yet to be absorbed into the mainstream or parenthood. For a week, I stopped listening to McNeil-Lehrer Report podcasts and put music back onto my iPod.

All the magazine articles covering the album gave Cornelius plenty of space based on the release timing, but oddly focused all their energy on explaining to young readers why Cornelius was on the cover in the first place. His first band Flipper's Guitar hit it big in 1990 and were kind of like the Nirvana of Japan - not in sound, but in the fact that they broke "indie music" and made things like memorizing Teenage Fanclub trivia a mainstream phenomenon. The U.S. already had a pretty widespread college rock scene in 1991 - the year that "punk" finally "broke" - but Japan's indie submarket for moody lo-fi guitar strum pop apparently had three hundred fans or so when Flipper's Guitar came around.

So continuing with our analog, let's say that Kurt Cobain managed not to have Courtney assassinate him and went solo and finally discovered the fourth chord and got really into non-geometrical guitar progressions and started making meta-pop or abstract-pop albums: you'd probably have to give the guy a bunch of magazine covers every time he had a record out. Musically, this new album Sensuous is kinda pleasant but manages to contain very little explicitly musical content. For most of his career, Cornelius always put the content in places where normal people don't look. Forget "lyrics" and "melodies" and "beats," listen to this pan sequence! check out how much this sounds like the High Llamas! notice this lyrical reference to Jesus & Mary Chain! consider how fucking good this acoustic guitar was recorded! worship my binaural microphones! etc. 1997's Fantasma may be the first pop record about the cultural history of the technology required to listen to pop music (basically an expansion on
"Those Magic Changes" from Grease without the wink and cheese).

2001's Point boiled down the 60s pop music ingredients to sonic abstractions but kept the "album as teleological text adventure" structure. Sensuous is totally disinterested in journey - Oyamada has gotten to that mid-life cocoon stage - I am only guessing - where you are obsessed with everything "sounding good," where a really expensive Les Paul that never ever actually gets played sounds better to you than a crappy Fender Squire that gets played daily. Cornelius' curiosity has dwindled to that of a super stoned sophomore - oh my god i can't believe how good an acoustic guitar sounds when you just pluck out a chord. Okay, track 4 "Toner" is a cool fake-piano and inkjet glitch duet. My guess is he is finally printing out guitar tabs for Arto Lindsay he grabbed from OLGA on Gopher a while back. The remaining songs are pretty much just Nord synth and long delay effects. I am not sure how many songs have already been featured as background music for consumer product commercials, but they all sound like suspects. I think that guy from Kings of Convenience sings on a track.

I am no Tapes N.T. Apes fan and can never remember whether the Arcade Fire put out their first 10" CD on Death From Above '79 Records or not, but there is nothing even remotely close to the "Pitchfork Effect" here in Japan. Every day more and more unemployable young people form bad melocore punk bands and clog up all the pay-for-play "live houses" around town and permanently redefine "indie" as "farm league major label bands that will never, ever actually get to the major label level."

There used to be, however, the "Cornelius Effect" - which was that Cornelius could anoint really weird bands by either putting them out on his Trattoria label or giving them a shout-out in a magazine, and they would suddenly sell in the 10,000s. Thanks to Cornelius, we got a lot of amazing bands like Citrus, Violent Onsen Geisha, Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her, Neil and Iraiza, and Salon Music (well, the second half of their career). Now that Cornelius is a father with a celebrity son Milo and totally complacent to make "pretty songs" that serve as good background music for writing reviews about his albums, there is a leadership/authority vacuum in the Japanese indie music market. His last effort to personally pick out the successors with his PM remix contest was a wash since Cornelius picked all these really weird Logic glitch-squirt bedroom cases. Nobody from that fraternity ever got the big break.

Obviously it's not entirely Cornelius' fault that the Japanese indie music feels like dropping pennies into a bathtub of oatmeal, but unlike Cobain - who succeeded in giving pre-existing Pixies memes to regular dudes in Indiana - Cornelius was basically responsible for giving Japan this whole stream of international-minded, internationally-relevant indie music. (For those wondering, Boredoms were more on the avant/underground tip far away from consumer culture.) Remember: South Korea doesn't have an "indie scene." There is nothing automatic about tastes/consumers/producers all coming together to make indie happen. Without Oyamada, Japan could have very easily stayed irrelevant. Matador would have been ironically signing bad Japanese hair metal bands in 1999.

But now Oyamada is a guy making non-essential albums of neato audio experiments. Wife and kids will do that to you. No dissatisfaction to subsume into songwriting, no sublimation of frustration into art. This guy's happiness just brought down an entire consumer subculture.

-W. David Marx
www.neomarxisme.com

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006