Dispatch, Week 2

Asako Toki on Monsta X, Seiko Oomori on ZOC, Mirin Furukawa on YouTube

Hello! I write about music time to time, mostly in my newsletter but also in other places. For whatever this is, I basically want to blog about random things I come across during the week to an audience of no one — or maybe someone? — in these times of isolation.

Asako Toki, a Monsta X Stan

Natalie launched a column with Asako Toki to explore the singer/songwriter’s recent new obsession with K-pop. She apparently first got into it after watching a dance practice video of Blackpink, and for this entry, she also talks about MAMAMOO and Monsta X. She talks about the latter in depth, recounting the time she got a text from her friend about, I think, Wonho leaving the group. “My mind went blank. I don’t remember picking up my luggage,” she said.

I’m more curious to see who exactly is in her Line circle of K-pop friends. She said she hit up Okamoto Reiji of the Okamotos when she first got into Blackpink, then he gave her more recommendations, including her favorite Monsta X. “The more I got into it, I wanted to have more people to talk about it as serious as me, so I thought I had to be open about it,” she said. “After Reiji-kun, I also told Ami [Onuki] of PUFFY, and she told me, ‘congratulations, welcome to the club.’” (Who does Ami stan!?)

Toki also looked up Juelz Santana’s “There It Go (The Whistle Song)” after Reiji told her Blackpink’s “Whistle” might be inspired it. Now I am imagining the alternate universe where Asako is instead obsessed with The Diplomats, and she has a column on Natalie to tell us how Back Like Cooked Crack 2 is a mixtape we should all listen to.

First Signs of (Night)Life

Here’s a nice news feature by Resident Advisor on China’s various dance scenes opening clubs after months of lockdown. Things are what you might expect: people are still extra cautious to stay out, which leads to earlier operation hours; strict checks on health is imposed for any patrons. I liked this bit about travel restrictions and how that affects booking acts:

China’s government has formally suspended the entry of most foreigners to prevent a second wave of infections, which means international acts won’t be booked anytime soon — even those with valid residence permits or visas can’t enter. But many have pointed out hidden silver linings to the current situation.

The lack of overseas artists is “a good opportunity to make the local community stronger and for newer DJs to grow,” Daily Vinyl’s Chen said. “Lineups are 100 percent local these days, and that’s great,” echoed Ng in Chengdu. “DJs who would never get to play peak time in main rooms are now getting their chance. International booking cancellations has meant club rosters are filling their weekends with fresh local faces.”

Lyrical School “Tokyo Drift” Freestyle

Lyrical School >>> Rich Brian

Malcolm Mask McLaren: ‘Unfinished’ (2020)

(“The Idiot’s Song,” from the 2020 EP, Unfinished)

The setting of the first video I watched from Malcolm Mask McLaren a few years back couldn’t be more perfect to properly contextualize their aesthetic: idols hanging out at the skate park to the tune of some pop-punk power riffs with a metalcore breakdown for good measure. It’s totally the jock punk that would rile up a crowd at a Warped Tour set if Vans still hosted those, and it hit me more purely, tapping into some corners of my interests I haven’t engaged with since maybe high school.

MMM’s new drop, the Unfinished EP, is a fun, brisk run-through. The EP format suits the pop-punk music a lot more than their full-length album, My Life My Way, from 2018. The latter’s 50-minute runtime is almost overkill to commit something singular like their brand of punk, and a speedy style feels best when it just comes and goes.

Chu Ishikawa: ‘Tetsuo: The Iron Man’ OST (1989)

I watched Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man for the first time this week. Wild ride! The industrial music of the soundtrack rules, too, especially with all the close-ups of metal scraps and factory scenes. I’m reading it’s by famed industrial artist Chu Ishikawa, who was also in the bands Zeitlich Vergelter and Der Eisenrost, and contributed to a number of later Tsukamoto films.

ZOC Explains “Family Name”

ZOC just launched their YouTube channel. Though the intro video was very loose with the group trying to come up with a name for their channel — Marina’s pitch was Atsumare! Zoc No Mori; I loved Katy’s, Zoc A Go! — the follow-up took a sharp turn into the serious with the idol group, sans Marina or Maro, explaining the thoughts that went into creating “Family Name.” Being the one who wrote the song, Seiko did a bulk of the talking, and she brought up a few great points:

On the difference between writing Seiko’s own songs vs. ZOC songs (from around 3:50–5:15)

“ZOC is the SNS generation. I’m part of the original generation who first started to use it, but they’re a generation after, so they’re great at it. Saying things that grab you using the shortest amount of words, and that gets pulled out… Or a short portion gets pulled out of a long interview, and that goes viral. We have a lot of members who got popular because of a viral pull quote being attached to their pictures, so thinking about things like that, looking at comments on the internet, I wanted to make something that was SNS-ish.

…[While looking at idols in music videos,] I bet there was something like “I’m singing this, but I really wanted to sing that.” I can sing a full song because I’m solo, but for a group, I wanted to definitely make sure that no one gets handed lyrics to sing and think “oh so I’m singing *this* lyric.” I wanted them to look great singing the song no matter when they’re captured. I didn’t make it so the song is great when you read it in full, but so that they always look great singing any line when they pull out a single section.”

Approaching her songwriting as products of influence of social media, and the distinction between her two projects being determined by the different between the generation, is really interesting!

When Seiko started to get more mainstream exposure, a big thing that the media focused was her songwriting technique of her jotting down lyrics on the Notes app on her iPhone. That image of her work process really informed how I looked at her actual lyrics as text, which is often sprawling, very indulgent in content and a mouthful to actually sing out loud; it basically reads like a long block of text sent to someone private.

So it’s fascinating to see just how much concision comes into play when it comes to writing ZOC songs. She explains before that quote I translated how commercial pressures obviously feeds into how she writes her songs. It’s got to be catchy, and it’s got to have lyrics that a listener can remember; it’s got to be pop. But I do like her very current perspective to lyrics as an instrument to communicate message. Her lyrics start to look more like tweets and not the threaded kind. Fragmented is how they get disseminated anyway, even in song, with members only getting single bars of their own before it’s quickly volleyed to another. But fragmented, or more like distilled, is how audiences share their appreciation of their lyrics, too, as they pull their favorite and declare it as the skeleton key to their personal issues.

On the response to “Family Name” (around 10:25–11:05)

“The moment I finished the song, I felt like it was a song that can save people, and even more with them singing it. I feel it’s getting to the people it’s supposed to get to. On the YouTube comments, it’s not like, “she’s so cute!” but “in my home…” It’s a song where you want to talk about yourself. It’s not that “this girl is great” but it makes you like yourself; it makes you like the person who got to like them. I wanted ZOC to be a group where in the end, life is great because you came across them. There’s a lot of feedback like that with “Family Name.”

On the lyric, “kusso ikiteyaru,” or “I’ll fucking live” (12:30–13:30)

Katy: Not that long ago, people were saying, “I wanna die, I wanna die,” but they’re starting to say, “I’ll fucking live,” and I’m happy. I want them to think that “I want to die” is out of fashion.

Seiko: Right now, it’s a time when intense words are the kind that spreads around easily. I think an emotion like “I want to die” is something you can do a lot more with. You can say “I want to die” even when you want to say you’re hungry... It starts to become cheap… We want to completely change how we express that. We want to invent something new.

This makes me happy, too, especially coming from Katy, who often projects disinterest when she’s out in public. It reminds again of the discussion on the SNS/social media generation, how we express depression the internet, and how that expression has fed into pop music as of late. There’s still a transition, I think, growing out of the deep, cynical irony people use to dance around speaking about our issues directly — a habit more prevalent in the first generation, my generation. I don’t think the execution of “Family Name” is perfect in what it sets out do, but at least conceptually, it’s an inspiring rethinking of how to go about a sensitive topic like depression and suicide ideation.

Welcome to YouTube, Mirin!

I’m sure a lot of geinojin in the past year have at least contemplated pivoting to YouTube. That’s where the television audience is going right now to consume entertainment to the point more and more YouTubers have been stepping into actual TV variety programs as guests. But now COVID has rapidly sped up the process, essentially forcing those folks out of TV and transition into the web platform if they want to stay in the public eye.

I imagine those geinojin are dealing with a similar situation as Mirin Furukawa of Dempagumi.inc, who recently set up her own YouTube channel. The intro to her introduction video is honest in how much labor it takes to edit together what seems like a mundane portrait of everyday life. This being her first time, which I’m sure is a case for a lot of others in her place, she took 20 hours to put together her 10-minute video.

“It’s so, so boring,” she says. “It’s not that it’s boring, but it’s also not fun to watch. I started to feel like, ‘is there even a reason to share this to the world?’ If I was going to start doing YouTube, I wanted to might as well leave something special, but it felt like my skills couldn’t keep up with my expectations, and it’s tough.”

It is tough, Mirin! Hang in there! It’s just part of the process!

Congratulations Sailer, You Made It to Friday

See you next week!