The Tokyo Concert Experience

  In the nineties, when rock was king, according to some, the biggest band of them all hailed from Washington State. No, it wasn’t Unwound . It was another one we all know that to this day has its nameprinted on t-shirts worn by people whose parents might not even had been born when they were active. Seattle, Olympia, Aberdeen, Tacoma, that whole area shaped popular music in that era, modern culture even, to an extent, Unwound operated within that space and were able to stand out among the bunch. They were quite possibly among the most experimental and interesting groups that came out of that scene.                          Their first recordings definitely were grounded on grunge and its post-punk emo offspring, but soon they developed their own sound embracing electronic influences and a more ethereal approach to their music. By their last album, L eaves Turn In...

    In the early 2000s the band Mogwai was at the peak of their critical acclaim. One of their best albums started with a song that sampled an Iggy Pop interview he gave in Canada in 1977. The sample quoted him over a slow guitar arpeggio saying that “punk is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators of music. It takes up the energy, the bodies, the hearts, the souls and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it. It’s a term based on contempt, fashion, style, elitism, satanism and everything that’s rotten about rock and roll…” It painted a clear picture of the confrontational, anti-establishment, constantly innovating and somewhat contradictory stand of an artist like Iggy Pop.                          Musically he, along with the rest of The Stooges, issued a similar statement thirty years prior on the first song off of their fi...

  In February 2011 I was in Berlin on a business trip. I remember going to a huge record shop near Checkpoint Charlie, like the ones that were fun to visit back when entertainment was still being sold in stores and picking up the latest PJ Harvey album the week of release. Because of how busy I was, I couldn’t listen to it until getting back home. On first listen it immediately became one of my favorites. I’d say it is a strong contender for album of the XXI century, at this point. Let England Shake is a concept album but not in the traditional sense of telling a story or following a character. It establishes a theme and provides eloquent commentary on each of its songs. Not to be hyperbolic, but, honestly, ‘eloquent’ is an understatement. It is poetic and extremely moving. One of my favorite lyrics in it was inspired by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: Jagged mountains, jutting out / Cracked like teeth in a rotten mouth. / On Battleship Hill I hear the wind say / “Cruel nature has w...

    Not so long ago there was a big TV campaign from one of the two huge beer brands in Japan, I forgot if it was Asahi or Kirin, that used the song Why Can’t We Be Friends? In Japan, especially in the mainstream, things are much more appreciated when they are labeled as ‘safe’, this assumption doubles or triples when they are of foreign origin. This concept of ‘safe’ is in reality a sort of twisted sense of ‘non-threatening’, that makes, for example, someone that looks like Elon Musk embraced and admired. Of course, this is only my perception and I could be completely wrong, as I’ll prove later regarding the song discussed above. But when that song was used in that commercial, at that time, it reinforced my eschewed idea that War was sort of a "safe" take on seventies funk. I was embarrassingly wrong, but for years I held on to that idea until I caved in and listened to the album The World Is a Ghetto . It was a revelation and now I consider it one of the best funk albums ...

  One of my favorite movies from Latin America is Rodrigo D - No Futuro . It’s a movie directed by Victor Gaviria and released in 1990. In a documentary style the movie follows the lives of disenfranchised youth in Medellin in the late eighties.The way these kids cope with the violent context they live in is with music, metal and punk music. Places like England, where punk started, cities like New York and to a way lesser degrees other areas associated with extreme metal like Norway and Sweden have some violent elements to them, but nothing can compare to Medellin in the eighties. That scene created a unique lo-fi merge of punk and metal that was a mirror to what those kids in cities like Medellin or Sao Paulo experienced. The tagline of the movie poster says it all: “is it death living this much?” Sepultura and other bands from Belo Horizonte, like Sarcofago perhaps didn’t experience poverty but they definitely witnessed it, it’s unavoidable when living in Latin America. Political...

  Many people believe that seeing a show at a small sweaty club with a band rocking out on a tiny stage is the ideal way of experiencing a concert. Even though I couldn’t say that I’d done that numerous times, I tend to agree with that sentiment. If you add to the equation a big -or relatively big- artist, then you’re privileged. That’s sometimes the case in Japan where artists that are huge in other parts of the world are not necessarily popular here. It usually happens with hip hop or hip hop adjacent performers. I know that Tyler The Creator and Doja Cat played really small venues in Tokyo not so long ago while they either headlined or co-headlined festivals like Coachella. Recently I reviewed the Marisa Monte show. It was a mid-size venue, in her country she plays stadiums. Jeff Rosenstock is not, by any means, a mainstream artist. He does attract a considerable audience, though. His name has gotten a lot of traction in recent years having popped up in multiple top ten lists f...