The Tokyo Concert Experience

  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...

  “Majestic” is the word I’d use to describe the moment when, halfway through the show, standing in the middle of the stage just by himself, Gilberto Gil exchanged the acoustic guitar he’d used throughout the bossanova inspired first half of his set for an electric guitar that was handed to him by a stagehand. The impressive lighting design, some of the best I’ve seen for a concert, seemed to attempt to reproduce the dusty atmosphere of the Brazilian Sertao. Gil stood there glowing with that strong backlight behind him. Having been seated up to that point, the moment became even more intense. And then he strummed the opening chords of one of the most recognizable songs in the world which happens to be, arguably the best song ever written about the experience of living in a developing nation. It was No Woman, No Cry . In spite of the title, there were more than a pair of teary eyes in the audience. It was a magical moment. The kind of moment that highlights what’s special about a l...

  The list of candidates that could join Bob Marley in reggae’s Mount Rushmore is quite extensive. I think it can’t be argued that there are more than a few legends in the genre. When it comes to solo vocal artists, I’d say that Horace Andy is a strong contender to be among the selected few. His voice and career trajectory, from recording with Studio One in the late sixties and early seventies, to the work he did for the American label Wackies in the eighties. Not to mention his membership to the prestigious Massive Attack crew from the nineties as well as an endless list of classics of the genre empowered by the strength of his unmistakable high pitched voice. I always thought he was the most likely to make the trip to Japan out of the reggae legends that are still with us, even though he confessed during the show that the reason he hasn’t been before is because he hates flying. I was elated when it was finally announced that he will coming for a three dates tour. The show was und...