The Tokyo Concert Experience

  I’ll start with a personal anecdote. The biggest gap between concerts from the same artist I’ve experienced was almost sixteen years between the two Peter Gabriel shows I’ve seen. I saw him in 1993 and then in 2009, I believe those are the only shows he has played in Venezuela. With Stereolab I now broke the record. The only other time I saw them was in March of 2002 in Los Angeles, headlining one of the days of the first All Tomorrow’s Parties festival that was held in America.                         It could be argued that it was a different groop then. Mainly because of the presence of the late Mary Hansen, who provided harmonies and countermelodies to Laetitia Sadier’s main vocals. Those were an essential part of their distinctive sound. In addition to the motorik Can backbeat and the Velvet Underground inspired songwriting. A unique melting pot of ideas that h...

    At the same table we were, there was a guy from Switzerland, young dude, I think in his mid-twenties, because I mentioned a show I went to in 2002 and he said he was born around then. We talked about music. He said something that was definitely very accurate about the artist we were about to see. He said that she’s vastly underrated.                         I couldn’t agree more. Patrice Rushen started her career in her teens, recorded her first album for Prestige in her teens. Yes, Saxophone Colossus, Eastern Sounds, first Miles Davis Quintet Prestige. On that album, Prelusions , Joe Henderson played tenor and Rushen sort of mapped a journey from hard bop to the jazz fusion of the day. Her amazing piano chops, especially on the Fender Rhodes were all over that album, but even more so on the following two, Before The Dawn and Shout It Out . She started to ex...

    "I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypothesis can’t define how I be dropping these…" There are many that will rate this intro as the best in hip hop. For some it is the best verse all times. It comes from Triumph , a song from Wu Tang Forever , the second album from the Wu-Tang Clan . At the time this album came with huge anticipation. It was the conclusion of a run of releases, probably unparalleled since. Their first one, Enter the Wu Tang (36 Chambers) , was a bona fide classic from the get go. It was released in 1993 and introduced a super group of sorts where each member had its personality clearly defined and their strengths worked combined to assemble a catalog of unheard lyrical prowess, witty wordplay, engaging storytelling and hard hitting beats. The core members followed with solo/side projects for the following couple of years and each one of those, to this day, are considered hip hop milestones. Gravediggaz/ 6 Feet Deep , Method Man/ Tical , Ol’ D...

  When I first listened to Night Reign , the second and most recent album by Arooj Aftab , I immediately knew that I was listening to the best album of 2024. It’s eerie and mysterious and yet accessible without making concessions. It felt like an artistic statement. Confident and very unique sounding, unlike anything else. The album defies genres, you can’t call it World Music, Jazz or Hip Hop and yet it has elements of each. I then revisited her collaboration with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile and was reminded of its vast soundscapes and the way that the electronic and acoustic instruments blend with Aftab’s voice to create this tapestry of sound that slowly builds itself throughout lengthy tracks. The album, as hinted by the collaborators background, has strong jazz/experimental attributes. I’d say that her masterpiece, though, is Vulture Prince . There’s the balance between accessibility and experimentation, but in this earlier album she seems to be taking far m...

  The other day I was watching a TV show, the kind of show where they go to specific areas and talk about their food. They profiled a cook who was well known among the locals for making an amazing ramen. In the show they called him a legend. It made me think that term didn’t exactly fit the person in question. After that I noticed that the word ‘legend’ is used a lot, but who’s truly a legend? To me a legend is someone who overcoming hardship was able to make a mark on their field. Someone who established a before and after. Someone who’ll be remembered long after their gone because of their everlasting impact. Without a doubt, on September 29th at WWW X we were in the presence of a legend.                          Born into royalty in Mali, Salif Keit a was ostracized by his family due to his condition. On top of that he pursued music as a profession, something t...

  It’s been a while since my last show at an Arena of this size. Ariake Arena was built to host events for the Tokyo Olympics, so it is pretty much brand new. I really like that feeling of anticipation when walking through the large round corridors searching for your gate and walking past those enormous gaps -the gates. Getting a peak of what’s going on inside. Passing food vendors, restrooms, etc, until finding the actual gate, walking in and the huge contrast of the full illuminated arena with the stage. It’s a really cool experience.                          My seat was the cheapest, so I sat way up and luckily for me I was at the end of a row with a wall next to me I could lean on when inevitably everyone will stand once the show starts. The amount of cosplay, furry hat, shorts and tie wearing patrons was larger than I expected, as well as the generational gap...

  In the Edgar Wright documentary The Sparks Brothers, there’s a scene that shows a concert at a small venue here in Tokyo, maybe Club Quattro, and the warm reaction of the crowd, implying that in Japan, Sparks has a strong dedicated fanbase. It is true. I remember they coming here almost annually for a while. Not for nothing they chose to do some of the initial promotion for their new album Mad! here as well. You can’t help but draw the similarities between them and Cheap Trick. The quirkiness in the contrast between the sort of goofy oddball looking member and the adonis type one is an obvious one, but also both bands have delivered powerhouse pop material. The difference, in my opinion, is that unlike Cheap Trick, Sparks had the ability to evolve and adapt their sound with the times without ever sacrificing their personality.                          It is fa...

  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...

  “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...