The Shamisen Redemption

One of my students is the curator of an art museum in my city.  We were talking the other day about the idea of Western art as subtraction stories as opposed to the idea of Japanese art as functional.  As Japanese society changed in response to contact with the West and people stopped using swords or wearing kimono (because it is so expensive), much of Japanese art also "died" - or was at least frozen in carbonite.  This works as a general overview to Japanese art history.  

Due to the nature of traditional Japanese arts as functional, there was never any concept of art as aesthetics until that idea was introduced by Westerners.  Japanese visual artists today have to walk a thin tightrope between the absurdity of producing traditionally Japanese, functional works of art for revisionist aesthetic reasons (since "art" has been de facto defined as aethetics) and appearing to do little more than copy Western modern artists.  Accordingly, creating good modern art is more difficult for Japan than it is for the West, since everything Japan's artists produce will ultimately be seen through a lens of Japaneseness.

What I mean by Western art as a subtraction story is that Western art has a history of the gradual removal of constraints - the opposite of Japanese art as necessarily bound to the constraints of function.  If we look at the history of Western poetry, for instance, we still see with Shakespeare and Marlowe a general reliance on the iambic pentameter and rhyming patterns of the ancients (even though those standard rhyme patterns and meters emerged from another language and culture entirely).

Fast forward to Walt Whitman and poetry becomes all about breaking "suffocating" rules of rhyme and meter whilst yawping barbarically.  This idea of directionless rule-breaking would find its most absurd expression in E.E. Cummings, who wrote about extremely conventional subjects in extremely unconventional ways.  

Rimbaud will eventually follow, like Genghis Khan laying waste to the paltry remains of the Classical order.  Eventually, a decidedly non-black and mediocre Eminem will emerge from a separate and awesome system into the system and be hailed as a poetic genius for rapping about vicodin and homosexuals instead of bitches, blunts, and forties by none less than high-brow arbiters of taste Reynolds Price and Seamus Heaney.  

This cynical reconstruction of art history is not to say that mindless conformity is good.  Certainly there is merit in pushing against artificially imposed boundaries; but this leads us to a paradox: the more we try to make poetry about meaning by removing arbitrary structural constraints, the more poetry becomes about arbitrary structure, and the more criticism of poetry necessarily becomes about analyzing arbitrary structure; an artistic medium that originally fostered free expression becomes bureaucratized.

On the contrary, the advantage of structurally super-conservative haiku is that readers are already familiar with the structure, so they can freely take it for granted and concentrate instead on meaning.  Presumably this was also the advantage of iambic pentameter, octava rima, and other traditional structural conventions in Western poetry, which we have since curb-stomped into oblivion.  The result of stripping away all these received structural rules is aesthetic nihilism, complete with hair nests and unmade beds.  

The ripest representation of aesthetic nihilism in the world of musical art is what we call "pop".  By aesthetic nihilism, I don't mean complete and total meaninglessness, because clearly pop music is about making money for producers.  And this is why I hate pop, and Gucci, and Dolce and Gabbana (among other reasons): any aesthetic or artistic purpose, no matter how fruity or misguided, is subverted to the bottom-line concerns of brand establishment.  

[Relevant to the rest of this post: I don't think this necessarily holds for music, given the "additionist" history of music.  The paradigm set by the Beatles rests on incorporating the musical notions of India and other non-Western civilizations into the big tent of Western music.  The fame of Led Zeppelin as a bookend to the project of the Beatles rests on taking these additions to their absurd and nihilistic conclusion.  Indeed, the entire rock project is based on musical egalitarianism.  Although it could be read as the misappropriation of other musical traditions, I find this narrative false.]

As I continued discussing Japanese art with my student, we moved on to Jpop, the Japanese bad carbon copy of American pop music.  I contended that it is possibly the worst music in the world objectively speaking, and relayed my personal belief as such.  The popularity of Jpop as opposed to traditional Japanese music is as if all the old pubs in the British Isles were torn down and replaced with Shidax karaoke, all the greatest, oldest restaurants in the corridor from Rome to Paris were torn down and replaced with McDonalds, and all the Buddhist temples in Thailand were bulldozed and replaced with Christian megachurches combined.     

Unfortunately, young people in Japan seem to prefer pop music to anything else.  I recently helped administer a dialectic at the middle school at which I teach concerning how to get better ratings for kohaku, the dwindling annual music contest held on Japanese television on New Years Eve.  In its current form, kohaku consists of about half Jpop and half enka.  Most of the male students said that they weren't interested in watching kohaku on New Years Eve, because they like Downtown's annual New Years Eve special.  (I like Downtown on all occasions - Funniest show ever.)  Many of the students said that there should be less enka, since young people don't like enka (Enka is kind of the last waltz of traditional Japanese music.) and that enka should be scrapped in favor of Jpop, which was much more popular with young people.  

I found myself agreeing that young people like Jpop, but nobody should like Jpop to begin with since it is a bad copy of Western music designed solely to make money.  I will admit that there is no accounting for taste, but I can't really find any reasons at all to like pop music, and I think it's sad that modern Japan is willing to reject so much of what made it great in the first place without reason other than economic.  I probably wouldn't be complaining about this if I didn't think that much of the love for Jpop rests in conspicuous consumption and/or ignorance.  

When I taught at Nova, I had a student once (She was probably the highest-level student we had, and she had studied in America for seven or eight years.) respond to a question I had about Akira Kurosawa with, "Uggghhh!  Akira Kurosawa is, like, sooooo, like, what OLD people like.  Like, maybe my grandparents, like, like his movies.  I, like, dig Orlando Bloom.  He's, like, soooooo sexy.  Pirates of the Caribbean is, like, my favorite movie."  I threw up in my mouth.  

After that incident, thoroughly depressed, I delicately asked my wife why Japanese people seem to hate their own traditional culture.  She responded with her belief that if it weren't for the extraordinary popularity of traditional Japanese arts with tourists, much of traditional Japan would be long gone.  Whatever tradition remains is shameful to the Japanese, half through free judgment of inferiority to Western tastes and half because much of it was consciously purged by occupying U.S. forces after the war.

This was the context for my stumbling into a shamisen concert today on the busiest shopping street in my city.  With my older daughter, I watched seven senior citizens in kimono playing perhaps the best music I have ever seen live.  The shamisen is one of many traditional Japanese musical instruments.  It is commonly described as a "Japanese guitar" but is more like a banjo or mandolin in both sound and traditional mystique.  I looked around me and noticed that everyone else in the crowd was at least fifty, excepting my one-year-old daughter and someone else's two-or-three-year-old granddaughter.  It was sad to see such beautiful music appreciated by only the outgoing generation.  As with sumo, another great Japanese passion of mine that is only appreciated by senior citizens, I can only hope that taste accrues with age.