Last updated on July 28, 2013
So here I talk about music. I like listening to strange music, so here’s some for you.
Shiina Ringo – Why must it always be the case that the one artist/musician that captivates you must come from a foreign country AND require much more time/money than you’d ever will to spend otherwise? It couldn’t have been Radiohead, no! It had to be Shiina Ringo.
I will tell you now: I listen to a lot of music. A LOT OF MUSIC. To take a cursory look at the music folder in my computer, it contains over 153GB of music files. I have a vast and diverse taste in genres that rarely finds satisfaction in the humdrum American music scene (other than Queens of the Stone Age, anyway). I search overseas for the craziest music I can find; the more strange, the better, though I prefer melody to ambient drone. Please, no ambient droning!
Anyone in the modern world finds one artist that defines them, or to which they cannot stop listening. I, myself, am an evangelist for Shiina Ringo and just about everything she’s done since she started making any kind of music in 1999. Discovering her in 2007, I was completely blown away by the quality and the depth of what she produces and how she writes catchy pop-rock songs that don’t fit into the proper musical structures.
To give you a closer point of reference from a western perspective: Björk in Japan. That’s highly reductive, I imagine, but without listening to Shiina’s work that is the closest reference. However, while Björk’s psuedo-spiritual sensibilities and airy dream-like quality tend to make me doze into a deep sleep, Shiina’s music arrives with a genuine forcefulness that demands listening. All her music sounds great on first listen, and demands subsequent replays to get nuance. For those opposed to listening to people sing in languages other than English, think of the human voice as yet another instruments in the palette of sound. Not that Shiina doesn’t sing in English (she does, and often), but the emotional connection remains palpable regardless of one’s understanding of Japanese.
If anything, Shiina Ringo (whose “last name”, as you might suspect, is a play on Ringo Starr and is purely a stage name; course, she actually did cover Beatles songs on a covers album) embodies the spirit of other genres within whatever she’s doing at any given moment. Her unique, nasally, and sometimes crackling voice echoes right through any instrumentation, making all her songs clearly and defiantly hers. For one album, she’ll play the part of the pop-rock singer-songwriter muse, as in her first solo effort Muzai Moratorium (Which means something similar to “the death of innocence”). Sparks and shades of Alanis Morisette and similar artists shine through, but even then you can feel the genre boundaries crack and break under the pressure of her creativity. Once sophomore effort Shouso Strip hit the Japanese music scene, Shiina clearly wasn’t playing around!
A million seller in its native Japan (second hand copies line used CD shops over there), Shouso Strip clearly takes influences from whatever took her fancy at the moment, from Radiohead to Madonna to…I don’t know, nurse outfits? Warning for the semi-NSFW nature of some parts of the video, but it’s difficult to find any videos available in the United States other than Honnou, probably her most well-known song:
She also defines her image through music videos, outfits, and aesthetic styles. She dances from album to album with such elements, subverting conventions of herself and refusing to remain the same. If there’s one thing I hate about some albums, it’s the repetition and sameness throughout a 40-80 minutes period. If there’s one thing about Shiina’s albums that defines them, it’s the variety that really nails you. I can’t think of a single album to which she had major involvement that I’ve been bored, or wanted to skip a song; they’re all fundamentally different from each other, but all uniquely Shiina.
Of course, she didn’t stop there; her experimental influences came to a head in Karuki Zamen Kuri no Hana (Lime Semen Chestnut Flowers – strange title, I know), an album completely composed of samples from nearly fifty different instruments around the world. How one assembles genuine pop music under such constraints seems utterly impossible – but then again, Shiina Ringo doesn’t care for what’s possible. In fact, the album so alienated her audience that it sold a fraction of what Shouso Strip sold.
This may account for the formation of Tokyo Jihen (Incidents) in 2004, a genuine “jazz-rock” band if there ever was one. Forming a band certainly feels safer, granted, but it’s much more accessible, and included most of her collaborators from her solo career anyway. For me, it struck like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky; it’s the music I always wanted to hear, but didn’t actually know I wanted. It may explain the recent surge of jazz music in my life, from Miles Davis to Charles Mingus, John Coltrane to whatever obscure French jazz fusion band crosses my ears. So here’s a live concert video, then, which perfectly captures Tokyo Jihen’s sound:
They do crazier things in the studio, of course, but the band itself…broke up sometime last year, never to return. Whether due to internal pressures or simply musical discord, Shiina released a solo album in 2009, Sanmon Gossip, which unleashed the inner big-band/jazz monster within for nearly its whole duration. I would say the beginning of the end came when she started letting other band members write songs – not a bad thing, granted, but certainly changing the dynamic of each album after Adult (which many Shiina admirers consider her second-best album overall).
So it is that she’s now a relatively free agent, collaborating, writing songs, and releasing a single here and there. It’s not that I don’t enjoy these, but they usually fit into her wheelhouse of already established works, and Japanese singles are costly enterprises (thirteen dollars for three songs and a poster? I’m dedicated, but not THAT dedicated. Wait for B-sides collections). I’m honestly waiting with baited breath for whatever she releases next – I prefer a cohesive album.
So, if I didn’t convince you already, please go and find more of her music. It’s hard to find on YouTube, but this is the Internet, so I think you’ll be just fine. Also, BUY THE MUSIC.
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