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Old 2007.08.23, 11:29 AM   #7
Nimh
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I think Shiina is more interested in pleasing a mass audience these days than digging into herself. She hasn't made an *anthem* for rebellious youth in the vein of Honnou for years now. I'm not an expert on Japanese society, but the multitudinous social problems of today's Japan are pretty well documented, and SS-era Shiina seems to speak for a lot of Japanese youth (I must have heard Honnou 4-5 times browsing in clothing stores in Tokyo just a year and a half ago).

That's just one form of her authenticity: speaking for herself, and by extension for a lot of her fans.

The other is her pure musical skill, and that's what evolved in KSK, was adapted into Tokyo Jihen, and is now kicking ass. It doesn't really "speak for" an audience, in the rebellious sense. It's more about pleasure and distraction. Dynamite Out was sort-of cathartic in that it had this incredible energy, you can't help but have a physical response to it. But it didn't pierce, it didn't haunt, it didn't *move* the way solo Shiina moved.

If not for the Ringohan concerts, and her work with Saito Neko, I'd suspect she simply calculated her younger persona, and let herself be exploited by faddish marketers until she was successful enough to do what she really wanted to do.

But I believe her when she says she merely changed. She is older now, with a child. She is successful. What does she have to be angry about? What are her passions? I think her passion now is to please a mass audience, with music that may not be as challenging and in-your-face as her previous music, but with the same standards of high quality we've come to expect.

She wants to please us because she's pleased with her own life.

To me, that's integrity.

Life is good for her now, the music is saying. But life, as we all know, kicks your ass every once in a while. It goes up and down. I hope it never goes down for anyone, but of course it does; I just hope that when it happens to artists I love, like Shiina, that they put it in their art. That they don't give up. We need art more than ever when life sucks.

Is she relevant to today's social problems? Well, she's not singing about war, or the decline of the family, or the bad economy, or corrupted values. In that sense, she is irrelevant, more "of" the system than "against" the system.

But if she's honestly not enraged about things, or rebellious, and the other members of Tokyo Jihen feel the same way, then their music does have purpose. They are expressing their enjoyment of the life they have.

That doesn't usually win awards. It doesn't make them "edgy" or "hard." As Douglas Adams said about our planet Earth, they are "mostly harmless." And fun. And brilliant.

They just aren't pissed off about anything. That's not the same as being without passion. Their passion is to entertain us, and on that level they score big time.
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