Final Episode: Relativizing Sound, Stripping Away the Meaning of All Music, and Heading Toward a Sea of New Values... What is the 'Intuition' of Kan Takagi, Who Was Led from Punk to Hip-Hop? Final Episode: Relativizing Sound, Stripping Away the Meaning of All Music, and Heading Toward a Sea of New Values... What is the 'Intuition' of Kan Takagi, Who Was Led from Punk to Hip-Hop?

Kan Takagi 'Between Rock and Roll...'
Text : Kan Takagi / Illustration : UJT

The popular series from the literary and cultural magazine IN THE CITY, published by BEAMS, is back. This is the grand finale of a long essay examining 'rock and roll as imported culture' from the streets!

This blog, where I have been continuing the series, also reaches its final installment with this post.

I wrote about the origins of this project in the first post of this blog, but I will touch upon it again.

It was over ten years ago, when the editor Masayuki Kawakatsu passed away. I spent a few days thinking after his farewell party; back then, even though I was posting short texts on social media, I wasn't really writing what you would call manuscripts. However, I had a vague desire to write something. I wanted to write my own manuscript about rock and pop music in Japan. I had this desire to interview the people involved from my own perspective and compile it into a piece about how those genres were when they were first imported from overseas, and what it was like when I first heard them.

After Kawakatsu-san was gone, I felt pushed by something to think that way.

I consulted with Tasuku Watanabe, an editor who knew Kawakatsu-san well and whom I had also known well since the 80s, about this matter.

The medium Tasuku-san introduced me to was 'IN THE CITY,' published by BEAMS, and the person editing that magazine was Daisuke Kawasaki. Through Kawasaki-san's hands, the series was published nine times in 'IN THE CITY,' and after that, I was allowed to write it here on this blog for a total of 25 installments over two years. Actually, between 'IN THE CITY' and this blog, I also wrote irregularly about twice for an outdoor fashion magazine called 'OUTSTANDING' published by my friend Detz Matsuda, and because the previous 'IN THE CITY' series ended midway, there are also stories from people that were never reflected in the magazine at the time. Including those aspects, plans for a book release with added content are moving forward, but for now, this will be the final installment here.

I interviewed many people for this series.

When I interviewed Yoshio Kataoka, he said he saw The Doors in America before their debut.

His impression at the time:
'It was like kayokyoku (Japanese pop music).'

Hiroshi Kamayatsu said he disliked Elvis Presley. The person who surprised Kamayatsu-san like that was The Beatles.

'Because it was a sound I had never heard before, like it had a veil over it.'

Hiroshi Fujiwara bought the Sugarhill Gang album at a record store in Ise when it was released as a Japanese pressing.

He said it was to surprise his older sister, who liked Chic, the source material for the track.

Setting aside the music I discovered later, the three major turning points for me were the rock and roll revival after glam, punk, new wave, and hip-hop. Hip-hop, in particular, made the technique of sampling an important element of my work as a creator, and from there, my tastes expanded to jazz, fusion, contemporary music, and electronic music, which I hadn't touched before.

Those tastes are also linked to the times.

Now that it has become normal for artists to share their daily lives on social media, and we can listen to not only old songs but also new ones on subscription services, 'when you turned up the radio volume' has changed to 'when you Shazamed it.' Now, we listen to the Sex Pistols, Led Zeppelin, Kool & the Gang, and Miles Davis all on equal footing.

At such a time, I was thinking about Afrika Bambaataa again.

In Bambaataa's park jams of yesteryear, the 'Death Mix' featured YMO tracks mixed in with funk records. He mashed up Kraftwerk with spaghetti westerns, driving the B-BOYs gathered in the park into a frenzy.

The story that he would play just the intro of a Rolling Stones song on a loop,
taunting the crowd on the mic by saying, "What you're hearing now is rock you don't usually listen to," is legendary.

Even though I wasn't in the park, I was greatly influenced by it, and it became a guiding principle for my sense of creation and DJing.

However...

Social media also plays a role in denouncing artists' past crimes, and in the hip-hop scene, it led to Afrika Bambaataa being ostracized. Bambaataa will likely never return to the scene. It's a shame. What is certain is that for me, Bambaataa's sensibility was the catalyst for getting hooked on hip-hop. That much is certain.

The other day, while talking with Haruo Chikada for the first time in a while, I suddenly realized something.

The reason I started buying pop singles normally in 1978, when my tastes were shifting from rock to punk, was because Haruo Chikada was relativizing pop music on his late-night radio show at the time. I realized this while talking to him.

Chikada-san was doing what we would now call a "quick change" style back then on his late-night broadcast, saying things like, "I can't listen to this boring stuff!" while playing EP records from the station one after another and making snide remarks on the mic.

Around the same time, across the ocean, Bambaataa was taking new wave records he bought in the Village, bringing them uptown, and mixing them with funk.

"To relativize something means to strip it of its meaning."
(Haruo Chikada)

The beginning of hip-hop is said to be the party DJ Kool Herc threw for his sister, but for me, the fact that Bambaataa conceptually rendered sound meaningless at the beginning of hip-hop music is significant. On the other hand, I've realized once again that it was Chikada-san who started me on the path of listening to sound by relativizing it, and I'd like to conclude with that.

Thank you very much.

This is the final episode. Thank you for reading.