Those of you who watched the U.S. male figure skater Jeremy Abbott, win the US National Championships in 2014, will remember the wonderful music piece that he won with. It happens to be one of my recently listed personal all-time favorites! He used a piece from the musical Pina, entitled ‘Lilies of the Valley’ by Jun Miyake.
I post the YouTube video here – by linkszumliebhaben for your enjoyment. The video accompanies/shows the music through clips from old movies, choreographed and edited to fit Miyake’s music. Brilliant!
Black-Japanese singer Judith Hill has wowed the judges on the US television show: The Voice on her first night. I am not a particular fan of these kinds of shows, but I always appreciate a Blackanese artist of success in the public limelight! She is truly a great singer!
Following videos of Butoh 舞踏 performance, the postwar avant-garde Japanese form of the movement expression of life/death, dark/light, inexpressible expression of angst and pain and hope, mystery and disorder, normal/abnormal, deep and disfigured–that I posted earlier, the most famous Butoh performer Kazuo Ohno 大野一雄, left legacies of expression that are unequaled.
Modern western forms of dance and movement almost always developed and focused on aspects and expressions of western interpretations of “beauty.” Butoh, on the other hand, is perhaps the expression of angst, death, darkness, disfigurement, complexity, subtly and the in-between places of life/death. It has its own “beauty” precisely because the “grotesque” and the “horrible” and “scary” are present, developed into form.
Butoh has expanded to a worldwide phenomenon. It speaks particularly to audiences connected to recent war, violence and the questioning of life. Below are further modern examples of present-day Butoh.
One of the most famous and well-known troupes from Japan that performs Butoh today, is the Sankai Juku group. I have included two performances by them below, followed by others.
Sankai Juku: excerpts from ‘TOBARI’
Sankai Juku: Excerpts from: ‘KAGEMI’
Hisako Horirkawa and Min Tanaka: Excerpt from a performance in 1988 in Czechoslovakia
Brattelboro Butoh
Co-Production of Compañía Cuerpo Transitorio (Barcelona, Spain) and La Compañía Slurp (Buenos Aires, Argentina) performing: “Penélope.”
Mercedes Sosa (July 9, 1935 – October 4, 2009) can be remembered as one of the most memorable, famous, and great singers of the 20th century. She was known as “La Negra” — the Black One, symbolizing the fact that she often sang for and with, giving voice to, those that are “darker,” and “blacker” –who are now expendable in a global structure, silenced and shunned.
She spent much of her life in prison, then had to live in exile from her homeland because of her leftist views. She united many music aficionados across South America and in Europe by singing her native Argentinian folk songs as well as those of Cuba and Brazil, often singing of heartache. longing in their connection to loss, politics, and cultural survival.
Here, the video is one of my favorite songs by her: Todo Cambia, (Everything Changes).
I thank Nancho21 who uploaded this nice video on Youtube and I offer an edited version of the translation below the video.
What is superficial changes
What is profound also changes
The mind changes
Everything changes in this world.
The traveler changes his way
Even if this harms him
And just like everything changes
That I change is not strange
Horacio “Chango” Spasiuk is an Argentinechamamé musician and accordion player. You can hear the Eastern European music influence in his Argentinian flair. His group creates his unique sound. He is one of my favorites.
Jake Shimabukuro and his incredible ukulele playing!!
He first attracted attention in his homelands of Hawaii, in 1998. From then, he has progressed to one of the world’s foremost “global” ukulele players. His playing ranges from Hawaiian traditional ukulele tunes, to American folk music, jazz, blues, bluegrass, and rock. Truly wonderful. He is a fifth-generation Japanese-American.
Turkish pop/rap star Sultana, was deemed “dangerous” by the Turkish government and the media in 2000 when her song Kusu Kalkmaz came out. The Title means: “Birds Can’t Fly” — which is a euphemism for “Can’t Get It Up.” The song suggests a failure in the men who leave their wife and family behind while they go out to clubs to search for women and prostitutes for elicit sex, hiding their impotence as men, not just sexual bodies.
When radio and television stations were told not to play her music or music videos or her performances in Turkey because of the song, Sultana was disgusted. She is quoted to say that Turkey has a problem with freedom, that creativity means freedom and that Turkey’s “Thought Police” is ridiculous because it actually tries to control thought and that creativity will always resist control. She moved to the United States at that point and continued to record some beautiful “woman-rap” songs in Turkish/English hybrid, mixing Turkish traditional instruments, modern rap and hip/hop sensibility and Europeanesque melodies.
I am a-kick it for my girl while you ask how
’cause people in the world are living so foul
I manifest a tune about this, aye:
‘Kuşu kalkmaz’ means: ‘your bird can’t fly’!
While wife and kids are locked up at home
And you are at the strip club
headed for the zone,
Brizzle and ice sucked up all your stones
And by the time you get back home
your baby done grown
‘Cause you were stuck at the spot
like a fool to rasclast
Trying to get at what the new girl got
Not conscious of the family
Not acting like a father
When you’ve seen her in the light
Man, that’s your daughter
“For My Sister” – a collaboration between Black-Japanese singer Judith Hill and Japanese/Italian-American Asian sensation AI.
AI is a huge R&B sensation in many Asian countries including Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, etc. Judith Hill, as said in my earlier post of her music videos, is a sensation who was a former back-up singer for Michael Jackson.
Singer-songwriter Malvina Reynolds (1900-1978), was a sensitive and powerful, straightforward singer-songwriter who wrote against the machine. There are so many in this world, who are unaware or just don’t care enough, that we live in systems in this world. Systems are created. And for those people who do resist, a problem comes up: the commodification and assimilation of resistance.
Writers such as Malvina Reynolds, understood this well, and sung against it. Her songs have been sung by Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and featured as a theme song for the hit television show “Weeds.” She sings to Americans and their easy willingness to think of themselves as “individuals” and “free” when in fact, there is so many brainwashing and levels of control. There are forces that control us—especially, the ways in which we think: the contours, the frames, the terminologies and “natural” ways in which we think we are in the world, are given to us by the cultures into which we are born. When we benefit from what is there, we rarely think of this as being brainwashed, being privileged, or being stupid. We think that we are “free.”
And often, when people speak and relate to each other, we think we are “free” individuals that are “freely” expressing “our” freedom. So-called.
Think about it people.
We develop.
We are grown in a culture or cultures.
We are grown in certain particular ways. When we say “human” and “humanity” — what is it are we referring to? Who has the power to speak for everyone?
And does our own morality become automatically better than others? And if ours is “better,” then what hierarchies are formed? What allows a person or group, community, institution, state or nation-state, to allow, to ignore, to make, to create, to change, to resist, to create that through which we work, play, relax, “have fun,” react, fight, cling, let go, hide from, jump into, speak against, speak for?
I also understand that those sensitive to democratic ideals, will understand what I mean here. Others could care less about democratic ideals. Those others only care about being right and above, looking down and being happy. Or ignoring and being “care free,” silently colluding with those who are happy with other’s downtrodden or less privileged, or suffering positions. It’s usually the individualists who often think that it’s “those others” who have brought on what they have brought on themselves. It is truly sad that those people who think this way, do not understand the contours and histories and development of such an “individualism.” And it’s made stronger by resources, beliefs, institutions and others who may reinforce and protect our ideology. Yes it’s an ideology. Whenever one is not willing to re-think the suffering of others, or our refusal to think, then we should question that thought as an ideology implanted in us.
Malvina Reynolds speaks to many of these problems. I include one of her songs, via video below, entitled: It Isn’t Nice.
I also include the lyrics to her song: It Isn’t Nice.
This song is particularly interesting to me, since it was BANNED IN JAPAN. It was banned only in the Japanese translation, but not in the English version. Hmmm….. and make no mistake, there were people arrested and jailed for singing and or passing this song around, in the Japanese language. Japan’s “peaceful” quality–which so many people I know believe in, hides the tremendous violence of suppression and bullying and marginalization that the so-called “civilized” countries practice. Japan is one of the most brutal. I am interested in this because I was born and partially raised there, and have Japanese background. This doesn’t mean I hate Japan. I love it, like I love the US. This doesn’t retract from the violences that the US perpetrates. And what I mean by “the US” doesn’t just refer to “those others” in governments or elsewhere.
I know that many people have barely heard of any political issues in Japan aside from the Atomic bomb of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pearl Harbor of 1941, or geishas and samurai and manga and anime. Japan has been a country built, as all other powerful nations (yes all), on suppression. Smoke and mirrors, violence and hidden truths. It is no secret. And hello– it is not “natural.” Those of us sitting on sidelines and just making it “natural” and therefore focused only on personal “success” and struggling to free oneself from something, have bought into this game and are just as much culprits as the elites who govern and make the contours and choices that we choose from and call “free.” But I am not “against” these material or capitalist freedoms. What I am against is that we spend too much time on these things at the cost of real freedoms and liberations, and democracy. Democracy has been founded on exclusion and violence. Democratic ideals are a constant struggle that we live every moment, everyday. Democratic systems and nations have been built on genocide and marginalization.
The system creates enemies within and without, in order to valorize it’s own system. The system itself, doesn’t care about people. It is created for itself to survive. A system is created by people who benefit from that system. Can you see it? The system is not out there, we live through it and with it. How can we make new systems while we live in our current ones? It must be. We can never be truly outside of it. Anyone who claims to be “outside” can claim this position if they, again, develop a colonizing, missionary-style mindset of “those people should follow us–we are right” kind of thinking. It is ugly and ultimately cold. There are those who are naive enough to think that everyone who joins “us” will be “good” and those others are “bad.” Does this sound familiar? This kind of thinking does not take diversity into account. It assumes that their own cultural and historical ways of thinking and ordering reality, is universal, cancelling out difference. In order to create new societies, there must be negotiation and dialogue and struggle together, with difference, not in spite of it.
Powerful countries, the media and educational systems and now the internet, play a large part in how we come to believe in “our” democracy, event though as a people and nation, it is no such thing. However, it becomes difficult because there are “democratic elements” in our societies. We have to recognize these democratic elements and learn how to nurture and fight for them.
Make no mistake, there are reasons why people would want to harm. They do not happen “by themselves.” Society—all of us, in whatever circumstances, culture or nation-state we live in, play parts—both as victim and as perpetrator, in our system. In order to now, deconstruct and re-evaluate, and re-think and respond in a changed way, acknowledging that it cannot be perfect but the path becomes slightly more clear, we must realize that it is a battle.
It’s not going to happen in safety, comfort, privilege, high morality, and laziness.
Please visit YouTube to listen and hear her other wonderfully playful but serious songs.
It Isn’t Nice
– by Malvina Reynolds
It isn’t nice to block the doorway,
It isn’t nice to go to jail,
There are nicer ways to do it,
But the nice ways always fail.
It isn’t nice, it isn’t nice,
You told us once, you told us twice,
But if that is Freedom’s price,
We don’t mind.
It isn’t nice to carry banners
Or to sit in on the floor,
Or to shout our cry of Freedom
At the hotel and the store.
It isn’t nice, it isn’t nice,
You told us once, you told us twice,
But if that is Freedom’s price,
We don’t mind.
We have tried negotiations
And the three-man picket line,1
Mr. Charlie2 didn’t see us
And he might as well be blind.
Now our new ways aren’t nice
When we deal with men of ice,
But if that is Freedom’s price,
We don’t mind.
How about those years of lynchings
And the shot in Evers’ back?
Did you say it wasn’t proper,
Did you stand upon the track?
You were quiet just like mice,
Now you say we aren’t nice,
And if that is Freedom’s price,
We don’t mind.
It isn’t nice to block the doorway,
It isn’t nice to go to jail,
There are nicer ways to do it
But the nice ways always fail.
It isn’t nice, it isn’t nice,
But thanks for your advice,
Cause if that is Freedom’s price,
We don’t mind.
The Song TEGAMI 手紙 (the Letter) was a huge sensation in Japan in 2007.
It was sung by Hapa White-Japanese singer Angela Aki, who sings in fluent Japanese and English in many of her recordings. The song Tegami, thrust Angela Aki into the limelight for its poignant and almost all-encompassing power to bring school children of junior and senior high schools across Japan in communicating its all-too-familiar message to encourage strength through alienation, loneliness, bullying, and the compulsory examination systems through which tremendous pressures are thrusted into the lives of the Japanese youth for its capitalist machinery. This song touched millions. It was also a social change, social consciousness project connected to money-making as well, let us not be mistakenly naive or purist.
In listening to the lyrics and the melody and emotion, it is clear that this song is moving and touches upon something deeply engrained, resisted, endured, and made to become something the youth of Japan (and other countries) must fight against with body and mind, in order to become something our global system of dominance deems “adult.”
It was written to encourage young teenagers in Japan, suffering from the pressures of society in those school years.
Masami Goto, of Japan National Public Broadcasting System — NHK, has this to say about this song (in 2007):
This year is the 75th anniversary of the NHK Schools Chorus Contest. We asked a popular singer-song-writer, Angela Aki, to write a compulsory song called Tegami (Letter) for the junior high school division. The song is based on a letter Angela Aki wrote as a senior high school student to her future self. A related project called Tegami starts in May, in which we ask junior high school students to send in their thoughts on this song and related personal anecdotes. Angela Aki visits junior high schools and interviews the pupils for a documentary feature that will be shown on General TV at 10:00 p.m. on May 9 and again in September. We have asked Naoki Award winning non-fiction writer Eto Mori to write lyrics for the compulsory song in the elementary school division, and an another author, Hiroyuki Itsuki, to do the same for the senior high school division.
Dear you,
Who’s reading this letter
Where are you and what are you doing now?
For me who’s 15 years old
There are seeds of worries I can’t tell anyone
If it’s a letter addressed to my future self,
Surely I can confide truly to myself
Now, it seems that I’m about to be defeated and cry
For someone who’s seemingly about to disappear
Whose words should I believe in?
This one-and-only heart has been broken so many times
In the midst of this pain, I live the present
Dear you,
Thank you
I have something to tell the 15-year-old you
If you continue asking what and where you should be going
You’ll be able to see the answer
The rough seas of youth may be tough
But row your boat of dreams on
Towards the shores of tomorrow
Now, please don’t be defeated and please don’t shed a tear
During these times when you’re seemingly about to disappear
Just believe in your own voice
For me as an adult, there are sleepless nights when I’m hurt
But I’m living the bittersweet present
There’s meaning to everything in life
So build your dreams without fear
Keep on believing
Seems like I’m about to be defeated and cry
For someone who’s seemingly about to disappear
Whose words should I believe in?
Please don’t be defeated and please don’t shed a tear
During these times when you’re seemingly about to disappear
Just believe in your own voice
No matter era we’re in
There’s no running away from sorrow
So show your smile, and go on living the present
Go on living the present
Dear you,
Who’s reading this letter
I wish you happiness
***********************************************
Romaji Lyrics TEGAMI
Haikei kono tegami yondeiru anata wa
Doko de nani wo shiteiru no darou
Juugo no boku ni wa dare ni mo hanasenai
Nayami no kanae ga aru no desu
Mirai no jibun ni atete kaku tegami nara
Kitto sunao ni uchiake rareru darou
Ima makesou de nakisou de
Kieteshimaisou na boku wa
Dare no kotoba wo
Shinji arukeba ii no?
Hitotsu shika nai kono mune ga nando mo barabara ni warete
Kurushii naka de ima wo ikiteiru
Ima wo ikiteiru
Haikei arigatou juugo no anata ni
Tsutaetai koto ga aru no desu
Jibun to wa nani de doko e mukau beki ka
Toitsu dzukereeba mietekuru
Areta seishun no umi wa kibishii keredo
Asu no kishibe e to yume no fune yo susume
Ima makenai de nakanai de
Kieteshimaisou na toki wa
Jibun no koe wo shinjiaru keba ii no?
Otona no boku mo kizutsuite
Nemurenai yoru wa aru kedo
Nigakute amai ima ikiteiru
Jinsei no subete ni imi ga aru kara
Osorezu ni anata no yume wo sodatete
La la la, la la la
Keep on believing
La la la, la la la,
Keep on believing, keep on believing, keep on believing
Makesou de nakisou de
Kieteshimaisou boku wa
Dare no kotoba wo shinji arukeba ii no?
Aa Makenaii de nakanai de
Kieteshimaisou na toki wa
Jibun no koe wo shinjiarukeba ii no
Itsu no jidai mo kanashimi mo
Sakete wa torenai keredo
Egao wo misete ima wo ikite yukou
Ima wo ikite yukou
Haikei kono tegami yondeiru anata ga
Shiawase na koto wo negaimasu
..............
AI NO KO 