A Beijing-based music and gig review blog

I’d read about this doc­u­men­tary a while ago, when I was fill­ing in the gig guide for Decem­ber, but some­how the whole event and the date had just fallen out of my head. So when I was dig­ging around for the gig of the week last week, I was glad to find that I hadn’t missed it! While my soul will always be with China, I will admit to pieces of my heart being stolen by Japan over the last year or so, and this doc­u­men­tary marked my first foray into some­thing other than Japan­ese dra­mas and pop music. (I know, I know. I’m embar­rassed. You don’t need to say anything.)

Check out the trailer on MySpace Videos:

Unfor­tu­nately, I can’t con­nect to the main web­site for the doc­u­men­tary with­out a proxy at the moment (I was able to last week; go fig­ure), but the Douban event links to this spec­tac­u­lar arti­cle in Japan Today about it. The doc­u­men­tary, directed by Kevin Mcgue, was funded by the Japan Foun­da­tion, a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion that puts together cul­tural exchange pro­grams for and with Japan. While the title sug­gests that it’s about the his­tory of the Live House — a pecu­liarly Japan­ese phe­nom­e­non — it’s really the story of a hand­ful of spir­ited young Japan­ese punk bands. Through inter­views and live footage, it really feels like a slice-of-life story of these groups more than a story of the venues they live, breathe, and excites them­selves in.

The film was really inter­est­ing on a lot of lev­els, but I enjoyed it because while I have com­pleted the Japan­ese Pop Cul­ture 101 course in life, this was a stone unturned though dear to my heart in other cul­tures. I know roughly how the indie/underground/local act music scene works in Beijing/Shanghai, and my home coun­try of Aus­tralia, but this was some­thing I’d never even thought about before. And while how the whole scene was con­structed was very much a prod­uct of the Japan I was already aware of, it showed a new and very pas­sion­ate side to the Japan­ese youth most West­ern­ers get to hear about. These weren’t otakus obsessed with col­lect­ing manga fig­urines, they weren’t the super-polished boy– and girl-bands, and they weren’t con­tes­tants on ridicu­lous Japan­ese game shows. These were a group of punk rock­ers, fight­ing to make a liv­ing doing the thing they loved and what made them happy. It’s a story that’s famil­iar in any lan­guage, but one that had a def­i­nite Japan­ese fla­vor to it.

Things that I found most inter­est­ing:
– The method of rent­ing out the live house: bands rent the live house area, and have to make a cer­tain amount of ticket sales. If they don’t meet the quota, they have to pay the owner for the unsold tick­ets.
– While I know that most indie/local bands hold down day jobs while they gig around, a com­mon thread between the groups was that, while the band was always first, Mon­day to Fri­day they were com­pletely loyal to their day jobs.
– The girl groups’ self-awareness of how their gen­der set them apart; though the con­sen­sus was that things were get­ting bet­ter in terms of peo­ple not tak­ing them seri­ously, the con­cern was also raised that audi­ences and other bands alike saw them as a nov­elty — as sex objects or some­thing to see as a bit of a laugh.
– The “grand­mother” of con­cert pho­tog­ra­phy, Hiroko Mat­sushita, who was invited to a gig in her youth and has now been tak­ing pho­tos at con­certs for most of her life. She was a typ­i­cal mother-type on screen, but she’s praised by the bands as the best con­cert pho­tog­ra­pher around.

After the doc­u­men­tary screen­ing (which was not with­out its typ­i­cal D-22 issues; the audio was out of sync by at least three sec­onds the entire way through), a few local Bei­jing bands stepped up to the plate. I stuck around to catch pacalolo and Trash Cat, both of whom per­formed well. I enjoyed pacalolo’s per­for­mance, mostly because they incor­po­rated some great video effects in with their music, which was a nice segue. I didn’t stick around through Trash Cat, mostly because their music was not what I was look­ing for (aver­age punk stuck out like a sore thumb after the shock of the new in the doc­u­men­tary), and it was near­ing my nanny-hour bedtime.