yeah I appreciate the meaning but I'm worried about that crab too
@“AlecS”#p86640
@"AlecS"#p86640 I love everything about this post (sorry people, for gushing). That link between the 70s and 80s band, Bill Bruford is my raison d'etre. So good. But yeah, Tony Levin on bass and Belew on guitar and singing... amazing, amazing stuff. Tony Levin on the Chapman stick is also fun to listen to.
My wife (girlfriend at the time) won a contest to be on a Guster album. The day she hung out with the band, Tony Levin was there playing bass for one of their songs. I'm not a fan of Guster, but I was jealous when she had dinner with some old bald guy who played bass with weird things on his fingers.
@“saddleblasters”#p86647 Thank you so much for the list. I‘m no longer young and hip, so I’m out of the loop of darn near everything but major league baseball. The only Japanese band I know is Melt-Banana, and that‘s because I looked up every band that’s ever toured with The National. I've listened to their stuff for maybe two or three weeks.
I currently enjoy manga and anime, but someone posted earlier that a newbie to certain types of art can't often tell the good stuff from the trash, and I think that describes me pretty well.
Side story: what set me apart from other kids in the 80s was an overnight summer camp at a college. I was in 4th grade and picked up a copy of Monsters magazine in the college bookstore because Godzilla was on the cover, and inside had an article about Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira and the anime making its way to Boston and New York City.
I couldn't go full blown Japanese because there was no way to. Epic Comics reprinted colorized, westernized, horribly translated Akira, and Blockbuster would eventually get the occasional anime. That's all I had.
But your original post opened up a wound long forgotten about. My best friend gave me so much crap in middle school over my love of Akira, but in high school used his "love of Akira" to make ins with the counter-culture cool kids.
This is why I think you should just ignore what your friends sling at you. They might use the same popular culture they give you crap for now as a means to impress others in the future.
Edit: Woah. I just came across the part in Tim Rogers's boku no natsuyasumi review where he mentions the same Akira/Blockbuster experience.
I‘ve thought about this kind of thing before - my family used to accuse me of this, and I think at one point it was kind of true that I liked things more if they were japanese - but it was more that Japanese things were the foreign things I could get access to, and where there was a glut of media to consume. I’m a fan of foreign media across the board - I like stuff that‘s different from what I saw and heard growing up, because I’ve seen a lot of that already.
I think it's likely that a lot of us older folks had a moment where we saw an onigiri in a video game being called a hamburger or a donut or whatever, and we were like... what is that thing!? Which started a journey of discovery. I often cite the japanese telephone box from Bravoman as kind of opening my eyes to investigate this stuff more: https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/418596076854050816
You walk up to this thing as an american and you're like what is that!? Then you hit it and it says not just telephone box, japanese telephone box. It indicates to you that this curious object is normal somewhere else. That made me realize that games were FROM certain places.
I was already watching Chinese movies on the local channel though, and watching german opera on PBS, and in highschool was reading cervantes, so before I knew it I was just a fan of cultural difference and nuance in general. I think I had a leaning toward Japan and Hong Kong specifically for some time, and I can't deny that I prefer this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuv-wkCnr8s
to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIhSnaqou0I
even though they're nearly identical. I did hear Joey Yung's version first, and that's a big factor, but there's still stuff to unpack.
I think for me not being able to understand the lyrics, or at least being able to turn off the part of my brain that does, helps me a lot with music in general. I think that being able to attribute certain unfortunate elements of movies to cultural difference helps me watch movies that otherwise I'd have to turn off (for better or worse).
But ultimately I was just a fan of "different" cultural in general. I was always listening to/watching obscure american stuff alongside the less obscure, but obscure in america, foreign stuff.
Like this band was super popular in Czechoslovakia, from what is now Slovakia. The music, the surroundings, the fashion, the grocery stores, the cars! It all makes me want to know more about the place. I love it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLDlKhAcuHo
I think americans and brits especially grow up knowing for sure that their country is the only real one. Little glimpses like this into other countries being real can be mind-blowing for a young person, and we can sometimes go too far into liking stuff that's "not from here" when we start to realize other places exist and are cool. People in other countries do this to us as well! Miyabe, from the podcast, loves basic-ass British stuff like Sherlock and will pause and rewind it to write the phrases down!
So me, if I saw this and a bunch of Czech cartoons as a kid instead of Sailor Moon and X Japan, how much would that have altered my path? Would I be a big fan of Eastern Europe?
But I guess that's the thing - I am! Look at these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMP1-bAT2rk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5hXkdO9os4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCLhkHVgZ60
And I also think that things have looped around for me, because without taking the jpop->kpop pipeline there's no way I could come round to liking this song by carli rae jepson, which actually hits a lot of those beats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV9sNmujCPk
like for real can you just imagine Yuna singing this in FFX-2, yes you can. (this is legit the one AMV I want to make) Would I like it more if it were Japanese? Probably not actually! I think I've rounded the bend on that.
Anyhoo. I think as long as we're always learning and always looking it's okay to prefer some things over others, and they will all kind of inform each other, and expand our appreciation of things in general. Liking stuff is cool!
(sorry so many of those videos have to be clicked through on youtube lol)
I‘d probably like a lot of American cars more if they were Japanese. Of course the cars would probably be very different, but the idea of a powerful, RWD car for cheap is very appealing.
In NZ, american cars are probably the most expensive, as Japan and Britian dump thier old cars here creating high supply which drives down prices for these markets. The cheapest mustang on sale is $13,500 (2003, 130k KM) where I can get a similar age BMW 3 series for a 1/4 of the price. I’m not sure what a Japan comparison would be; RX8's used to be pretty cheap before covid. It makes car discussion online pretty boring to read as the internet is so USA dominant.
I watched a lot of anime in my teens, a lot of that was pretty bad. What initially drew me to it was the animation, I felt too old for cartoons, and most shows on TV bored me. It was also extremely easy to watch, crunchyroll wasn't really a thing yet so there were a lot of sites like gogoanime, without too many ads and massive libraries. It was easier than streaming TV too, Netflix wasn't a thing here yet either.
I don't watch much anymore and I somewhat regret wasting so much time watching so much trash. Although there are some which I still genuinely like and probably wouldn't have tried or found if I wasn't binging it all (anyone watch Flip Flappers?). If someone tells me I should watch X anime l'm much more likely to give it a try than if someone tells me I should watch X tv show. That could just be down to average episode run times though.
This is something I‘ve thought about a lot, and my answer is maybe(?).
Sometimes I like some Japanese music that’s in a genre I don‘t particularly care for too much. I really like Ellegarden but I tend to not care for most pop-punk, is it because they’re Japanese? Idk man.
No Buses is really cool, but I recognize they sound fairly similar to a lot of indie-pop that I usually don‘t care for. Sometimes I think it’s because I can‘t understand the lyrics so I can’t feel second-hand embarrassment from them or something.
In conclusion, I DUNNO, but I sure do like some stuff and I sure don't like some other stuff.
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@“SU2MM”#p86668 I guess a simple example is that a lot of of manga, anime and even live-action Japanese TV contains exaggerated gestures, speech patterns etc. and people definitely do not behave like that in real life in Japan. However, these exaggerations are sometimes based on mannerisms that I do observe in real life and the suggestion they have absolutely nothing to do with real Japanese people is often overstating the case a little, in my opinion.
Very interesting point to bring up, and very evocative in terms of substantiating your point!
I'd add on to that as well that even if we control for them being exaggerated, it's still quite obvious not only that they're based on some observable behavioural/gestural difference, but that they are indeed cultural signifiers that aren't universal. Maybe they aren't necessarily strictly only Japanese, they're definitely something powerfully perceivable as different if they aren't also a part of your culture.
I ended up talking to myself a lot so I tucked that big long post into bed!! It's less dour than the other one
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Non verbal communication is absolutely culturally inherited and is as diverse and prominent as linguistic dialects themselves, and it‘s a fascinating thing to think about… Speaking from an indigenous perspective, there is lip pointing, which isn’t unique to indigenous people here from a global context but certainly didn't come from Europeans. Same with cultural standards for maintaining eye contact in conversation–I
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What this passage made me think of in particular is a pet theory I have on why Final Fantasy X in particular is so often thought of by English speakers as having awkward and cringe inducing voice acting. I was really thinking about that a lot when I was replaying it a handful of years back, when it was remastered and packaged with X-2 (also yeah I know I have brought this up before if not multiple times but I will defend FFX with my life, so just skip to the next paragraph if you know what I‘m about to say…and, you know, I try to write posts like this as if people on this forum aren't familiar with me or anything I mean to talk about which is often why I end up being so verbose I think). I do think part of the problem is just that translation between most languages is going to produce lots of incompatibilities with regards to people’s gums flappin‘ around to express one thing in one language, and then needing to match both the meaning and the length of the gum flappin’ when dubbing. This explains why, for instance, the performance in the English dub for Auron is perhaps the most consistently good one, considering his collar is usually covering his entire mouth… no need to time things precisely to gum flaps. It‘s almost uncanny how consistently Auron’s lines sound rushed or unnatural when it‘s because the scene is using his face articulated cutscene model and the camera peeks up above his collar. Tidus and Yuna’s voice actors had the hardest job considering how much the camera is going to be pointed directly at their faces, not to mention how they‘re going to get the most time rendered in their face articulated cutscene models rather than their simplified field ones. Yet at the same time, Tidus’ off-camera narration is really quite expressive and gives the character of Tidus a pretty wide dramatic range overall.
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Why I thought of this in particular in response to what you wrote @SU2MM, is that even more so than the clipped or unnatural cramming of phrases into too short of a gum flap, I feel like perhaps an even more prominent reason for why FFX gets this bad rap in the English speaking world is the nigh cognitive dissonance caused from hearing English, but seeing those very Japanese (if exaggerated (or at the very least definitely not American or European)) gestures and body language. This was of course inevitable, given that localization can only go so far before you would just be shipping a different version of the game entirely for different regions and with region specific mo-capping, but still. Dubbing is already hard enough with sayin‘ stuff taking longer or shorter depending on the language, but then the metre of speech and the placement of stress on individual words, and the meaning of those words being accentuated with non verbal communication like gestures, that are also being exaggerated already… Ignoring the financial differences it really would just be easier to just do regional mo-capping rather than try to translate text, grammar, metre, and gestural communication… you gotta feel for Hedy Burress in particular given how culturally rooted Yuna’s character concept and design is to begin with, and how much her gestures reflect that, so she's bowing like an apprentice shrine maiden, and covering her mouth way more than any westerner ever would, and doing polite corpo-kawaii flight attendant hands all over the place… it's even more noticeable in the FMV cutscenes! Thank you for demonstrating so well, Sung Won.
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Even moreso evocative of this weird phenomenon than FFX, is a much, much later game in the same series: Final Fantasy VII Remake, especially considering, using the wonders of modern technology, the facial animations of the dubs are procedurally generated to match the localized voice acting (which I still feel in awe of), but of course, it likely is not yet possible or practical to do the same with the mo-capping, and so that same incongruity from just under 20 years prior remains. It feels like it‘s most noticeable when it comes to Aerith… the way she seems to put stress on sentences and words with those adorable littleaegyo was…
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Anyway, yeah, not necessarily that @SU2MM's statement about mannerisms and gestures needed evidence, but I think the truth of this is evident in just how much visual and audio incongruity is caused from hearing (perhaps exaggerated, but still) English and seeing (perhaps exaggerated, but still) Japanese mannerisms and body language. It would probably look a lot more “natural,” for lack of a better term, for exaggerated English voice acting to be matched with exaggerated or even cartoonish Western/American/whatever mannerisms and body language.
@“exodus”#p86753 I love your take on this. Everybody's got their something.
Growing up, I couldn't verbalize it, but I hated how awful the people around me treated one another. I hated how I was treated. I also hated that I, for the most part, didn't have anyone or anything to relate to. I think that's why when I discovered entertainment enjoyed by the few friends I had, I'd obsessed over it. For instance, a friend would like Chicago or Frank Zappa. They'd have an album or two, but I'd get it in my brain that I had to collect EVERYTHING. I'm sure I got really annoying. But it's also why I was drawn to what Blockbuster dubbed "foreign films." Those movies were safe places for me, because they weren't loved or understood by anyone else I knew, but I knew there was something special about them, because while they were different, someone thought they were important enough to be shared overseas.
This is the exact energy that I bring when I go anywhere, any time. Adding this context to american traffic and riding bikes through it.
(context: the 99% of the time I’m on my bicycle daily in venice/santa monica)
Unfortunately I would not necessarily blast this on my bicycle unless I was in the right setting & company, because blasting Japanese music like this is embarrassing.
Wasn’t sure of a thread to put this, but this will do cause this is the fantasy I’m living.
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Hah! Good one. I like the cut of my jib.