"How Noisy! That Woman is Impossible!" (Shiina Ringo - II)

I'm not going to be able to adequately describe how amazing this stuff is.

I've been listening to Shiina Ringo.  Incessantly, obsessively.  A lot.  And barely feel qualified to say anything but "Listen to this!  Listen to this RIGHT NOW."  There's great temptation to devolve into hyperbolic bloggasm; just ask the TimeAsia journalist who compared her third album to Sgt. Pepper's and OK Computer.  So before I get around to embarrassing myself, and possibly confusing all of you, let's get you situated:

For these three entries I've uploaded a good chunk of Shiina mp3s, and strongly encourage you to skip through and download them all.  (And do it now, because these will all be available for a very limited time.)  Avoid the blather, enjoy the music.

I wouldn't normally post so many songs, but: (a) they're selections from across her catalog; (b) her recordings aren't available domestically, and it takes a little more honey to justify your import dollar; and (c) this doesn't come close to exhausting her quality material.  Every track that queues up is my new favorite.  It's almost all good, and it all gets better the more you listen.  I know this sounds too good to be true.  But sometimes something comes along that keeps you believing.

Most of this stuff isn't new.  She's been a superstar in Japan since her first singles were released in 1998 and has been acknowledged as an artistic force there for just about as long.  That's a decade's worth of work, and while she has a devoted cult following on this side of the Pacific I haven't seen any evidence of U.S. media coverage.  As I said last time, I understand the prejudices.  I don't give a damn.  Her name should be everywhere.  It's been a long time since I've heard anything as exciting as Shiina's 2003 album Karuki Zamen Kuri no Hana.  I'm furious that it took four years and a random recommendation to get this into my headphones.

I can't wait for everyone else to be get as excited and angry as I am.

So listen to this!  Listen to this a lot.  If you're thinking "Ewww, I don't like JPop," know that calling Shiina Ringo just another Japanese Pop singer is like calling Radiohead just another Brit band fiddling around with keyboards.

*

Kids can be so cruel:

Hurts, don't it?  That's a sixteen(?)-year-old Ringo, singing Danielle Brisebois' "Just Missed the Train" at the 1995 Yamaha Teens' Music Festival,  You can hear Kelly Clarkson cover that same song on Ms. Brisebois' site, if you're so inclined.

Now:  Imagine a world where Kelly Clarkson became an inventive-but-still-popular musician, a world where she took a release called Jism! Jism! Jism! triple-platinum.

It can be frustrating looking for Ringo info online.  The spelling of her name varies (Shiina/Shéna/Sheena Ringo/Ringö/Rinngo... and of course, in the West it's "Ringo Shiina").  Everything in English is on a Wiki or a fan site - thank God for those, by the way - so there are contradictions and awkward translations and odd areas of focus.  I know, for instance, her blood type (O) and her favorite kind of beans (Azuki).  That she came from "a musical family" (though one that seems to have had no professional musicians (beyond a slightly older brother)), that she started taking piano lessons at age four (or, perhaps, five), that she studied for a short time in London, that she was in several bands (or, at least, one) during her teen years.

I don't know when she learned to play guitar and drums, or what happened to "Marvelous Marble," or if that band ever performed any original material.  But a year after the nationally televised performance on the video above, Shiina won "an award for excellence" at something called the "Music Quest Competition" with the song that, two years later, would become her first hit single.

Shiina Ringo - Koko de Kiss Shite (Kiss Me Here) (mp3) (buy album) (1/20/99)

The delivery's very Alanis, and "Koko" sort of marries "You Oughta Know" with the Kashmirishness of "Uninvited."  Shiina had, from her earliest singles, strong alt-rock tendencies.  But one of the reasons I made you sit through that Marble video was to establish that she has always been a pop musician.

And we're not there, yet, but I think this is what makes Shiina Ringo such an amazing artist:  She's absolutely able to express herself through The Pop Song.  No matter how aggressively creative she gets, no matter how singularly, sonically weird she might be, she's devoted to The Song.  She might crawl in and start banging away at it, or stuff it so full that it bloats, buckles.  But the center holds.  Curveballs and cutaways:  Tempos change, instruments - electronic, orchestral, whatchoogot - appear and dis-.  All additions, no distractions.  Everything's convincing, organic.  There's never a devolution into masturbatory prog, psychedelic mush or lyrical morass.

It helps that her melodies have the pull of a white dwarf star.  "Koko's" chorus has now been carved into the walls of your hippocampus.  You're welcome.

That single is basically a ballad... but this time Shiina's not going to let that happen.  The vocals on the chorus, right from the a cappella opening, are nasal with a capital Ehnnngh; the harmonies don't complement so much as reverberate.  She ain't asking, she's telling.  And demanding not only affection, but fidelity; at the end of the first verse, her voice raises up and tightens around a line which translates as "I'm the only one who can put a modern day Sid Vicious in handcuffs."  Behind her, the music chop-chop-chops away at the smoov bassline and string cushion.  The beat bobs-and-weaves (and actually disappears for two-thirds of a phrase), a guitar part goes from wucka-chucka fills to a solo that sounds like it's played with a fork.  Even during the soothing bridge, before the song bursts back into English, each little synth swell gets summarily cut off. 

Have you ever heard a ballad where the word "Baby" was so jarring?  (Not annoying, jarring.)

*

(For contrast, here's video of singer/actress Tomosaka Rie doing a Shiina medley which includes "Koko."  Yikes.)

*

Shiina Ringo - Koufukuron (single version)(mp3) (buy single) (5/27/98)

Shiina Ringo - Koufukuron - Etsuraku hen ("Pleasure version")(mp3) (buy album) (2/24/99)

The restless creativity that drives Shiina Ringo to push her pop in interesting directions also forces her to evolve quickly, to reevaluate her work constantly.

"Koufukuron," Shiina's first official single, was welcomed with a shrug.  It's a relatively busy piece of work, what with its little reggae backbeat, its disco strings, its chimes and toy piano.  As bouncy and silly as something titled "Theory of Happiness" might suggest. The formal beat and smiling, stiff vocals make the song feel like a coordinated recreational activity.

By the time she'd re-recorded it for her first full-length, Muzai Moratorium (1999), Shiina had developed a different idea of fun.  She assaults the song, leaves it for dead.  Fuck the arrangement.  This song - which has selfless lyrics like "You're there living your life and just knowing this simple little fact makes me so happy" - really needs its ass kicked.  Shiina pukes all over it, howling, hissing, coughing(!).  Pushing that needle deep.  Nine months earlier she was a slave to this beat; now she's racing ahead of her drummer, screaming at him to catch up.

*

The half-Japanese album title translates to "Innocence Moratorium." This person suggests a celebration/defense of the generation described in Okonogi Keigo's The Era of the Moratorium People, a generation unwilling/unable to move beyond the Erik Erikson-proposed stage of psychological development wherein teens withdraw from responsibility and reassess their identity through experimentation.  (Shiina's explanation of the album title suggests a nostalgia for her own naïveté... at the age of twenty.)

It's a helpful observation that not only supports Shiina's perpetual self-reevaluation, but explains the connect Moratorium made with the Japanese public:  The record spent 79 weeks on the charts and sold almost 1.5 million copies.  Filled with girl-figuring-out-the-world/girl-angry-at-the-world lyrics, that first album's more directly derivative and less interesting than what followed - but it's still a satisfying and surprising piece of work.

That TimeAsia article applauds Shiina for breaking with the "prim and practically virginal" standard-issue JPop princess - and if you listen to those two versions of "Koufukuron" it sounds like the break occurred somewhere in-between.  I find it difficult to believe that, in 1999, every Japanese pop singer was 100% Shinyhappypeople.  (Or sexless:  Just take a quick glance at the video for a song Shiina wrote for friend Tomosaka Rie.  Seriously?  Glowing stripper poles?)  In contrast to Western mores, Ringo's "raunchiness" often comes off as fantasy-role playtime.  But she is listed in the credits as Shiina "Sadist" Ringo, she does drop a line about messing around with handcuffs, another about how her amplifier gets her off.  She poses a hard-hearted song about being a second-generation prostitute ("Kabuki-chou no Joou" (watch video), in which she sings "I'm selling only myself as I become a woman.  I will lose everything when I want for sympathy)."

Over here, where we're letting latch-key toddlers ogle Beyoncé/Shakira wet t-shirt contests, the sight of a sexy nurse straddling and licking patients might not retain its kick...

(God, I love it when she plays air drums.)

...but in Japan the "Honnou" ("Instinct") video was iconic enough that the costumes carried over to promotional appearances. 

Attitude's nice, direction is better:  "Honnou" was the lead-off single for her second album, Shoso Strip (2000), and, y'know, *bam.*  Strip (the title apparently works out to "being so excited about winning something that you take off all your clothes in jubilation" -shouldn't that happen more often?) is a light year jump ahead in terms of confidence.  It rocks solid, it more successfully integrates her eccentricities.  Also, Shiina her diaphragm reinforced:

Shiina Ringo - Tsumi to Batsu (Crime and Punishment) (mp3) (buy) (1/26/00)

A showstopper, that's what that is!  A dirty gawrldang house-downer, a big band barn-burner.  If I was you, I'd demand to see my insurance representative immediately.

In what's rarely a successful approach in songs like this, the production carves no room for her vocals.  She's allowed to establish herself, then has to fight to keep her ground.  She totally wins.  You could complain that the song spends too much time at 11, but I wouldn't be able to hear you.  Love those slurs, those trills.

The Japanese buying public apparently preferred a ballad:  "Tsumi" was released on the same day as "Gibusu"("Plaster Cast") (its video weirdly pilfers from "Heart-Shaped Box"); they opened at #4 and #3, respectively, on the singles chart.  Strip popped out at the top of the albums chart, went on to sell 2.3 million copies.

If Moratorium had a fondness for figuring things out, the more assured Strip settles for questions.  While the red, white and blue-draped video for "Identity" (watch) concretely sets up a conflict - Shiina, splits time as cowgirl and geisha, gets dragged around helplessly - the lyrics are hardly political.  "Where should I go?  Can I trust you?  Will you love me?  Just who am I?  It's just that I'm scared and there's nothing I can do about it."

The record starts with a track called "Kyogenshou" (Compulsive Lying Disorder), ends with "Izonshou" (Substance Abuse Disorder).  You can't handle the truth!  This is from "Benkai Debussy" (Excuse for Debussy):

Getting tired of trying to think of what to say, so I just spew out a bunch of bullshit...

In reality it's all important

In reality, it's probably all rubbish

In reality, it's all the truth

In reality, it's probably all just a trick

Feel free to start/stop taking her at her words.  Translations are great, but one of the benefits of listening to someone sing with a foreign tongue is that you get to experience language in all its phonetic glory.  Gone are the distractions of logic and literal disinclination (when she switches to English, the phrasing is awkward, etc.).  Shiina Ringo speaks Music, and does so with such eloquence that you're going to get it.

Trick:  Shiina seems to dissuade even her Japanese listeners from scarfing down her lyrics.  She jumps between languages, she uses obscure/obsolete kanji on her track listings and lyric sheets.  (I love this note:  "Track three... [is] written strangely with random characters. However, according to the insert, the title is also known as '喪 興瑠怒 (ソー コールド)', which is a transliteration of 'So Cold' in English. The single is sometimes accidentally Romanized as "Mo Kyouryuudo"; which would translate to 'Also Dinosaur Moderation', which does not make much sense.")

Truth:  Shiina is an obsessive artist who inspires an obsessiveness in her fans.  Part of her self-mythology is a fascination with symmetry (this takes a bizarre physical turn, later).  Starting with Strip, the number of characters in the track listings mirror themselves around a central track.   On her masterpiece, the 44-minute, 44-second-long Karuki Zamen Kuri no Hana, parallels get Lincoln-Kennedy ridiculous.  However, this game playing never gets in the way of the music, and there's absolutely no need to appreciate this - the same way you can easily enjoy Lost (well...) without delving into its numerological gobbledygook.  At the very least, it's a reminder that this instantly enjoyable pop music is involved, crafted, controlled.

*

You say I betray you

That I'm always changing

When all I really do

Is not stay true to your illusions

Shiina Ringo - ∑ (Sigma) (mp3) (buy Gibusu single) (1/26/00)

An infatuation with her lyrics and characters may be give-or-take; a mania with her music is not.  It might be typical of the JPop industry to saturate the market with product from a hot artist; I doubt it's typically all good.  Shiina's B-sides and live recordings (there were four official live Shiina DVDs by 2003) can be as satisfying as her album work.  Even her teen demos are listenable.

"∑" was a B-Side to the easy-on-the-ears ballad "Gibusu."  Shiina wants "simple peace," starts a fucking war.  And it's fucking hot.  Thrown down in English, an iffy rap-rock beginning is pushed forward by a relentless guitar riff, a rat-a-tat chorus, electronic and turntable infantry.  I love how the C+C Music Factory sample is abruptly cut off, like someone thought better of it.

There's even material Shiina gave to other artists. 

"Shoujo Robot" (Female Robot) (6/1/2000):

Shiina wrote and produced, perfectly using/offsetting Tomosaka Rie's lifeless, anemic voice by giving the clockwonk machinery of the song lots of fuzzy character.  Hide yr oil can.

How fanatic does her audience get for material?  They bought almost half a million copies of a boxed collection of three singles, pushing it to the top of the album charts.  The first and third discs of Zecchoushuu (or Ze-Chyou Syuu, or ZCS, or Climax Collection) were live recordings with different backing bands.  Eight of the nine songs in the box were originals, two of those would be reworked for later releases.

As this has gotten longer than I'd intended (oh, surprise), let's finish up in another entry.  Say, Thursday? (Sorry, guys.  Stuff came up.  Shooting for Saturday.  It's coming, it's coming...) For now, I leave you with one of those reconceived ZCS songs: 

"Yattsuke Shigato" goes from harried, headbanging momentum to the hum (and harpsichord?) of carefully managed, fully orchestrated metropolitan busywork.

Shiina Ringo - Yattsuke Shigato (A Damned Job) (Live, ZCS) (mp3) (buy) (9/13/00)

Shiina Ringo - Yattsuke Shigato (A Damned Job) (Studio, KZK) (mp3) (buy) (2/23/2003)

Next time, jism and jazz hands:  Shiina Ringo's best album, and her newest.  Plus sources and links and whatnot.

Who doesn't love whatnot?!  See you soon.

GO TO PART ONE

tags: shiina ringo  ringo shiina  tokyo jihen  jpop  jrock  japanese rock  japanese pop  shena rinngo  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    reddit