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P/SUNNY
Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s private disco featured not only aspiring showgirls performing striptease acts as sexy nuns and nurses, but one woman dressed up as President Barack Obama and a prominent Milan prosecutor whom the billionaire media mogul has accused of persecuting him, ...
Tonkatsu is comfort food, gourmand grub — not a gourmet delicacy. So what are those hearty, unpretentious deep-fried breaded pork cutlets doing in an elegant little bar-style restaurant above one of Ginza’s temples to high-end consumption? Katsuzen has come a long way from its ...
Life in Japan just seems tailor-made for certain foreign residents, who slip into the fabric of this society as smoothly as a hand slides into a glove. American Curtis Patterson, a professional koto player and music teacher, is a case in point. Not only ...
It is a tricky deal being an authorized biographer. Charles Moore’s big advantage over those who have previously tackled Margaret Thatcher is that he has been provided with material denied to them. Of the arrangement that he was offered by his subject, he writes: ...
Unbelievable energy. Splendid self confidence. Never-wavering faith in his abilities or his teammates. Those are ingredients to success for Draelon Burns, the Yokohama B-Corsairs’ super substitute. Burns buried a remarkable three buzzer-beating shots to close out the three final quarters, and his team needed ...
Chan Marshall sits in her record company’s office toying with a partially eaten apple. It is a fitting symbol. In Tokyo to promote her new album under the Cat Power moniker, “You Are Free,” Marshall (first name pronounced Shawn) is dealing with her own ...
Only a few years ago, Japanese music was the hype. At South by Southwest, the tony annual music confab, consecutive years saw Cornelius, Number Girl and Ex-Girl wow audiences. Rolling Stone ran a feature on upcoming Japanese bands like The Zoobombs, Takako Minekawa and ...
What is the difference between a track and a song? To the average listener, nothing — the terms are often used interchangeably. But for music freaks — DJs, producers, obsessive fans and critics — the distinction is somewhat clearer. A song is organized, structured ...
To describe the dizzy thrill of Sleater-Kinney, one has to reach back to the bristling energy of early rock ‘n’ roll. Think of Chuck Berry cackling the words to “Maybelline.” Think of Wanda Jackson’s redemptive howl. Think of Muddy Waters’ deliberate spelling of “M-A-N,” ...
Little Creatures’ 12-year career is a catalog of restless musical curiosity. Though their first moody releases were vaguely trip hop, their subsequent work defies categorization. Recent releases have touched on drum ‘n’ bass and jazzy Tortoise-like turns. ,fusing traditional instruments and electronics into heartfelt, ...
Quality control is something few recording artists manage gracefully. What back catalog doesn’t contain its share of half-realized (or half-baked) ideas or downright duds? Avant-garde musicians, with their preference for music’s lawless outer fringes, are often the worst offenders: producing masturbation masquerading as music. ...
Arto Lindsay steps onto the stage. In his late 40s, he still retains the gawkiness of an adolescent boy, all long arms and legs. The image of a geek is completed by large horn-rimmed glasses and a pale complexion. But as Lindsay and his ...
DJs tend to fall into two irreconcilable categories: those who garner glowing accolades from faux intellectuals who don’t dance — and those who pack dance floors with throbbing, heated bodies. Few DJs bridge this body/mind dichotomy as well as the London-based Scottish DJ and ...
As the torpor of summer dissipates into autumn’s more tolerable temperatures, the music scene moves from the beaches of Shonan and the foothills of Fuji back into its dark and dank urban recesses. Tokyo’s music scene continues to be fractured. The only trend is ...
Postmodern hijinks have become such a staple of contemporary pop music that genre bending and blending are hardly news anymore. What artist hasn’t ransacked the back catalog of some long-lost funk or soul label, or lifted grooves from obscure jazz hepcats or, for the ...
The last time Matthew Herbert performed in Tokyo, among his instruments were a bag of Big Macs, a pair of Gap jeans and a television set. For each piece, Herbert took one of these symbols of consumer capitalism and demolished it. The sounds of ...
Hip-hop commentators talk a lot about roots: about old school roots and neighborhood roots and ultimately roots in Africa. Though hip-hop has flourished in Japan, much of it is distinctly rootless, imitating the goofy antics of The Beastie Boys or the street-savvy poses of ...