At Liquidroom last Friday night, clubbers attending the Red Bull Music Academy Tokyo closing party formed an orderly mob outside the venue as they waited for upward of half an hour to get inside. Only on reaching the head of the queue did it become clear that the bottleneck wasn't being caused by a surfeit of paying customers but by people on the guest list, a sprawling document that looked only slightly shorter than the "Bhagavad Gita."
It was a familiar scene during RBMA Tokyo's month of creative hothousing, hobnobbing and corporate profligacy. Much of the academy's most important work took place behind closed doors, where this year's 59 participants collaborated with each other in recording studios, shared meals in a lounge festooned with contemporary Japanese art, and soaked up lectures by artists ranging from Richie Hawtin to Haruomi Hosono. But for the public, it was judged on the merits of the gigs, parties and other events that took place during its run.
Let's get one thing out of the way: There was an obscene amount of money sloshing around here. RBMA Tokyo scrawled its signature over some of the capital's most prominent ad space, blanketing Roppongi Station and bumping the latest Johnny's idols off the billboards at Shibuya Crossing. Academy participants and overseas journalists were put up in the luxe Cerulean Tower Tokyu Hotel, while visiting musicians were lavishly compensated; one admitted that he was being paid more for his RBMA show (audience: about 50) than he'd earned on the whole of his last tour. And just in case all this wasn't enough to leave every other concert and club promoter in Tokyo permanently disheartened, Red Bull subsidized the ticket prices, too.