No Music, No Life!

It's me again! I know Ryan was supposed to be the one to make this post, but he's exhausted from work and running low on creative juices. So I'm gonna do it instead. Deal wit' it!

As you've all heard by now, Ryan and I spent two weekends in a row attending life music performances.  You may be wondering what possessed us to do such a thing, since we weren't exactly frequent concert-goers in the United States.

Well, at the time we had been in Japan about two and half months, and we'd seen a lot of the sights and hit a lot of the cultural highlights.  The things we'd seen all had one thing in common, though: they were old.  Japan is renowned as the place where ancient and modern meet and harmonize, and so far we'd failed to experience the modern part of that equation.  But no longer!  We were going to place our fingers squarely on the pulse of modern-day Japan. 

And what better way to lay bare the beating heart of a culture than to do what all the cool kids are doing?  What we needed was a newfangled rock n' roll show!

Part One: Cave-be
As we understand it, Cave-be is the bottom of the barrel in terms of venues in Hiroshima.  It's where high school and college bands get their start and build a following before rocketing into the industry stratosphere (or completely failing and living out the rest of their lives in misery and regret -- one of the two).

This was the opening band: "Lobster Prodigy Plus Lover!"  I have no idea what a Lobster Prodigy is, nor do I know if "Lover!" is a separate entity or just part of the name.  What I do know is that the pint-sized drummer back there must have burned a week's worth of calories, between her duties as a drummer and all the running around she did after the show handing out surveys.  Apparently bands in Japan want you to take a survey after you listen to them.  That's arguably more bizarre than anything that's happened at an American rock concert.

The next band was called "Snow Drop."  They were three hard-rock college girls who at one point stopped playing, sat down at the front of the stage and did a Detective Conan impression.

This dude was at least ten years older than everyone else at the concert and had clearly come straight from work.  Man, he was super into it though!  He kept bobbing his head and swaying back and forth and riding that smooth groove to Heaven and back.  More power to you, conspicuously old dude!

The headliner, "LONELY PANDA," was insane!  We felt this was the picture that best demonstrated that fact.

Part Two: Namiki Junction
Namiki is the place you go when your band has gained some fans and is doing fairly well for itself.  Also, you must be a boy who wears a lot of make-up and whose audience consists entirely of swoony, over-dressed Japanese girls.  No exaggeration: Ryan was one of maybe two dudes there.

In summary, visual kei is a genre populated by boys who look like girls who make music for girls who want their boys to look like girls.  Could you follow that?

Don't even think about smorking at Namiki Junction.  It's strictly a non-smorking area.

Two girls who showed up dressed as maids.  The connection between cute, subservient maids and hardcore glam-metal may seem tenuous to the Western mind.  But trust me: in Japan, it makes perfect sense.

The lead singer for the first band, Tokyo Heroes.  Obviously, he was the kind of hero who could stare directly into your soul.  He made some version of this face the entire time he was on stage.

The bass player for Tokyo Heroes.  Note the bare feet.  Metal!

The second band, Flower Boy Baddies, was out to prove that you can rock out and still enjoy a ludicrously wussy name.

The third band, Mamono, billed themselves as "zombie rock."  Horror was their shtick.  At the beginning, they gave a scary speech laden with strategic pauses, during which their fans squealed, "Nee!  Osoroshii~!" ("Ooh, how horrifying!")  They cracked me up.

The bass player for Mamono was some sort of mute, zombie clown.  It took us most of the rest of the concert to decide if said bass player was a boy or a girl.  I'm still not sure.  It could go either way, really.

We couldn't get a picture of the fourth band, Sex Android, because some dude who worked at the bar snuck up behind Ryan and gestured at him to stop snapping photos.  So here's an image I found on the internet.  They looked basically exactly like that in real life.  By that point, the crowd was so exhausted from all the headbanging (see video below) that they barely had enough energy to make all the requisite hand gestures (see explanation below).

Part Three: Japanese Fans
I'd heard Japanese fans behaved differently at concerts, but I never anticipated the extent of it.  Japanese metal heads do mosh and headbang and all that, but they do so very politely and only at the appropriate moments.  In general, Japanese concert-goers prefer to draw from a pre-set repertoire of hand gestures rather than dancing, screaming, or vomiting on each other.

I can't stress the hand gesture thing enough.  It was uncanny.  Did they all meet up hours ahead of time to coordinate their motions?  How did they know when to paw at the air like a cat and when to make little heart shapes with their fingers?  It was all Ryan and I could do to copy the movements as they were happening.  Hopefully this video will give you some idea of what it was like -- plus you get to see Japanese teenagers headbanging like crazy!

Warning: the sound quality is pitiful.  This was shot on a point-and-click camera.  It sounded much better than this in real life.