Thanks to a mix of language barriers and cultural stereotypes, most 'heads think Japanese hip-hop is derivative, silly, or downright racist. But the emerging Japanese underground is pumping out excellent, innovative tracks that deserve to be heard around the world. Japan The Beats highlights the best of these releases and tells the stories behind them. Click here to access the archive.
So far, “Japan the Beats” has highlighted artists whose work is interesting, because it offers some worthy Japanese variation on a global movement. But Boutsuki wo Nakushita Ousama (The King Who Lost the Moon) is sui generis -- like Boy in da Corner or Ceci N'Est Pas Un Disque, it's such a fully-realized, unique achievement that its national origins are irrelevant to its value as art. Origami have been known to say that the music they make isn't hip-hop, that it belongs to a genre entirely its own. It all sounds sounds insanely egotistical until you hear Ousama. That it hasn't received a fraction of the international attention even of Disque, which is almost as indecipherable to English speakers, is the single greatest tragedy of America's deafness to Japanese hip-hop.
The group consists of two MCs, Shibito (which means roughly “Person of Will”) and Nanorunamonai (“No Name to Call Myself”). Like their chosen names, Origami -- which means “Descending Gods,” rather than the identically-pronounced art of paper folding -- tend toward the abstractly intellectual and vaguely mysterious. Their lyrics are frequently metaphorical or indirect and, therefore, particularly hard to translate. But what is most notable about them is also what is most internationally accessible: their radically innovative vocal style. They are masters of high-speed rhythmic complexity, best demonstrated on the pulsing “Chuumon no Ooi Coryouriten” (something like “Little Restaurant of Many Orders”). But what makes them utterly unique is the way their rapping slides again and again into an arresting tonality -- not quite singing, but something more like the mournful keening of noh actors.
Similarly, the album's music is packed with droning flutes, organs, oboes – sounds of subdued intensity. Origami's primary beatmaker, Onimas, gets help on Ousama from a large, diverse segment of the extended Temple-ATS crew, but the album has a consistent feel. Its sonic palette is made up of organic, understated elements -- from acoustic guitars to chimes to field recordings of running water -- and its insistent, spare rhythms are sampled rather than synthesized from drum machines. While one of Origami's closest spiritual parallels is in the fuzzy meditations of cLOUDDEAD, the sounds here are clear, clean, and carefully arranged.
The apex of the album is “Sanzou” (“Styx”), whose slow insistence, somewhere between a dirge and a march, is appropriate to its hellish theme. Jangling bells sound like the chains of ghosts, while a reedy tone enters and retreats. Over this, Shibito and Nanorunamonai don't so much rap as chant, solemnly contemplating how the soul of Japan itself, still bearing the lingering traces of war's sins, might be judged in the afterlife. Throughout Ousama, Origami reveal a similar concern with the overlapping questions of what it means to be human and what it means to be Japanese. Shibito repeatedly invokes Natsume Soseki and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Japanese writers who, in the period of Japan's modernization before World War II, struggled to articulate a Japanese humanism through close attention to the lives of the people around them.
Like Soseki and Ryunosuke, who worked in the context of a Japanese society that constantly looked West, Origami articulate their Japaneseness through the Western filter of hip-hop. Ousama occasionally includes distinctly ‘Japanese' sounds -- opener “Monday” buries monks in rhythmic prayer below an unchanging organ note and organic breakbeat. But these moments never sound like exercises in self-Orientalization, perhaps in this case because the monks never sync to the beat, emphasizing distance and difference rather than glossing over it by making Buddhism “funky.” Most of the time, Origami manage to sound Japanese without following the predictable route of, say, sampling the shakahuchi flute or taiko drum. Their national identity comes across primarily through tone and texture, in their meditative quietude, and, occasionally, their palpable sadness.
Of course, it's strange to say that Origami “sound more Japanese” than other Japanese hip-hop acts. More accurately, they sound more Japanese to us, to people who aren't Japanese. They just happen to represent a part of the wide spectrum of Japanese identity that is strong in the Western mind and that only rarely can be made to fit in a hip-hop form. Theirs is often an understated intensity, a sensibility thoroughly debased in widespread Western images of the repressed salaryman. What Origami reclaim from such stereotypes, while maintaining their kernel of truth, is the ethos of carefully controlled, but nonetheless intense passion, explicitly articulated in the ethos of Zen archery.
In a conflicted, contradictory way, it is Origami's commitment to a mature articulation of Japanese identity through hip-hop that makes their work important. Many Japanese hip-hop artists attempt to erase their own Japaneseness by asserting their position in a transnational context. Others deploy clichéd markers of Japaneseness, like shakahuchi samples or samurai imagery. For the global listener, both of these more often than not just heighten the anxious sense of listening to an imitation. But listening to Origami is like entering an alternative timeline in which hip-hop was born and raised in Japan. In Boutsuki wo Nakushita Ousama one finds no nagging suspicion that somewhere else there is something more legitimate, more original, more essential. This is honmono -- the genuine article. The real thing.
