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.
I've spent a few months now telling you about all the great things happening in Japanese hip-hop, including, I hope, a glimpse of the background that makes it about more than just music. But it's not all sweetness and light – just as in America, the best Japanese rap stands out against a background of mediocre or outright insulting product. This is the sort of stuff that gives Japanese rap a bad name in the first place – predictable knockoffs of American style, musically derivative and vaguely offensive. Zeebra is, you might say, the best of the worst – the most successful example of Japanese hip-hop's worst impulses. He began his career in the mid-90s as a member of the fairly respectable group King Giddra, who borrowed heavily from New York's hard-knock style and tough imagery. Since then, he's pursued a solo career that has simultaneously brought him to the top of the Japanese pop music market and further accentuated the contradictions of a Japanese pop musician making tough-guy rap.
The hugely successful World of Music (2007) is his most recent full-length release and represents Zeebra as the absolute paradigm of Japanese fake thug -- in this case, one who has based his entire career on the supposed legitimacy accrued during two years spent in Newark (enabled, of course, by his parents' relative affluence). The album is wall-to-wall clichés, a full-scale regurgitation not just of American rap, but of shitty American rap. This makes the records' idiocy hard to break down into distinct parts – it's kind of a moron gestalt – but one thing that will jump out to American listeners is Zeebra's shameless appropriation of English lyrics that were kind of dumb the first time around. Let's just look at the list of song titles, for a start: “Stop Playin' a Wall,” “Shinin' Like a Diamond,” “Lyrical Gunman,” etc, etc, etc, almost all English catchphrases, just like roughly a third of the lyrics themselves.
On “We Leanin',” he let's us know that “You got me trippin'/ Got me trippin' like I'm on something,” and the final line throws in a little screwing effect for good measure. But there's something about his delivery that makes it clear he doesn't quite get the full range of meaning of ‘trippin,' no hint in his delivery of the eye-rolling, finger-snapping humor lurking there. It's a lyric that begs for a little leavening humor and gets none, which pretty much sums up Zeebra's style as he strains his voice ever lower and raspier. He stomps on beats with all the creativity and freedom implied by his frequently violent, militaristic rhymes, constantly planting his feet in preparation for an imagined assault.
Meanwhile, the production is the perfect accompaniment to semi-consensual anal sex in a bathroom stall, all coke-line thin drum machine claps, meat-market synthesizer blurps, and blaring, obvious, repetitive stabs. There are literal barks and grunts structuring several tracks, and almost no songs that evoke any emotion but contempt for people supposedly inferior to Zeebra and his homies. The whole hard-edged package reeks of the sort of unironic gorilla machismo that usually masks a pitiable insecurity. The album's success shows that Japan's audience for rap is at least as shallow in places as America's – Zeebra would probably get along pretty well with, let's say, Rick Ross. Of course, Zeebra is far more ridiculous, since his persona is even more obviously based on shameless imitation: America – and specifically black America – is clearly the be-all and end-all of self-respect for Zeebra and his fans. And it's utterly, physically enraging to listen to – when the chorus of “This is 4 the Locos” comes in, declaring, in cheaply vocoded English, “This is how we ride, this is how we roll/ This is for the Locos,” I just want to stand on Zeebra's throat until his eyes roll back into his skull.
But the arsenic cherry on Zeebra's shit sundae is that he, like most of Japan's mainstream rappers, is actually using his racist idealization of black male toughness to mask even more long-lived theories of Japanese racial purity. While all of the King Giddra albums were just as much unselfconscious rip-offs of American rap as is World of Music, the group constantly shouted their dedication to “representing Japan.” This quest for a renewed Japanese pride through hip-hop has been heavily influenced by works like Kobayashi Yoshinori's “Sensouron [On War]” – a manga which insisted that the Nanjing massacre never happened, that Korean comfort women serviced Japanese soldiers by choice, and that kamikaze pilots should be revered as national heroes.
In an interview in the June 2009 issue of Japan's Remix magazine, Giddra leader K Dub Shine explains that he thought and still thinks Black Nationalism and Japanese Nationalism are the same thing, a misunderstanding as scary as it is sad. In a twisted logic all too representative of Japanese nationalism, Shine equates America's postwar occupation of Japan with black slavery. This not only draws a ridiculous comparison between hundreds of years of oppression and a half-decade of redevelopment assistance, it feeds into a much broader rhetoric of Japanese victimology that has spent a half-century keeping Japan from truly coming to terms with World War II. Right-wing commentators have incessantly worked to focus attention on the undeniable horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while completely ignoring Japan's status as an aggressor nation and denying any government culpability for the suffering of the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean peoples during the war. (For the best general treatment of this topic, see the second half of John Dower's Embracing Defeat).
That this sort of ideology could find its way into hip-hop is less absurd than you might think. I recently spent an illuminating afternoon watching Roots with a few members of the Shirouto no Ran (Amateur Revolution) collective in Tokyo's Koenji neighborhood. The miniseries was broadcast in Japan in the 1970s and continues to exert influence on Japan's left as a touchstone for the struggle for human liberation – but Roots, and the ‘up from slavery' narrative more generally, can be mined for a much more conservative message as well. This other message is about the importance of family and blood, constantly emphasized in Haley's epic and entirely comfortable for Japanese right-wingers, who tout the Japanese nation as a ‘family' descended from the divine emperor, implicitly consigning the ‘lesser' races to supporting roles in the great drama of Japanese history.
None of this convoluted logic is as clearly stated on World of Music as it is in K Dub Shine's amazing interview, and we can't look at the worst of Japan's nationalist rap as some sort of unique abuse of the historical legacy of black slavery. Hip-hop is just the most recent vehicle for the story of black liberation, a story that has been the animating force for the universal appeal of not just rap, but of almost every form of African-American music. Everyone wants to think of themselves as struggling to achieve self-fulfillment in the face of great obstacles, and African-Americans have long had to confront the complexity of literally embodying that desire.
The problem with World of Music, then, is not that Zeebra is ‘fake' – keep in mind that Ice Cube notoriously said he grew up more afraid of his father's belt than of the police. Playing a role is, after all, the essence of art, and it applies whether you're a middle-class black guy reporting on your friends' exploits or a Japanese kid programmed with American-style ‘street dreams.' The only real crime in our world of fantasy is DOING IT WRONG, and, all politics aside, this album is a steaming pile of thin sounds, regurgitated catchphrases, and unnecessary cornrows. Not that it's going to matter too much to the English-speaking audience, but if you're looking for an example of just how fabulously shitty Japanese rap can be, this is it – an album so blithely unaware of its own ridiculousness that it would be impossible to parody.
