Artificial intelligence is for nostalgia / Miyako Harumi [two halves of entries]
「PREAMBLE | artificial intelligence is for nostalgia」『▧ artificial intelligence is for nostalgia i warn you for in its ceaseless churning through a century of digital information it will discover beautiful things that even if the algorithm does not know why will make you weep or move you. production in the strictest sense of new cultural items, new symbols, will end. the machine will never stop looking for those buried gems to polish for you, to make them novel again, to take up your attention. but this is just a reflection of the way our own minds work. ▧ the future is not pop music by robots but pop music discovered by robots. it’s hosono haruomi recontextualized and plastic love from sidebar to temporal lobe. it will be the deepest of deep cuts. forever. ▧ in the comments of a nahawa doumbia track: yes well i have no idea why the algorithm brought me here but it’s wonderful. yes i wonder why the algorithm blessed me with this. yes i have no idea why i listened to this today but it’s beautiful. everyone is brought to the same obscurity at the same time. this is what the culture industries have always done in a slower way. they remix. they recontextualize. they borrow. a memphis gospel record heard by few outside of the congregation chopped up for a hit. revival through cognoscenti circles of a lesser film by li shaohong. ▧ human and computer have never discovered enka (almost. there are examples. in 1991, terada soichi and yokota shinichiro fresh from new york dropped twin house mixes of kanazawa akiko minyo tracks. and perhaps sakamoto fuyumi singing enka vocals in a group with hosono haruomi might count). ▧ enka and here i refer to all melodramatic sentimental traditionalish but not strictly traditional popular music from japan has or lacks something that means it resists recontextualization (maybe it is the fact that vocal performance is crucial and this style of vocal performance is evaluated based on measures that must be learned and which have not been passed on). ▧』「and that is what makes it so lovely」
「WHAT CAN BE MINED AND WHAT MUST BE LEFT IN THE GROUND | training artificial intelligence to appreciate miyako harumi」
『▧ the song is anko tsubaki wa koi no hana, miyako harumi's third single from 1966, attached to a film of the same name, and the song that made her famous. it's about tragic love and parting, like three quarters of enka numbers. the song was composed by ichikawa shosuke. the lyrics are by hoshino tetsuro. all enka is fixed on a location, usually rural or in the urban demimonde, and in this song, the place is izu oshima. ▧ the singer is miyako harumi. she is seventeen or eighteen years old. this is her third single, from 1964, attached to a film of the same name, and the song that made her famous. ▧ she is performing here on an nhk program festival of local songs, broadcast from kagoshima. ▧』
『▧ and it’s hard, looking back, to understand the meaning of this music. this is a conservative program and a conservative song. i have used the line before about how misora hibari’s music stank of the mud on the boots of the men coming in from the countryside to rebuilding the cities. in postwar japan, it was unfashionable. the kids have revolted already. ▧ in an age of americanization, enka was resistance. but it was resistance for a generation old enough to remember another time. this isn’t a pop song about the city or the new japan but about people and places left behind. this was not the music of young people in the city. enka was songs for the homeland, songs for the motherland. ▧ if there is any cultural nationalism left in japan in the 1960s, it is here. ▧ some in the audience will be stunned to find out when it is revealed a few years later that miyako harumi is korean. ▧』
『▧ some elements are easy enough to appreciate. we can interpret it as a slightly idiosyncratic modern vocal pop performance. the joy she seems to take in the song is infectious. the way her eyes dart flirtatiously under her heavy false eyelashes contrasts with the story of provincial longing told in the lyrics. she is beautiful. ▧ some elements are more defiant. the performance borrows heavily from traditional vocal styles or at least on rokyoku singers. you can hear it in the guttural vibrato, the barking yelps, the rasps. ▧ of course i know the theory put forward by wajima yusuke that she is borrowing from pop singer hirota mieko, whose growl was self-consciously borrowed from jazz and r&b records. sure there might be some debt there. i hear more rokyoku than dionne warwick in her style, her harumi-bushi. ▧ but anyway to understand why miyako harumi is considered among the best requires being able to evaluate her singing not as a modern vocal pop performance but as enka. this appreciation requires training. this makes it resistant to recontextualization. ▧ like watching a regional chinese opera form or an umm kulthum performance, we might appreciate the tightness of an orchestra, a certain color in a vocal turn, poetry, but other things remain known only to those that understand the patterns and the rules. the word kata is used for these patterned forms in enka. you can sing according to a score but the formalized embellishments are what makes it masterful. ▧』
『▧ we can see it by watching another performance of the same song. this is ishikawa sayuri. it’s 1979. she’s twenty-one years old. her biggest hit, tsugaru strait-Winter scene was still in circulation. the embellishments are different. she is singing it according to her own practiced patterned forms. ▧ and then we can compare miyako harumi to herself, since she emerges to join ishikawa sayuri on stage. she is thirty-one years old. her voice has changed. she does not hit the first syllable of the chorus with the same rasp as she did in the 1966 performance. there is a guttural vibrato on the close, hitting the word hana, but it seems to be accomplished with great effort. ▧ the 1966 performance becomes even more incredible: we are seeing something that even miyako harumi herself will struggle to replicate. maybe it was that style of singing that softened her voice to the point we see it in 1979. the harumi-bushi existed and now does not, strictly speaking. it is an ideal, preserved in memory or on records. it’s always just beyond her reach. ▧』
[a heading with nearly no content:]「CULTURAL SOVEREIGNTY | methods for protecting your attention」『▧ but you can train yourself. you can fall into these alternate worlds. ▧』