I end up snooping on a lot of crosstalk and out-of-context conversations about music while scrolling Twitter. I thankfully manage to purge most of it from my mind almost as quickly as it's absorbed. However, there is one outcropping of the "discourse" that has stuck with me the past few days. A person I follow shared the highlights of a conversation that they had in their DM's which I found interesting about K-Pop, J-Pop, and media exported from East Asian countries generally. In particular, there was one line of the conversation that jammed its way into my brain like a road-spike into a Firestone. It was something along the lines of how Asian artists tend to take sounds from other parts of the world and reproduce them in a way that "decontextualizes" them. Because I was not actually part of this conversation, I have no idea what the larger point being made was (or even if this statement is true, or a widely shared opinion), but it jutted out at me like an accusation. I had never considered what it meant for something "borrowed" from another culture to be out of context. As far as I can gather, most J-Pop going as far back as J-Pop goes was both an attempt to make something fun and contemporary for a domestic audience and an attempt to create a viable cultural export. Similarly, this is in part why, as an American, I encounter so many familiar and popular references in Anime and other cultural products from Japan. It's part artists metabolizing art that comes from abroad through the organs of their own culture and part an attempt to open up space for their own products in a foreign market. After all, America not only produces and exports an outrageous amount of culture, but also consumes an impressive amount as well- including culture from abroad. Even breaking open a small crack through which to distribute your product to an American audience can pay off big in the event you can cultivate a demand from even a niche audience. The context for all of these products is a cultural exchange- or at least the attempt at one. This is all just my understanding, though. I only bring it up because it is an interesting backdrop to contrast with the reissue of the Japanese band Aunt Sally's self-titled debut again. Aunt Sally was a spry and precocious post-punk band whose lead singer is a woman who goes by the name Phew. Later, Phew would become a highly respected performance artist and musical collaborator. But on Aunt Sally, Phew and the band still seem very young and mostly eager to simply make music and be heard. When the album came out in 1979, it was pretty clear that through its writing and recording, Aunt Sally's members had basically been bathing in as much punk and high-concept rock music (especially from the UK) as was humanly possible. And what the band made after straining that stew of influences is in many ways highly familiar to an international audience- but not in a way that feels commercial, or even immediately digestible. You can hear The Raincoats on this album, and you can hear Public Image and Pere Ubu, but you're also going to hear nursery rhymes sung in atonal English, songs built around beginner piano tunes like "Heart and Soul," and a bunch of melodies that seem like they were picked up while on vacation in a French-speaking part of the world. It's very idiosyncratic, restive in its naivete, and simplistically miraculous, as well as unbound by any thread of conventional logic. It feels like something made by a group of people attempting to rationalize their place in the world, in light of their personal histories, and the ebb and flow of world history, and was released as much as a cohesive (and somewhat confounding) artistic statement, as much as an attempt to compare notes with whoever else has been paying attention (no matter where they might call home). I think it's for this reason that none of Aunt Sally's debut feels out of place. Just as it's always true that, where ever you find yourself, there you are! Where ever you find yourself in the world, that is the only place you could ever exist in, and so you have to make sense of it the best you can. This is all to say, that as obtuse and irascible as Aunt Sally's debut can be, it still manages to make a compelling amount of sense the way it all comes together- even forty years on from its inception. At least that's the way I feel about it, whether I totally grasp the nuances of its context or not, that's the impression it leaves me with. Every piece is exactly where it needs to be.
