Systematicity and Serendipity

From time to time, after I play some offbeat piece of music or show a snippet of some offbeat video in a class, one or more students ask me “How did you hear about that? What’s you secret for finding new stuff?” The secret is simple: Systematicity and Serendipity, the twin cities on either side of the great river of media that girdles the globe.

Systematicity is the easy one: First, you find something you like. Then, you look into everything that touches that thing you like. For example, I discovered the Insist (韻シスト) EP Relax Oneself wandering through a little CD shop in the Hanshin railway station in Ibarakashi, Osaka. For those of you still benightedly ignorant of this group, it is a highly creative Osaka hip-hop band that, until the most recent album, always performed with the backing of a live funk band. Well, according to the liner notes on the EP, the horn line for the funk band backing Insist came from another Osaka institution, a funk band called Osaka Monaurail (named after the classic funk tune “It’s the JB’s Monaurail,” recorded as a side project by the band behind the Godfather of Soul, James Brown). I found their first full album, Rumble’n Struggle, and continued from there. I found my first album by Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her (led by Higurashi Aiha) in the same little shop, an amazing disc titled Future or No Future. Contributing musicians on that album came from the bands Buffalo Daughter and Museum of Plate, and off I went.

This is one reason I really prefer to get a CD instead of downloading tracks if at all possible. I can’t get enough information to feed my habit for new music if I just download tracks.

Serendipity often comes from my colleagues and students, who know I love hearing new stuff and lend it to me, or at least point me in the right direction. A colleague brought me Year of the Tiger by the Korean(-American) hip-hop duo Drunken Tiger as a gift from Seoul; a fellow student introduced be to the Okinawan punk trio Bleach (aka Bleach03) in my final year of graduate school. I discovered the joys of not-really-legally streamed Asian video when a student of mine got me watching the entwined love triangles of the Korean drama Coffee Prince. And of course I am indebted to the colleague who got me watching the Japanese drama Ikebukuro West Gate Park (IWGP), which I am only halfway through even as I write this.

So there you have it. Some stuff I finds, and some stuff I gets. And yes, this will be on the exam.