old conversation about Sambo Master

tim:

Perhaps I should post the final track on the album. For once it's nice to listen to an album that doesn't "come full circle." Rather, it rides up a ramp and keeps going.

Yamaguchi's desperation is different than Ian Curtis's, though. I can't quite put my finger on why. I can't quite analyze it; I can only give examples.

Nonetheless, when I talked to him last, he seemed like there was nothing wrong with him in the world. That (second-to-)last song, "and you will sing a new song, for all that comes between us" is like a great (not-quite-)happy ending, where the girl who loves the absolutely crazy guy in the dark romantic thriller finally says something that makes him realize what he really means to her. This album is different from Closer because it's about love, not death. It's just that . . . there's a lot of death in love. There's a lot of out-shutting to be done. That's why most songs on here deal with the absolute fear of losing the entire world when you devote yourself to one person.

Yamaguchi has used the word "futari," meaning "two people," in five song titles in the last two years. I don't think there's not a reason for this. This album title is about "you and me" -- "the two of us." All of his songs are about himself and "you," only unlike Western music, where "you" is just a general term for the person the singer is in love with or hates (an exception would be Springsteen, in whose case "you" is "everyone in the world listening to this song, even if it sucks"), "you" in a Japanese song has to be positioned very well if it's even going to sound linguistically right. "You" plural, in this language, is five syllables.

Yamaguchi is singing someone in particular; stories have been running through the internet lately about how he froze up and just gawked at the female interviewer on a television show a few weeks ago, so it's kind of rumored he doesn't have a girlfriend, nor has he . . . ever. He's so rock and roll that he doesn't even have sex and drugs. The first two records saw him

1. being a punk-rocker
2. making great, slightly-warmer-than-usual super-power-pop-rock songs

Now he's realized that he doesn't want to be a pop star, so he took the darker path. In a way, I think this album is more personal than the others because halfway through it just snaps and breaks and then . . . yes, it goes up the ramp. If it seems like it doesn't want the listener to understand it, maybe that's just the sacrifice it's making for trying to understand the listener. By the end, it seems to understand everything, and it becomes kind of . . . something to fear.

The "tambourine song," which I sent to the Gmail list back when it was released as a single, is track 15 of 18, and it comes in right where it's supposed to. Track 13 is a reworking of "an insperable pair," which was track three of the single. Tracks 1 and 4-14 were recorded in one session, supposedly, which accounts for Yamaguchi's throat condition in the re-recorded (studio live!!) track 13. Holy lord it's scary as hell. That entire song was a little key experiment. The performance of it on the album is nuts, especially when the superchorus (my friends Kama Boiler!!) comes in. That superchorus signals that . . . something has changed.

What I like most about Sambo Master is what most people don't like at all -- Yamaguchi never uses pretty words for pretty words' sake. That, and he reuses the same phrases over and over again. It's less an example of his lack of imagination and more an example of his appreciation of continuity, like in an American comic book "universe" or something. I don't know why it gives me that feeling -- in music that is everything except kitschy, thinking about it is best done kitschily, I guess.

Time for lunch.
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chris:

Yeah, I sensed that Sambomaster is singing about this almost hopeless kind of love. That kind of love was in my mind - there's been a thread about Neutral Milk Hotel's In An Aeroplane Over The Sea running, and I can hear some similarities in vocal delivery between that record and the two songs here.

What I'm curious about: Yamaguchi sings about a personal, specific "you," the second person singular sort of "you". It's different in Japanese than English, because he is not using a proper noun to identify the "you," - Paul McCartney's Michelle, Jeff Mangum's 'Comely,' who must be Anne Frank - and I assume it means something different than "she," or "the girl," or other third person singular nouns. It's... well, we have first, second, and third person pronouns. I don't know anything about Japanese grammar.

I'm just trying to figure out how to accomplish the same effect in English, to address someone in song like that. Is it like how Bob Dylan would write those spiteful, bitter, hilariously mean break up songs in the sixties? There was a guy who loved to throw out proper nouns for atmosphere- but it's just like Dylan, not to name the target of his lyrics. But they were clearly directed at one person alone.

That, and he reuses the same phrases over and over again.

Fucking awesome. When it's done right. There's the 'Pink Floyd,' method: rigidly focused on a concrete narrative. There's the 'Destroyer,' method: writing an entire catalog that continually references itself to the point there's an internet drinking game (which has dozens of rules: drink when there is an "Invocation of a cliche or idiom, however dismantled," or when there's "Recycling or referring to lyrics of another Destroyer song; drink twice if it's a song on the same album; also drink twice if they're from pre-official releases We'll Build Them a Golden Bridge or Ideas for Songs," etc.)

And there's the... Neutral Milk Hotel method. "Aeroplane" effects the people it effects because it builds the themes in the first four songs for the rest of the record - to the point where the penultimate couplet can make Toups and I cry, sometimes.

If it seems like it doesn't want the listener to understand it, maybe that's just the sacrifice it's making for trying to understand the listener. By the end, it seems to understand everything, and it becomes kind of . . . something to fear.

I didn't say that the two songs I heard seemed like they didn't want to be understood. They're just too busy, or too personal, to let me in. Nothing here is purposefully abrasive. What makes Sambomaster such a conundrum is how contradictory this record sounds. I think Yamaguchi has so many things he absolutely must communicate, but he doesn't know how to overcome his weird little idiosyncrasies. It's not empathetic; that's what terrifying about it.

That's what makes not knowing the lyrics so frustrating.