Japan

Reading Simon Reynold's Retromania (not trying to plug his book, honest!), there's a chapter, with the basic gist looking at how Japan, rather than take on a music style and add their own twist to it, actually it copy the music to a tee. This isn't just the music itself they copy, but the entire subculture, case point:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJh6vH6V_to

I mean, on one level, impressive. They've learnt the moves and for people with no jamaican influence on a national level, and I can't imagine there are too many Japanese people with Jamaican heritage knocking about, this is impressive. Hell, those who go the length will speak better patois than me, the one with jamaican family. My main gripes go to culture and musical production.

The problem with copying a culture like this is twofold. 1st, there's a balance problem with actually living a culture and how its represented. Yes, people from other cultures latch on to those that don't inherently relate to their own, that's how cultures spread. But these guys copy a culture meticulously. Could you imagine anybody in this club, coming from a deferential place such as Japan, coping with ruffneck Jamaica? This goes for any culture they manage to copy. This is a personal gripe though, and doesn't matter as much as the fact that the Japanese never add anything to the musical culture they take on.

Take Britain, our history is to take American forms, make it our own, and give it back to the Americans. Metal for example was bastardized RnB, the Americans have since changed it for their own purposes, and a culture for this strand of music has grown over the decades. There would have been those in those days that copied the RnB to a tee, but it's been those kinds of groups and people who take a known form, fuck around with it and make something new. There seems to be no room for this in Japanese culture, which is a shame when you consider that Japan is a nation that with everything else is seen as one of the best for adding its own touches. For technology, adding their own twists to new things, anime that invariably has Western themes told in a Japanese style, so why can't their music scene do this?

The last point links to the musical which affects everyone who just copies without adding their own quirks. The Japanese artists can make the music to a tee...which means by a paradox the music sounds wooden, like they are trying too hard to get everything right. Here's one example

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVzFwDoG8D0

This is Sleep Walker's Wind a bought a while back. The singing seems nice, the playing is tight, everything is right...too right. I mean, there's is nothing about this track that, or this band, that's stands out to me, its just a nice, jazz band. As I say the Japanese aren't the only ones who suffer this, but they seem to be the only ones who suffer for carbon copying as a nation