The Blindboy Podcast - Julias Gulag

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

How a Japanese watchmaker in the 1940's influenced Detroit Techno Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Take off your bicycle shorts, you bearded fiendians. Sit down with me and let's have a bit of crack. How are you getting on? Hope you're having a wonderful time. Currently at this exact moment, I'm recording this on Tuesday the 15th of January 2019 and I'm in Soho in London same place that I was last week and I'm up in a tower block

with two massive windows in front of me I'm several stories up and before me is the the city of London the night skyline rooftops little blinking red lights

but there's a small bit of chaos there's between five and six helicopters scarpering all around the city of London There's between five and six helicopters scarpering all around the city of London, mainly focusing their energies around the Houses of Parliament, Westminster. Because poor old Theresa May has just had her Brexit deal

handed back to her and rejected. So, I don't know what the helicopters are. I assume they're just like news helicopters of the world. Just looking at the chaos that's happening in the buildings, you know. Maybe there's a couple of military helicopters waiting for shit to kick off, I don't know is that riot sparking material the rejection of the Brexit deal

I don't think the Brits are really into rioting are they em but that's the crack, so hopefully the helicopters won't get so fucking loud that they fuck my shit up and that they'll my shit up. And that they'll intrude upon the microphone.

That would be awful. So last week's podcast was about anger. I got lovely feedback from that. Thank you very much. Yeah, I felt like doing a mental health podcast, you know. Checking in at myself you lads checking in with yourselves discussing some emotions

having some valuable conversations about emotions shit that doesn't get spoken about a lot the internet is currently on fire because

there's an an advert by Gillette Gillette Razors you know and it came out yesterday but the advert is it's an ad for fucking Gillette Razors it's not even an ad for Razors

it's a short viral video that deconstructs toxic masculinity right and the content of the video is excellent it's perfect the content that it's very well shot it's got a good narrative it uses a visual language to convey some complex themes and it kind of just addresses, you know, toxic male culture, stuff we've spoken about on this podcast before. Boys will be boys and the thesis, the central thesis of the video is quite good and it's noble and, you know, all it asks for really is, in 2019, can we stop having male culture you know

from children from young boys on upwards stop having a culture that glorifies physical aggression and sexual aggression which those things are yes absolutely let's do that but I get

a queasiness, right? I completely agree with the message, obviously. But I get a queasiness because I don't like it when this social justice culture or woke culture, as we call it, I don't like it when these things are being communicated through advertising something about that doesn't sit with me properly

um because I don't believe that Gillette I don't I think I think they're being disingenuine you know or disingenuous like formerly Gillette's tagline was Gillette the best a man can get and for years their means of advertising was um to promote like to promote an idea of maleness not necessarily a great well yeah I would nearly go as far as to say aggressive if you think of Gillette the best a man can get the ads were just like really good looking men who drive land rovers and have expensive watches and maybe go hunting and safaris lads that don't really exist you know that was the ideal gillette man for years and years and years and like they make mac tree razors like

this is a razor for shaving hair off your face and they've named it after a fighter jet so Gillette for years have very much obviously traded upon traditional tenets of masculinity in order to sell razors to men but this time around they've they've completely they've done something totally different but what bothers me is yes the message is great but i don't want corporations to be the ones who are doing this performative who are given this performative message because first off if you look at it the internet's gone apeshit over it, right? And not for any good reasons. No one's having any decent discussion about toxic masculinity.

No one's addressing any of the issues within the video. It's just simply become a very polarised, aggressive argument where you're either on one side or the other. So we'll say one side is like the likes of piers morgan you know professionally offended men you know who just like piers morgan is a pantomime character i do believe that the man is uh behaves like a prick and that he is misogynistic and he is the things that he is but i also think that piers morgan gets offended because it benefits his career. So you've got Piers Morgan pissed off that masculinity has been deconstructed somehow by this advert.

And then you've got other people on the opposite side attacking people who agree with Piers Morgan. So it's completely polarised. It's one giant, big argument with nothing of note being discussed. It's just us and them, us and them, as the internet tends to do, and, you know, what did Gillette get out of it? is there's a thing in branding called that or in advertising called front of mind advertising and front of mind advertising is it's what all advertisers want front of mind means when i think of razors does gillette come to my head first okay and to be honest if you say to me razor like mac tree that comes to my head first so gillette wins there um so it doesn't matter whether people are pro gillette or anti gillette so long as everybody is talking about them so they've in that respect they've created something quite perfect everybody

is talking about this advert which i don't even think there's a razor in the advert everyone's talking about it but because of that polarized aggressive internet shit that happens in comment sections that that's why people are talking about it the video when it went up on youtube it's got something like 4,000 likes but 70,000 dislikes and it doesn't matter anymore because even a dislike is engagement of sorts and that engagement drives up the visibility it's perfect fodder for media sites because media sites work hand in hand with advertising so Gillette have made this new controversial ad perfect the word controversial is brilliant for clickbait sites and now all the sites get to roll out Gillette have unveiled this ad and this is how the internet is responding and some people are

offended and some you know some men are boycotting Gillette and then people to the left of that opinion are going fucking idiots boycotting a razor you're so stupid and then the razor boycotters are going well you're all fucking snowflakes give me back my testicles and it's all nonsense it's all foolish and i'm sure in gillette you know at the core of we said the advertising team that came up with this idea of this toxic masculinity video i'm sure there's a couple of quite genuine young people working in advertising who are like we can make something really good that might make a difference I do believe that it's a systemic problem it's not necessarily a problem with individual people

but what does piss me off is like I'm going right what do Gillette want front of mind advertising okay number one it doesn't matter whether it's negative or positive is the word Gillette being used an awful lot yes it is mission accomplished number two

advertising is about emotion it's not really about thinking we've you know we've spoken about this before on the podcast about Edward Bernays and how he used the ideas of his uncle Freud Sigmund Freud and how to advertise so what Gillette want out of this it's an emotional thing Gillette now appear like fearless warriors for social justice like when I saw, when I looked at the Twitter comments and I saw people who were supporting the Gillette advert

most of the comments were stupid centrist dads are boycotting the Gillette products, fucking idiots and then they might use a gif of Ariana Grande or Rihanna, these kind of current icons of feminism.

So Gillette are trying to occupy the same emotional space that Ariana Grande occupies or Rihanna occupies or Beyonce occupies. This corporate identity that is trying to sell razors is trying to emotionally occupy space within us, but we associate them with the good fight. You know, you don't even know if you want the razor, but you'll buy it because it's what they'd call brand taste. You know, that's another word that advertising uses what is the

taste of your brand when the brand is mentioned what's the taste that you get and the emotional taste and Gillette want the emotional taste of we are an underdog and we are fighting against very clear dickheads like Piers Morgan and I don't like it it's the commodification of social justice culture the same thing happened in the 60s with the hippie movement

it's as soon as corporations step into culture and commodify it it starts to dissipate become ineffective and become very uncool. So, like Coca-Cola did this in the 60s with the hippie movement. If you haven't seen the TV series Mad Men,

which is about the advertising agency in the 60s, if you haven't seen it, spoiler alert, the next hot take I'm going to talk about for a couple of seconds, I'm going to ruin the season finale of Mad Men. So if you intend on watching it, maybe skip forward about two minutes. But if you have seen it, listen up. So how hippie culture was commodified and reduced by the advertising industry one of the most famous advertisements in the world and considered to be possibly one of the

best and most important advertisements in the world was coca-cola's campaign in I believe 1969 it was called I'm gonna teach the world to sing and what the advert was it was a bunch of all people different colors different cultures joining hands together and singing a song and then at the end they all drink coke so they were all unified by coca-cola so this 60s message of peace love inclusion civil rights we're all the same we gotta get along with each other on this planet fuck the war fuck the bomb all these good things that are idealist movements of the 60s reduced to a corporate message to sell fizzy brown water via a song 1969 and you kind of have there that's the start of the commodification of social justice to sell corporate products and in the final episode of mad men the final scene the character of don draper he goes on

he has a bit of a crisis uh you think with his crisis that he's achieved he goes to like a hippie retreat and meditates and achieves calm and peace and mindfulness and a sense of inner peace and inner resolution and you're looking at because he's been you know cheating on his wife and all this shit and acting the cunt and drinking much, so you as a viewer are going, wow, Don Draper is achieving inner peace, it's the final episode, I wonder what's gonna happen, and the final fucking scene is the Coca-Cola advert, I'm gonna teach the world to sing, so in the Mad Men universe, we are led to believe that Don Draper, the main character, is the person who created this advert, the most important advert of all time. And that's the end of Mad Men, the series, you know, and it's brilliant.

But the actual true story of where I'm going to teach the world to sing, it's quite interesting. It comes out of Shannon Airport in, Shannon Airport in Clare, which is, it's kind of Limerick's airport. That's not fair for me to say, but Limerick is the main city near Shannon Airport in Clare, which is, it's kind of Limerick's airport. That's not fair for me to say, but Limerick is the main city near Shannon Airport. I did a podcast on Shannon Airport and all the stories that were there

because my dad used to work there. But yeah, the lads who came up with the, I'm going to teach the world to sing advert, they were stopped over in Shannon Airport in about 1967 shannon airport was one of the most important airports in the world because it was the conduit to europe from america and the advertising lads were sitting in the lounge in shannon airport and they all around them were stalled flights and people waiting from iran from japan China, all these nationalities. And the advertisers noticed every single one of them was drinking Coke.

All different styles of dress, different languages, all of this. But what unified them was Coca-Cola, this incredibly ubiquitous product. And from that, they come up with the idea of, I'm going to teach the world to sing from Shannon Airport. So that's the end of the spoiler alert. But right there, that's the commodification of wokeness in the 60s. It's been done and it's a bad thing. It's just, none of us should be cool. None of us should be happy with corporations performatively

promoting woke or fucking social justice issues what they you know I'm all for them being more ethical and maybe using their corporate money to like I don't know fund some men's mental health charities use a lot of money

and fund some men's mental health charities and change your stop having branding Use a lot of money and fund some men's mental health charities. Change your... Stop having branding that appeals to a formerly... Appeals to a kind of an outdated mode of masculinity. That's all good. But when you make a big song and dance about it, it's like, no, you're just being disingenuous.

You want us to think you're woke. And then we buy more razors. Now, here's where it starts to get fun. And this is the utter silliness of contemporary culture, right? So, like I said, Gillette razors, they've got their toxic masculinity viral ad. Everyone's just fighting about it.

No one's really engaging with it Everyone's just fighting about it. No one's really engaging with it, with the issues in it. Like Gillette are woke Gillette, you know, social justice Gillette. Gillette are a company that, they're a proctor and gamble company, right? So Gillette's owners are Proctor and Gamble, who are a fucking huge multinational corporation their advertising budget budget is 7.2 billion you know that's the economy of a small country and while Gillette gets to be all woke with their toxic masculinity the same like parent company of Gillette like they they use palm oil right and palm oil is grown in places like Indonesia you know sticking with the

theme of previous podcasts woke Gillette right their parent company buys palm oil that is produced via child slavery okay so the hugest most disgusting human rights abuses slavery of children in places like Indonesia Procter and Gamble have been accused of getting their palm oil from these places. So it's like, hey, look at us, we're Gillette. We're woke. We're into social justice and deconstructing masculinity by our razor. By the way, we exploit child slaves in order to make more profits. But we've got a 7.2 billion advertising budget so you don't find out about that what else is there

they've been accused of huge amounts of deforestation like people have accused Procter & Gamble of personally being personally responsible for the extinction of the Sumatra tiger and there's an orangutan in danger

Procter and Gamble were made aware of this they didn't do anything about it they've been accused of anti-union lobbying trademark bullying, false advertising inhumane animal testing right

like as with most huge corporations utterly dripping in the blood of third world countries and then

they're using themes of social justice to advertise to the developed world it's fucking insane it's madness and again fully aware lads the irony of me putting this out on my podcast which relies upon conflict minerals in order to be made through the equipment

that i use and through the equipment that you use to listen to it the insanity of our world so do you know what else I think this is a little hot take so the other thing with Gillette right who are they aiming this at I think like do you know the way

loads of hipsters have beards right so like lads that are woke are into their social justice a high percentage of those men are going to have beards and we've reached peak beard there about four years ago right beards have been a thing now since about 2010 and they have to be going on the way out it's as simple as that trends are cyclical i fucking wonder and and when the beard backlash comes it'll be hard and it'll be harsh and it'll happen from hipsters hipsters will be the first ones to go sorry dude beards aren't

cool anymore it'll be generation y hipsters and And they'll go, fuck beards. Those are for lads in their 30s. What am I, a dad? So they're all going to be clean shaving. And I reckon Gillette are like, I want G-cons. You're going to have some chin fluff in about two years. And I want you to be using my razors. Because any hipsters that are shaving,

they're not using Gillette, they're using like, um, Dollar Shave Club, which is, it's like an online, I've just given them free fucking advertising, and the cunts openly sponsor podcasts, sponsor my podcast, you pricks, Dollar Shave Club come sponsor me but em yeah so like my kinda hipsters would be they'd be going Dollar Shave Club

they wouldn't be buying Gillette products because again Dollar they've just got good branding their branding is better than a best a man can get

they they've got clever fucking I think I don't know what it is unlimited razors in the post or something sounds like a pile of shit but i will completely reverse my opinions if they want to sponsor me okay that's enough about beards and chins lads sure i've got a bag on my head anyway what does it matter anyway this week's podcast has absolutely nothing to do with beards, nothing to do with razors or anything like that, or advertising.

That was the garlic bread. Who's ready for the spaghetti bolognese? So I'll get on to the spaghetti bolognese of the podcast. And it's, I won't tell you what it is yet but it's something i'm really looking forward to doing and i don't want this i don't want to interrupt myself so we'll get the old ocarina pause out of the way now so ocarina pause is where there might be a digital advert inserted i'm repeating this every week because of new listeners. If you are a new listener, right, do me a favour. If you're a new listener, please go back to the start,

very start of the podcast and start from there, will you? Don't begin from here. So the ocarina pause, you might hear a digital advert. If not, I'm going to play my South American Spanish clay whistle. It's a South American clay whistle that I bought in Spain. Hence the continual confusion. Ocarinas are South American instruments. But I bought this one in

Spain. Here we go. And it sounds great in this London apartment. So, do you know what? I'm going to play this week's Ocarina Pause. I've got the beautiful vista of the London skyline in front of me. There's helicopters. And I'm watching the British Empire burn, essentially, you know.

There's chaos outside Westminster. There's protests. The helicopters are in the sky. And I'm going to play the ocarina up in my tower in Soho. Looking down on Westminster. Thinking about my grandfather who was in the IRA and I'm going to watch,

I'm going to play the ocarina as we watch Westminster burn. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together

and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth.

Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen, I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six.

It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The first omen.

Only in theaters April 5th. Okay. Okay. A very jolly Ocarina Paws. The Brexit Ocarina Paws. The chaos of Theresa May's government and her no deal. So, yeah, best of luck with that, Britain. Do you know what?

Ireland's going to get fucked as well. Ireland's going to get fucked too. We're all in it together. So anyway, there's no advertisements on this podcast as you may have noticed so this podcast is supported by you the listener via the patreon page um patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast would you like to be a patron of this podcast would you like to help with the podcast upkeep would you like to help me earn a living from making the podcast well you can um you can give me the equivalent of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month by going to patreon.com

forward slash the blind by podcast it's a suggested donation you don't have to whether you do or don't you get the same podcast it's a model that's based on on soundness basically if it's something you'd like to do please do it makes a massive difference to my life but if it's something you can't afford i understand listen for free that's fine you're so let's get on to the fucking let let's get on to this podcast, this podcast is going to be about music, I fucking love doing the music podcasts, all right, you might remember a couple of months back, possibly two of my favorite podcasts, to be honest, if I, if I think, I don't really have favorite podcasts, right, that I've done, but if I think I don't really have favorite podcasts right that I've

done but if I think of ones that were the most enjoyable for me to do and ones that like if I wasn't me the one that I would like to listen to the two for me are DeVito's Teapot and the one after it right and DeVito's Teapot that podcast that after it right and DeVito's Teapot that podcast that I did it's about the history of disco music and how disco

has it's roots in 1960's New York out of the the LGBT and the trans movement and I loved making that podcast and I loved making

the podcast after it where it went we went from disco right up to house music and we went from disco right up to house music and we went to fucking New York Chicago, Detroit

I loved making that podcast I'm hugely passionate about music about the origins of music it's a genuine fucking obsession a true obsession for me I think about music all day long I can't not

I fucking love it so much and not just to hear it but to understand its origins and why it exists and the history of it and I love making hot takes about music

and guessing why certain things sound a certain way. And I love how culture, how cultural and historical factors shape how music sounds. I fucking love it. So this week's podcast is, it's not a history of disco podcast, but it's certainly in,

if the disco podcast was a series. We'll say this would be an episode of it. So I want to do a parallel timeline. Except not in New York. I want to go to Japan. Okay. That's what this week's podcast is. It's.

It's a hot take. I want to make the case. Of how the Japanese. Are the kind of the silent partners. Of a lot of 20th century African American music. The Japanese are the unsung heroes. Of modern music, electronic music in particular.

So that's what I want this week's podcast to be about. And it will run in a parallel timeline to the history of disco podcasts. It's part of the same series. So Japan in the 20th century, right, Japan made the best electronics in the world. Simple as that. The Japanese economy became synonymous

with the exportation of superior, high-quality electronics. the exportation of superior high quality electronics and to kind of interrogate the roots of that right the u.s has had a very fucking strange relationship with japan now in i i covered like the we don't talk about the behavior of the united states in the 1800s enough they were fucking lunatics i did a podcast a couple of weeks ago about how the u.s how the u.s forced like military coups and invasions and enslaved entire populations in in um central america in Central America with banana plantations. The expansion of American interests through fruit. And, like, here's the queer thing about America in the 1800s.

When America became, like, an independent country, they borrowed the aggressively expansive imperialism of the British Empire. Except when the Ys did it. They were just as brutal. Just as colonial.

But they didn't do it for. For a crown. They didn't do it for. Like a literal empire. It was for. Private corporate interests. You know very different. A slightly different vibe.

But just as sinister. Not a king and country thing. And American imperialism, like the borders, you can't define those borders. They're secret borders. It's a sphere of influence. The British Empire was very explicit. Here's the empire. We own this.

Fuck off. Here are the boundaries. American imperialismism very different it's spheres of aggressive influence that are hard to pinpoint so the thing with japan is japan were a very economically isolationist country very isolated they didn't really trade with any countries outside of themselves they didn't allow foreigners to even live in Japan I'm going back

1600s and 1700s right so there was a going to about 1850 now there was a 200 year old policy of isolation they wouldn't trade with other fucking nations and they closed borders Japan was a very isolationist country

and which wasn't too mad like in the 1600s the dominant economic model was called mercantilism and mercantilism was you know all nations were kind of economically isolationist and mercantilism it's it's the opposite of free trade and it caused a lot of

wars and it caused a huge amount of trade wars between countries in europe and that's why there was a lot of actual war as a result so like it was the opposite of free trade it's like try and be resourceful um don't import shit from other countries but try and sell it sell them finished products if you can that's mercantilism so it wasn't too insane that japan were isolationist economically in the 1600s and 1700s but they did take it to extremes so by about 1850 the americans were just incredibly pissed off with japan and talk about fucking toxic masculinity the americans used to arrive in tokyo bay with giant warships right in the 1850s and just hang around japan in these huge warships with guns and basically militarily intimidate japan and japan would freak out and be like you're not

allowed in these waters and then america would go what are you gonna do about it and like in 1853 i believe it was they went into ido bay which is now tokyo giant gunboat and they fill the entire all the cannons with blank with blank rain or blank rounds right so it doesn't actually fire a cannonball so this giant fucking american ship starts blasting cannons on the bay ido bay in japan japanese start freaking out thinking the Americans are attacking them, scramble their navy and the Americans say, oh no, we're not, we're not fighting with you, we were just celebrating American Independence Day by letting off some cannons, there's no, there's no cannonballs in there. So the Yanks aggressively bullied Japan into opening their borders into trading with America in particular

through extreme militaristic bullying you know, so as you move into this sort of bit of a shitty seed as you can imagine between Japan and America Japan was a very proud country. Imperial Japan. This is pre-World War II. So there was a disharmony and a dislike.

Japan when it entered World War II. Were on the Axis side. They were on the side of Germany. And no they were with the Nazis like. They were on the side of Germany and no they were with the Nazis like they were on the side of Germany Italy Germany and I can't think of any of the other ones but there was a few others but they were on the wrong side of World War II basically and prior to like 1941 Japan America starts to I think it was a steel embargo Japan invaded Indochina

and as a response to that the Americans had put massive they froze all the assets of Japan and the US and began a bit of a trade war which is one of the those tactics led to the attack on Pearl Harbour soapan attacked pearl harbor in hawaii then america declared war on japan and america effectively effectively became part of world war

ii at that moment we all know that the yanks then and this is something that does not get spoken about enough a huge like human rights abuse that a lot of people don't know about when america entered world war ii and its main enemy was essentially japan the americans interned 200 000 japanese americans like american citizens some of them weren't some of them were newly arrived Japanese immigrants but the Americans got 200,000 people essentially based on their ancestry and if you were in any way Japanese you were interned in a camp

for a couple of years like shocking do you know it's not spoken about enough so so we know how things with Japan and the US ended in World War II. The US, you know, the only time ever in history that nuclear weapons have been used on civilian populations.

The US dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Effectively forcing Japan into surrender. Ending World War II. And this left a massive... It was a huge shock collectively to the Japanese psyche. Japan unconditionally surrendered and the whole world

kind of just went what the fuck what the fuck have you got what were those bombs you know what I mean and Japan becomes occupied by the Americans so post war Japan after the surrender it is occupied by the Americans. So post-war Japan, after the surrender, it is occupied by

the Americans. Now importantly, you know, unlike we said the occupation of Germany, when Germany was occupied, the Yanks took, you know, the Yanks and the Allies took West Berlin and then the Russians, the Soviets took East Berlin. That didn't happen with Japan, Japan was occupied by the Allied forces but it wasn't divided as a country so it still managed to keep a national unity which was quite important so

two factors, main factors led to Japan becoming the kind of technological behemoth that it became by the 60s, 70s and 80s. First and foremost, when you drop two atomic bombs on a fucking country, when you go that far, all right, when you go that extreme, the United States were like, when you go that extreme the United States were like fucking hell man

we dropped two atomic bombs that's pretty harsh I hope these Japanese don't like try and get revenge someday so one of the conditions to surrender was that like Japan had to massively curtail its military

even to this day Japan has a policy of is it pacifism i think i think it's pacifism i could be wrong but it's a militaristic pacifism japan japan's military isn't very big and it only really exists to defend itself whereas before japan was imperialistic they were very isolationist but quite expansionist as well you know and that ended after nagasaki and hiroshima so you have this country whereby the yanks are occupying them and the yanks are going we're never letting these cunts get their own back not a chance so what do the yanks do put restrictions on the size of the military

the purpose of the military and also they prevent japan from being able to import any type of high grade steel any decent type of steel was completely banned because if you want to build warships and planes and tanks you need decent steel so the yanks were like well that's the first thing you're not having japan but this restriction on steel this kind of allowed like it's in the 70s and 80s i barely remember it now because i was too young but when i was a kid i do remember seeing like toyotas you know japanese cars and they used to have like one yellow door because the door would have fallen off and this was a famous thing with japanese cars up until the 70s and 80s the outside of the car was shit because the metal they were using was absolute crap so they'd rust very quickly and they'd fall apart on the outside but because of this shitness on the outside the insides were incredible

so the japanese focused their technological efforts on making the insides of their things absolutely fantastic so the embargo on steel meant that the electronics were fantastic other factor like i mentioned 200 years of extreme economic isolationism it wasn't only economic isolationism it was cultural isolationism it would have been a crime in Japan at one point

like under Imperial Japan before the end of World War II it would have been criminal to like have a radio and listen to a broadcast from another country or it would have been you know criminal to listen to music from outside of Japan very a lot of cultural purity so post-World War II radios became like a real symbol of freedom, you know, cultural and personal freedom, it was like, you see with Japan, not just Japan, this is something that's common with Germany too, a kind of a post-World War II shame about being on the wrong side of history, where

War II shame about being on the wrong side of history where you're kind of not allowed to celebrate your own culture so you embrace western culture and Japan really did embrace western culture so there was a boom in radios in particular with the the foundation of Sony in 1946 Sony had the first ever transistor radio a wireless radio so you start to see this in 1946 with uh with sony um the other thing that kind of primed japan for success in electronics like in a previous podcast i did a podcast on collectivism and individualism so in societies where in rice growing societies you tend to have a collectivist ideology in that culture in that it's not about an individual it's about working for the benefit of the whole of society so there's a culture within japanese business it's called the kairetsu system of business and what it means

is that corporations instead of really aggressively competing with each other they'll mutually invest in each other and what it does is it leads to kind of a stable efficient kind of horizontal growth and a fast growth and this we saw this with the electronics industry in japan the other thing with japanese electronics japan start moving on to the 50s and 60s the main the cold war right there was massive massive advances in the cold war between mainly the US and Russia military expansion, military technology Russia and the US were focusing on this, they were focusing

on the space race, how the fuck can we get up onto the moon first Japan didn't participate in that, they weren't interested in it instead they were interested in more kind of commercial things while the participants instead they were interested in more kind of commercial things while the participants

in the Cold War were obsessed with killing each other Japan's technological obsession became how do we make life better for our society through technology and Fuji steps in you knowy developed the first electronic computer

in japan fucking vcrs came out of japan a shitload of stuff so where am i going with this where you know how is this ending up as a parallel timeline to the roots of, we'll say, disco music or house music? Well, here's where my kind of, my hot take is kind of coming from, right? I want to start with a young Japanese lad who was born in the early 1930s by the name of Ikutaro Kakahashi. And Kakahashi, he had an unfortunate life. He would have been born kind of quite poor. Both his parents died of tuberculosis when he was two. So he was like a child on his own in Japan. I believe he was in Osaka could be wrong and he essentially had to fend for himself as a child and what he did is that he lived near a

military base and he learned how to fix submarines in a military shipyard when he was six or seven years of age just picked it up as he was going along as a child, fending for himself, fixing submarines. Then as he got a little bit older, to about 16 years of age, he ended up finding himself in a situation where he was working, fixing watches. And this is where,

this is the root of the hot take for this episode because Ikutaro Kakahashi is a very very important person in terms of what his career later developed and I'm very very interested in the fact

that this lad at 16 years of age starts working with watches, in particular, timepieces. The thing is, is that he discovered that for whatever reason, there was no kind of watchmaking industry in Japan. Watches weren't really a Japanese thing. making industry in Japan watches weren't really a Japanese thing so he set out as a pioneer of repairing people's

watches, the ones that were about and learning the intricacies of essentially time pieces this perfect mechanism that is tick tock, tick tock perfect timing, he also becomes

interested in repairing radios again finding himself attracted to attracted to radios because of the freedom, the cultural freedom that they represent he intended at the age of 20 to go back to university because he'd made a bit of money for himself

repairing watches and repairing radios and before he can go to university a bit a bit of money for himself repairing watches and repairing radios and before he can go to university he gets a blast of tb which is a very very big deal obviously in this would have been i suppose the 1950s the late 1940s so he's in an infirmary ward for three years with tuberculosis all the money he'd made from repairing watches and repairing radios this money has to go on his tb treatment and his life is saved because they gave him uh antibiotics which would have been experimental at the time but it saved his life and while he was in hospital then he became obsessed with fixing TVs. And he wanted to have like, he wanted to receive Japan's first ever TV signals.

So he built his own television out of vacuum tubes and things like that. So he was a genius. He was an electronic genius. At a time when electronics was a very new pioneering field and he was completely self-taught so when he gets out of the infirmary he sets up his own little company called the ace electrical company this started off again mainly watches and radios and when it starts to get interesting is And when it starts to get interesting is Kakahashi becomes obsessed with this thing called a theremin, right? Now a theremin was invented by a guy called Dr. Bob Moog, who was a pioneer of musical synthesizers. But the theremin is a very simple musical synthesizer that just makes one tone.

You control it with your hands. It doesn't even have a keyboard. But what made the theremin so revolutionary is that in order to have a theremin in like the 1950s, you couldn't just walk into a shop and buy a Moog theremin. You had to buy an actual kit and build it yourself, which meant you needed to know a thing or two about electronics and circuitry and soldering. And Kakahashi became obsessed with this.

It's like a musical instrument, but it's from electronics. So from that moment, he himself, Kakahashi, decided he wanted to make the Ace Electronic Company an electronic music company, company essentially out of Japan. So he starts to build keyboard instruments. And what he wants to try and start building with Ace Electronics is organs in particular.

Like pipe organs using transistors.'re they're electric kind of organs and by 1959 he's now building really simple organs and he's building guitar amps and pedals and selling them and ace electronics is kind of doing well so he gets to the early 60s and his organs are selling well now the thing is with these organs they weren't synthesizers they were electronic

versions of like pipe organs and if you think of the market of who he'd have been selling to like these organs they weren't really for bands. They weren't, they weren't, he would have been in kind of almost a novelty music market. Organs weren't really being used, not in 63, weren't really used in bands.

Organs would have been very popular in people's homes and also popular in churches in America particularly with gospel music okay if you couldn't afford a big church organ with massive pipes you got an electrical organ and Kakahashi and the Ace

electronic company were making good organs and because of the like the novelty home market we say with organs it's like you'd have your own organ in the house and you'd use it to entertain guests and it wasn't something that was like I said being sold to musical acts so then he starts to think if someone's in their house and they're entertaining people and they're playing their organ and they're not in a band you know bands usually have like a

drummer with them you know what I mean and he starts thinking why don't I make like a little accompanying instrument that I sell with the organs that does the job of a drummer so that if you're in your house playing with your organ you essentially have a little electric drummer beside you because you're not going to fit an actual drummer into your living room and this for me is what I find really fucking interesting his roots are as a watch a watchmaker and a watch repairer the perfect timing so using his knowledge of pieces of electronic equipment that keep time he then comes out with a drum machine called the Rhythm Ace in 1964

and this is fucking revolutionary and this was called a drum machine now Kakahashi didn't invent drum machines drum machines had existed already like there was the Wurlitzer Sideman but they were large and they were bulky and they weren't true

drum machines they played recordings of drums on tapes and they were bulky and they weren't true drum machines they they played recordings of drums on tapes and they were triggered but what kakahashi had invented with his experience of transistor radios he created a really small portable box that was a true electronic instrument that generated drum sounds right and it was a novelty it was a complete another novelty not only was it a novelty it was massively rejected it was seen as a laughable piece of shit toy and it was the type of thing that when people in america mainly the american market because the japanese electronics boom was selling to the American market. When an American bought one of these organs,

they would also get as an add-on this little drum machine with it, which was seen as a novelty toy. Certainly not something that a serious musician would ever consider using. But then, what you start to see with his Rhythm Ace drum machine, this transistor drum machine, it kind of starts to get picked up musically by black gospel musicians. So like I said, the two markets, really, for these electronic organs,

people in their own home who want something for entertaining are black churches who don't have a hell of a lot of money and want to have one of these organs for sunday singing so i'm going to play you a little example of a song now that uses ikutara takahashi's rhythm ace drum machine and this is a song by Timmy Thomas who would have been like an underground soul gospel singer and Timmy Thomas is probably the song is more or less just his voice the drum machine and an organ and you can And you can tell because he wasn't a massive artist, he's probably using the drum machine because he can't afford a drummer or he can't afford to set up a mic to record the drummer.

So for him to use a drum machine like this probably would have been a source of embarrassment. It certainly wouldn't have been valued at the time. It would have been seen as a very very odd thing to do but what you're going to hear here for not the first time in music but a significant example like i said what's interesting here is that kakuhashi was a was a watchmaker and actual an actual drum that a human plays, when a human plays a drum, it's never perfect.

It can't be perfect, because humans have a looseness and an error. No matter how perfect you think a human drummer is, they're always a tiny bit off. But a drum machine is perfection. It is mechanical perfection which there's an argument against it for music it can make music lose its sense of soul because you have this thing that is rhythmically perfect and i find it so fascinating that kakahashi started as this watchmaker this watch repairer and took his knowledge of making watches to make this drum machine.

So here's a bit of Timmy Thomas' Why Can't We Live Together, 1971. You'll hear at the start, the intro, that's the Rhythm Ace drum machine. Thank you. so first and foremost like that's absolutely fucking gorgeous 1971 you might recognise that because Drake Drake sampled that song there about two years ago for a song called Hotline Bling so whoever is sourcing Drake's samples knows their shit just to be a disgusting hipster

I was very annoyed when I wasn't annoyed it was just the hipster in I was very annoyed, when I wasn't annoyed, it was just, the hipster in me got pissed off, that that song was sampled, because I used to listen for years as a little, a secret song that I thought only I knew about, but sure, that's my hipster cross to bear, but yeah, what you have there, like, Timomas an african-american singing soul and blues and gospel you have the african-american musical expression but the japanese tools Kakahashi invented that drum machine

to accompany the organ and this is where we see the beginnings of the hot take I'm trying to get that Japanese instruments electronic instruments

were instrumental as such in mid-20th century onwards african-american musical expression through electronic instruments and it's not just the rhythm ace that's just the beginning and it was still considered a tie the The Rhythm Ace then, it would have had more use. Sly and the Family Stone chanced it. Sly would have been seen as a lunatic for doing it. You had Shuggy Otis. Again, Shuggy Otis is a fucking genius.

His album, Information Inspiration, heavy use of the Rhythm Ace drum machine. It wouldn't have been, it wouldn't have charted. Shuggy Otis was not, he didn't get respect at the time. He got retrospective respect a few years later. Now, that's not the first time drum machines are being used. Drum machines are being used massively in Germany at this time as well with the likes of Kraftwerk and the Krautrock movement.

I mean, that's a separate podcast I am very interested in the fact that we'll say electronic music house music, disco, they're American forms African American forms, African American, Puerto Rican forms but bizarrely African American farms African American Puerto Rican farms but bizarrely the other cultures that can

have a massive influence on them tend to be for some insane reason the axis powers of World War II Japanese instruments Kraftwerk were a massive influence on house music and dance

Kraftwerk from Germany the krautrock scene was an influence and then the Italians the Italo Disco so those are the three those are part of the Axis powers the ones who supported Hitler during World War II I can't understand why that is just yet

so Kakashi continued over the next few years still making drum machines. And making the odd instrument. But in. I think it was the early 70s. Around 72. He quit his own company. The Ace Rhythm.

Or Ace Tone Company. He quit that. And then he founded Roland. And Roland are where. things start to get very big for Kakahashi and there was the Roland electric piano there was the Roland space echo which is a legendary effects unit Kakahashi invented and the Roland jazz chorus guitar amp this was a transistor most guitar amps that are considered good are made from tubes

which are kind of I don't know what you call it, analogue transistor amps tend to be shit but Kakahashi invented one called the Jazz Chorus guitar amp which was hugely influential to many many get jazz guitarists American jazz guitarists in the 70s and 80s this was the go-to amp

Nile Rodgers in chic you know chic are essential to disco music Nile Rodgers is amplifier of choice was the Roland jazz chorusp that was developed by Kakahashi over in Japan with Roland. So I'm going to jump a few years forward to 1980, right? And this is where, this is what Kakahashi would be most remembered for. He invented a drum machine. Roland came out with a drum machine called the TR-808 and the 808

it's one of the most, it is the most important drum machine of all time in a hundred years time the 808 will be looked upon I think as important as an instrument

like a guitar the 808 was fucking revolutionary now the reason it was revolutionary is because it was a massive failure so Roland released the 808 in 1980 and it was a little small analog drum machine and again it wasn't

it wasn't even aimed at musicians at this drum machines and synthesizers by the late 70s they still weren't being taken seriously at all they were the height of novelty the 808 was marketed for someone gigging in a pub who has a guitar and can't afford a drummer or doesn't want a drummer with them and just wants to have this box that can fake the sound of a drum beside it. So Roland didn't sell the 808 to recording musicians. They weren't saying, here's this machine and it makes drum noises and you put this on your album. At most it was sold, a songwriter maybe. If you had a guitar and you wanted to write songs and make a demo that nobody hears, If you had a guitar and you wanted to write songs and make a demo that nobody hears, you might use an 808 if you need a beat to help you write the song.

Now what made the 808 different from any drum machine before it is, like the Rhythm Ace 10 years previously, the beats that were in it, there was maybe 16 of them or something, but you had to use preset beats. The 808 allowed the musician to program in their own beats to have now creative freedom. But again, it wasn't marketed at serious musicians. Also, the other problem with the 808 is that they rolled it out and said, this has got a realistic drum sounds. It didn't at all. The drum sounds of the 808 did not sound fucking realistic in any way.

They sounded, to the ears of a person from 1980, they sounded like utter shit. It was an embarrassing piece of equipment. So they made 1,200 of them. And after three years, stopped making them all together because they weren't selling anyone who bought an 808 in 1980 felt as if they'd been cheated out of it and immediately tried to sell it but what happens from that is and this is where this is the parallel fucking the parallel timeline I'm talking about. So let's take it to Detroit, New York, Chicago in 1980.

When we have the end of disco music and the roots of house music, okay? Go back to the DeVito's Teapot podcast. Try and remember some of that shit or go back and listen to it. So what we have now in Chicago and Detroit is, like I mentioned, disco's done. There's no more money left in disco, but people still want to make it.

No one has the budget for a band. So you have young black artists who come from poor areas in Chicago, New York, Detroit wanting to make music. When they go to pawn shops, all of them see these boxes on the wall, the 808 drum machine that are being sold for fucking 10 quid

because they were a failure. And young black kids in Chicago in 1980 they don't have a friend who has a drum kit they don't have a friend who has a fucking guitar so they all pick up these 808s that have been flooded in the market in the pawn shops

and they take the 808s home and this Japanese instrument this perfectly timed box of electronic industrial rhythm this failed box the sound starts to make sense to kids from Detroit the motor city like I discussed in that podcast the roots of house music they exist because it was an industrial city clocks go perfectly on time

they tick and they tock perfect rhythm they're never out of time tick tock, tick tock, perfection so does machinery in car factories so the young black musicians of Chicago who were pioneering house immediately were like,

this fucking 808, this is the sound that we want. This is exactly what we're looking for. This Japanese instrument from a Japanese watchmaker called Kakahashi. So the 808 is, it's the only drum machine that non people who aren't musicians people who aren't producers you could drop the name 808 and they'd be familiar with it like kenya west has an album called 808 and heartbreaks the 808 like like trap music, that's like the dominant hip hop that's out today right now is trap music.

The bass in trap is an 808 bass, 808 bass drum. It was huge in hip hop, instrumental, the house music, techno, this Japanese instrument. So to give you an example of, we'll say the early use of the 808 in techno I'm going to play you a little sample now of a song called Big Fun by Inner City this is from Detroit would have been written in 1987 Kevin Saunderson was the writer and producer of it Kevin Saunderson could be considered the originator of techno music. This industrial Detroit music that found its heart and soul in the 808. We don't really need a crowd to have a party Just a funky beat and you to get it started

And oh, we, like the sound of the fucking, the future, you know, with Detroit techno. But alongside, there was the 808, then the 808 had an older brother called a 909, the 909 was just as important, slightly different sounds but the same vibe, it was absorbed by house, hip hop techno another incredibly interesting instrument

that happens at the same time is the TB-303 and the TB-303 wasn't a drum machine it was a very new innovative thing it was supposed to replicate a bass guitar and again exactly the same as the Roland 808 the TB-303 was a massive failure. It sounded fuck all like a bass guitar. What Roland and Kakahashi intended with both the 808 and the TB-3, the market was not house musicians in Detroit at all. It was gigging musicians, mostly in Japan, who were gigging in bars.

So Roland's thinking, like taking it back to the rhythm ace you know if you bought an organ you also got this little box beside it well if you bought an 808 in Japan you would also buy the TB-303 so you have the 808 playing the bass or playing the drums and then the TB-303 was supposed to do the job of a bass player. But the TB-303 sounded nothing like bass guitar. It sounded fucking ridiculous. But of course, same thing. The TB-303 ends up being bought by Americans. They buy it, think that this is an utter piece of fucking

shit, give it to a pawn shop, throw it away, and it gets picked up by the kids in Detroit, the kids in New York, the kids in Chicago, the black kids going into the pawn shops, the TB-303 what what the the house musicians found in Chicago was that when you use the TB-303 as it was intended which is to sound like a boring bass guitar when you do it like that it's a piece of shit but they started to get creative with it started to realize that if you twiddle a couple of knobs if you push it beyond what it's supposed to do you end up with this really dark sinister completely new sound that no one has ever heard before very similar to how early blues musicians would abuse their amplifiers like amplifiers for guitars were never meant to sound they were just meant to make your guitar sound slightly louder but early blues musicians like muddy waters

they pushed their amplifiers so that it would distort and that created what you know we now call rock music the same thing happened in chicago with tb-303 with young black musicians pushing it to its limits using it in an unorthodox fashion to create a sound no one had ever heard before so i'm going to play you a quick example now this is a song called the first example of acid house ever of the TB-303 being used within house music to completely create a new genre

now it had been used two years previously by an Indian musician who accidentally created acid house in India by complete fluke but that's not considered part of the history and canon of Acid House music so this is

future Acid tracks. The sound that you're actually looking out for in this as well is the kind of snake like sound in there, that's the TB-303. so kind of what i'm trying to get at with this podcast, you know, this particular episode, and it's a take that I just, I never hear it discussed. That's not to say that, like, Roland aren't celebrated as being pioneers in electronic instruments.

what I'm trying to say is that like African American musical expression flourishes with Japanese instruments and tools and I never hear that spoken about I never hear it phrased like that and it's a fucking fact just like

this episode alone all I've done is concentrate on Kakahashi and Roland. That's just one example. There's several like, it's not just Roland and the one or two drum machines that he made. The reason I focused on Kakahashi is that I find it fascinating that a watchmaker, a person who makes instruments of time, then makes drum machines, which are musical instruments that are perfect time, and that this industrial electronic act of manufacture finds a heart and soul in African Americans from industrial cities that kept me awake at night

thinking about that but that's just one example I could have done another podcast on Yamaha on the instruments that Yamaha made and how they got picked up by house musicians, by techno musicians. I could have done a podcast on Korg. Korg is another Japanese company. Korg had the M1 synthesizer released in the late 80s. And so many sounds that are synonymous with house music or with hip hophop are from the Korg organ a Japanese instrument the most important electronic instrument in hip-hop music is made by a company called Akai another Japanese company the Akai MPC sampler hip-hop music sampled James Brown records sampled funk records to make music.

But the instrument that was used to sample this and to play samples on pads was a Japanese instrument, the Akai MPC, in about 1987. Dr. Dre wouldn't have a career without the MPC. Many hip-hop musicians would say the same thing there's a huge relationship between Japanese instrumentation and African-American expression and here's the thing like as a fucking auto music nerd like I listen to a lot of Japanese music and there's a kind of a derogatory there's kind of a derogatory attitude towards Japanese music right I listened to Japanese funk from the 70s some of the best

funk you will ever hear amazingly recorded instrumentation is perfect incredible musicianship but what gets the detractors will say that Japanese musicians are excellent at aping in other culture that when Japanese musicians express themselves in the 20th century musically all they do is copy american music perfectly and sell back a really really brilliant copy of it that is perfect but adds nothing to it um like another podcast i'm going to do down the line i'm just researching it i might even need to have to go to Japan to research this podcast. I want to do perfectly. Japanese city pop, which is a 1980s Japanese type of music. It's a Japanese version of American post disco, which is a precursor to house. But again, incredibly perfect fidelity recordings, unbelievable musicianship. But it gets critiqued because from a creative perspective

it didn't add anything to the genres it just perfectly aped what was already happening in America and that's something that gets rallied against Japan a lot but the fact of the matter is the creative ingenuity thery, happens in the electronics. Kakahashi invented the 808. I know he was trying to make it sound like a drum kit, but the ingenuity and the forward thinking carry on. Like to make something like a TB-303, a bass player in a box, yes, they were fucking failed.

They were failed instruments that didn't sound anything like the real instruments they were trying to ape. But because of the ingenuity of it, African American musicians, they brought the soul to it. They identified something within there and said, if you use it the way it's intended it's not very good but if you do this with it and you do that with it then it's fucking amazing and I've just never heard

I've never heard I've never seen the Japanese get the nod that they deserve for the true contribution to 20th century music. After 1950. Like.

Like I said. Techno. Disco. Hip hop. House music. Trance music. Trap music. Everything created today

right now owes a little bit to Japan so that's my hot take I hope this podcast wasn't too fucking nerdy for you these are very specific obsessively in-depth

kind of discussions around music but hopefully I I don't know made it accessible I mean at the end of the day the purpose of this podcast it's not really to

it's a form of self expression it's I could do something that I think would be popular or I could speak about something that I think would be popular or I could speak about something that I'm genuinely passionate about and hope that my actual passion and interest in it

will make it engaging. I'd prefer to do that than to... Like, there's podcasters out there and they just look at what's trending like the first half of the podcast I had a hot take but the hot take was about something that's trending massively at the moment and it's very relevant and sometimes I like doing stuff like that but I want to speak about what I give a fuck about and i give a fuck about a japanese watchmaker and how he may have influenced hip-hop music that's that's what i'm into so thank you very

much for listening god bless and before i go i want to plug a gig it's not one of my own gigs but i was asked to advertise it on the podcast it's a gig in whelans and I'd urge you to go to it because it's a charity gig to raise money for the Peter McVerry Trust which helps homelessness, right? And the gig is on Whelans, Dublin, 23rd of January. I'm assuming you can get the tickets on the Whelans website. Good line-up of Irish music on the night.

Elkin, Eve Bell, Bar Q and there might be some more acts added to it go along to that, it's for a very good cause Peter McVerry Trust and it's in Whelans on the 23rd of January have a tremendous week

I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast do you know what I loved making this podcast this week I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast do you know what I loved making this podcast this week I fucking loved it um I get very excited about this stuff I'll do something about dogs next week maybe I don't know you tell me what you want to hear about yurt rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 3030pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for

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