2010-9-12
Well, that surprised me.
When I tried to watch a live concert by Arcade Fire in the suburbs of Paris on U-tube,
a live performance from 2009 came up right at the beginning, so I thought, “Oh, their latest live performance,”
only to find that it was young people playing something like a street gig at a Sophia University festival or something.
Good for you… the vocals were not quite there, but just doing it was quite an achievement… now, if you were to produce critical essays with concise words that strike home, about the present state of things and the state of the mass media, especially television, Japan would undoubtedly be reborn.
For young people have value only when they are at the very tip of the rocket.
Young people… are beautiful simply because they are young, you say?
Don’t talk nonsense.
Do you know what Zeami said 600 years ago?
… The flower of the moment, blooming with each season, is not the true flower.
The true flower remains without falling, even when the tree grows old… that is what he said.
One reason Japan’s mass media today, especially television, which I have mentioned so many times, are truly no good is that they chase nothing but these flowers of the moment.
That attitude began to affect even politics, the most important thing for the country… and produced these 20 years…
From those 20 years your senior right down to you today, there is an essential cause there too for your experience of an age in which finding employment is difficult.
You too, in fact, bear responsibility for having followed such mass media obediently, without entertaining any doubts… or even joining in their frivolity….
The spirit of the band on the street at Sophia University was good, though….
For example, when I watched footage of Régine Chassagne, who is also the wife of their lead vocalist… Win Butler… playing various instruments… especially when she was playing the drums, I was shocked…
Why?… Because that is music itself…
Together, all of them embody what music is.
I believe that it is far more precious than the classical music that the elite speak of as a mark of cultivation.
Why?… Because classical music rots at the very moment the elite speak of it as a mark of cultivation.
Something like Hideo Kobayashi’s essay on Mozart is, if you ask me, like a fart.
Because music, in the first place, is something you beat, strike, play, and move your body to.
Well, as for the tremendous power of music’s essence, please look forward to the book I will eventually begin writing as my mission.
For there, I will write about the roots of human thought and the essential sickness that still exists in our country… this is, in fact, the real reason for the “lost 20 years”… and complete it with a structure and style… that only I can write.