Issue 3
In Spring of 2002, HoW find themselves in London to better understand the transcontinental manifestations of popular culture (particularly in pubs). Example: HoW is in Spitz, a performance space situated above a hip restaurant in Spitalfields Market. The space is dark, as a club should be, but not oppressively so. We are at our table, two pints of stout in front of us, while the DJ spins an impossibly eclectic collection of music. One of us turns to the other and says, “this is quite good”; the other replies, “it’s what I dream about.”
The first musician up is Taku Sugimoto, dressed in a hat and leather jacket that recalls Robert DeNiro in Mean Streets. His freely improvised music is delicately pointillistic at first, and then haunting. He plays guitar like the way a Zen rock garden is arranged—simple gestures, sparingly used. At the end of this sparse performance, Sugimoto, so serious on stage, smiles broadly and walks into the audience, asking “did you like it?” At first, the people he approaches aren’t sure how to respond. But then, people begin to praise his work, which he receives with a kind of goofy pleasure.
A day or two later, HoW is coming out of Sports Pages in Covent Garden, and in front of a guitar store, there is Taku Sugimoto again, window shopping. HoW feels shy: should we say anything? Eventually, we say that we caught his show and enjoyed it very much. The same crooked-teeth grin, the same snorted laughter. “Oh, you liked it?” He seems as surprised to see us as we him.
Now, in the pantheon of pop idols, Taku Sugimoto is pretty small beer. One of the charms of the highly fragmented pop world is that many of the musicians in the micro-micro scenes are very accessible and work at creating a strong sense of community. In fact, absolutely the best part of Spitz was that it conveyed a feeling that here was a real community of people passionately committed to avant-garde music. So why was HoW so shy at approaching Sugimoto? Despite the sense of community already referred to, there is still a divide between performers and consumers that seems endemic to pop culture. Are we at HoW helping to break down some of these barriers? The answer, sadly, is no, as our bashful encounter with Taku Sugimoto on Shaftesbury Avenue demonstrates.
The best we can do, in this third issue, is offer critiques of audience/performer relationships. John Kimsey uncovers the savage heart of rock and roll and finds that it belongs to a semiotician. Said Shirazi uncovers Bono’s big sellout, and finds a savior in Eminem. Hazel Cameron discovers academic interest in Japanese pop and its burgeoning appeal in the West. And Jeff Purdue recovers some of his sanity by bringing his two-part article on Nico to a close.
