[PREV - MERCY]    [TOP]

TURNING

                                          March 2, 2000    

The song "Turning Japanese" had
young teenagers asking "So what's
'turning japanese' supposed to
mean?"

    They came up with the answer that
    "turning japanese" was a euphemism
    for masturbation.

But it's pretty clear that "Turning
Japanese" is about being obsessed
with photography, and it's a
reference to the stereotype of
Japanese tourists running around
taking pictures of everything.

Maybe the misleading lines are:

   I want a doctor to take your picture/
   so I can look at you from inside as well.

Maybe there's some implication here
about masturbating to photographs,            A friend insists that
but it isn't the main focus, and 	      the context is that the
certainly not what the chorus was 	      singer is literally in
about.					      prison, looking at photographs.

It's amazing how bad people can be 
at listening to song lyrics... even                     Okay, maybe.         
when it's a song that they've heard 
a million times on the radio, they                      (He mentions being 
may only catch a few words from it.                     in a "cell", and     
                                                        there's the lines    
The constant repetition causes                  	"No sex/no drugs/    
the song to move into the               		no wine/no women"    
background, and then no matter          		And so on.)          
how bizarre the lyrics might            		                     
be, it becomes invisible.                               But what would       
                                			'turning japanese'   
There are many, many examples.  			have to do with that? 
                                  
Many people don't understand 
that the Lou Reed song 
"Walk on the wild side" is
about transvestites in New
York. Despite lines like:
"shaved her legs on the way/
and then he was a she".

The Bruce Springsteen song "Born in the USA"
was regarded as some great patriotic anthem,
when really it's about how awful the Vietnam war
was and what it did to the people fighting it: 
"in the black of dark, you can see too much/
till you spend half your life just to cover it up."

All of this is especially peculiar
when you consider that lyrics are
*required* in pop music.
                                                    
You've got to have someone singing
something even though no one is
going to hear the words.
                                                         
Things like Techno can be a great success
as dance music, but it hardly ever breaks
through into the Top 40.

Okay, so we might suppose that it has to do
with the *sound* of the human voice, it's an
instrument unlike any other, and there's no
reason it shouldn't be popular.

But then, why is it so important that the
lyrics of a song should be in English?

There's a lot of music sung in French,
Spanish, Chinese, etc, but it's extremely
rare for any of it to touch the American
charts.


--------
[NEXT - SUBVERSIVEPOP]