June 29th, 2004
108851795148401764
The hallmark [HMV] of summer
is of course when you go home at ten and it’s still twenty eight degrees outside (at least in Shinjuku). I am halfway through my third consecutive rainy season in Japan and finding it anything but. “Rainy” seems to equate to “seldom sun, heavy haze and the occasional gusting wind”, at least in Tokyo. There was a small earthquake today while I was at work, the first I’d felt since November. Like most earthquakes in Japan, one or two people around me exclaimed surprise, things shook for about seven to ten seconds, and then business returned to normal. I wouldn’t mind frequent, small, temblors if they eased the pressure of the aching earth in a preventive care sort of way.
I am constantly discovering more and more new places to shop in Tokyo. I think that one could make a career out of it (and I’m sure some do), for it is no small feat that something like half of Japan’s (second largest in the world) economy is domestic. After griping to myself about never being able to find a CD it occurred to me that HMV has stormed that market en masse, as there are any number of them taking up amazing tracts of land around the western half of the city. I spent about ninety minutes in the hangar of a twelfth floor that is the Takashimaya branch. They have a lot of stuff, and for the first forty five minutes or so I was beginning to think that I’d discovered another means to my social undoing, lost amongst piles upon piles of anime’, two-for-one DVDs, techno, trance, and goa. Of course my salvation came along with disgusted memories of the HMV in Bangkok and the quickly collapsing Wherehouse chain west of the Rockies. With big pizazz most often comes big prices, and HMV is no exception. Actually, the store isn’t that great, the decorating and aplomb with which things are presented is pretty weak. It’s messy, dead hair salon fuschia, and too loud music blasts from cracked speakers. I could deal with this though for the three aisles of DJs and remixes. However, the prices are ridiculous, and in my mind the prime reason why global music sales are off. I was sure I was going to by the Appleseed soundtrack because it was a two CD set, and the marketing songs are unbelievable (Boom Boom Satellites, Basement Jaxx, and Paul Oakenfold). However, everything else (and even some of the BBS) is complete trash, and I couldn’t listen to the second CD on the preview machine, so I have no idea if it was good or not. In the end, it seemed more feasible that I could find the three or four decent pieces of music on the net than actually enjoy the album along with its thirty-two dollar entry fee.
A larger, more significant strike two against the merchandising monolith was the fact that both CDs I came into the store to buy were not in stock, despite being prominently listed with “on sale now” stickers on the website. When I asked the girl how long it would take to get 4 Strings‘ Believe in, she said two weeks, drawing out the syllable and then more quietly perhaps two months, she didn’t know. Ok! (laughs) The nail in the coffin really though was that I went through the entire goa stock and did not find a single disc below two thousand yen. You can usually always find some questionable psy-trance collection in a newspaper cover for at most eleven bucks, even in Wherehouse. [In retrospect, that's REALLY the stuff you want to rip, because you know it's never coming back when the coke head pillages your car's CD wallet.] Anyway, that’s a very poor showing, and most of the single LPs were twenty-five to twenty-eight bucks a pop.
So, I bought a Godskitchen compilation just because it had so much material in it that the average worked out to be eleven bucks a disc. Unfortunately it seems that it’s not even mixed [listening now], despite small, (perhaps rightfully so) text suggesting John ’00′ Fleming and Fergie spun it together. You get what you pay for, except, in the case of ets-global [two gigs from a week of BitTorrent], in which you get so ridiculously much for nothing I’m sure the universe is folding in on itself someplace (maybe HMV corporate headquarters).
[As a footnote, it really bothered me to see so many of the newer CDs (especially electronica) with labels boasting some sort of copy protection, preventing the creation of MP3s. This also somehow causes them to be unplayable in game machines, which to me is contradictory as most of the discs bearing this technology were involved with Sony, who boasts that the Playstation is an all-in-one media player for the home. I have heard somewhere that this protection doesn't actually work with a lot of the rippers available, so it could just be a lame joke. I'll have to look into it more, as it's even less appealing for me to buy a CD that I know I can't backup or listen to when I jog with the Rio. So much for fair use.]
