I’m calling it.  5 years from now there is going to be a Choice Is Yours and it is going to be Chronicle against Chronicle…as this movie has no competition. Chronicle is the first movie I have seen in a long time that when it ended I wanted to go right back in and see it again.

So now I am just trying to figure out if this was just a ME thing or if it was actually amazing.  My compadre in movie watching crime thought it was great, and when I was listening in on other people talking I heard a lot of “WOW, that was a lot better than I thought it was going to be.” So take that how you will. First a refresher. As Whole Milk pointed out the film is written by Max Landis, son of John Landis. Chronicle is both Max’s and director Josh Trank‘s first feature, probably not for long though.

One reason some people seem hesitant to take Chronicle seriously is because of it’s place in the “found footage” subgenre but it works here for two reasons. First, without the firstperson camera I think the movie would have been straight up BAD.  It is the camera that makes the movie so PERSONAL and affecting. Second, they do a really good job of making the camera make sense…jumping from sources/angles, using the powers to get different shots etc etc. Trust me, it all works.

Other great things?  Big shout out to Michael B. Jordan aka Wallace from The Wire aka Vince Howard from Friday Night Lights for holding it down yet again and moving higher and higher on my favorite actors list. Also, although I loved the whole movie, the last 20 minutes are just INSANE.

I don’t really want to talk about the plot too much other than to say it is about “Kids Getting Powers.” A lot of people have been claiming this to be a superhero movie which…it really isn’t.  Yes, the kids have superpowers but they aren’t really starting new lives with them but just incorporating them into their normal lives with varying results. Honestly the only thing I can really think to compare it to is Akira.

I think at the end of the day that is why I loved Chronicle so much. When I was a youngster I would fantasize about having powers and using them on the daily, not running off and fighting evil…WAYYYYYY too much work. Amiright? Anyway, if you liked the trailer even a little bit I think you owe it to yourself to go see Chronicle.

If you’ve been into this hip-hop thing for long enough, you are most likely tired of it. Just like most genres, I guess. You get back to it every now and then because there’s nothing like it – but it still bores the hell out of you to sort through all the crap that is being played and said and made and swayed these days. If you’ve been into hip-hop for long enough, you have most likely heard of J-Zone – or one of his productions. While I am not a huge fan of everything he does, as a rule I am entirely puzzled by the fact that he never hit payload off a ghost production somewhere. To me, he has always been the weirdo Pete Rock, the choosy DJ Premier, a big name sound without all the big name drama. He has a style that’s instantly recognizable, and any beat you pick out of his catalog will make you at the very least nod your head in appreciation. But his instrumentals are so complex and rich that it takes only the most ridiculous lyricists to benefit from the win-win relationship that is to be able to spit on a J-Zone beat: Cage, Celph Titled, Wordsworth, Biz Markie, Rugged Man, GM Grimm and… a handful others. Zone himself can’t quite get on par with his own beats, people of his entourage did a better job than he did, but at least he says funny stuff… That is neither here nor there though, because J-Zone has been into this hip-hop thing for long enough to be tired of it and he retired himself from the game with zero Soundscan hits under his belt.

When he wasn’t rapping or producing, he has been writing a column for The Source and more recently Egotrip’s blog, where he shared his thoughts and archive with the world. That is also where the masses were introduced to his droll journalistic style (no tumblr). That is where Root For the Villain is coming from. Subtitled “Rap, Bullshit, and a Celebration of Failure,” it is part autobiography, part exposé. The first chapter goes right for the femoral as Zone traces his intellectual and physical lineage to his two grandfathers, characters and chroniclers in their own rights. They gave him his sense of humor, his sense of self, his first musical experiences. When his skin color made him a target for bullies, rappers provided him with role models and enough material to tread water in trash talk territory. One by one, he connects his defining moments with rap releases, as we watch him grow from a teenage jive turkey up to a grown ass man of few words, from intern bathroom cleaner in a recording studio up to working overtime as main engineer in another. He meets his idols along way, tours around the world, his crew forms and falls apart and he touches on good and bad times with the same candor. My ONE gripe with this part, and it’s entirely personal, is that we don’t learn a thing about where HUG and Shid have gone.

The second part of the book contains a series of rants, treatises, short stories about being a New York resident, a reformed indie rap producer, a single 34-year-old black man in 2010. While the first half was more about him being a man-child who grew up both faster and slower than his peers, this one is about him being a child-man who gets pissed off at the internets and generally yells at cloud. Both parts of the book are equally entertaining to read though because even his most melancholic recollections are treated like they happened to someone else.

There is no weeping, no preaching, no gossipping; just a list of what J-Zone has been through, and what kind of man that made him. You can only sympathize with his tour stories. I did feel my gallbladder being yanked out of my stomach when I read that his Live @ The Liqua Sto sold less than 50 copies upon release; partly because I bet I can find more than 50 people with the album on their hard drive right now, partly because I had no idea how badly overlooked he was. I do know many underground artists have stories much like his, being abandoned by a crappy promoter halfway through a tour in rural France or running after artists who haven’t paid him for beats. However I am not sure how many have bought mega record crates from crackheads and how many are living with their grandma. This is the kind of unique anecdotes that make the book an interesting read even if you had no idea who he is as a musician. The epilogue/third part of the book (which is only twenty pages deep with a lot of pictures) is called “Word to the Nerds” and it is where he gets the most personal, and the most nerdy. No boring details, technical stuff, perhaps even a lack thereof.

“Rap, bullshit and the celebration failure” are the soundtrack to J-Zone story. You can hear each of them oozing out of every reference, every rhetorical figure, every blunt moment of honesty. But I suppose it’s not a very marketable title; Root For the Villain is much catchier, but I can see nothing villainous, or even remotely ill-meaning about the dude. Shit, if it were another column, I would call him kuudere. He doesn’t conform, he doesn’t care, but it’s not like he didn’t try, and he’s not missing out on much anyway. A bit less than 200 pages for about the retail price of a record, entirely worth it. So go villain go!

I went on a vacation this past weekend. It was beautiful, breathtaking, exotic, enchanting, mysterious, and mostly magnificent. The place I went was very far away, in the northern reaches of Tamriel. I took a vacation to Skyrim. I highly suggest you do as well. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda Softworks‘ long awaited sequel to 2006′s Oblivion, is not a game you simply play. It is a world you inhabit, and indeed one that inhabits you. In case you can’t tell, I quite enjoyed this game.

To me there is no more deep and rewarding gaming experience than the RPG. I’ll play a shooter til I’m dizzy, or Street Fighter until my thumbs bleed. I’ll do so many Starcraft matches back-to-back that I can’t remember where one ends and the next begins. But only a masterful RPG, usually these days from Bethesda, engages me on seemingly every level. Now, 5 games into the series, simply returning to Tamriel is a happiness that I’m almost embarrassed to cop to.

Sporting a detailed and rich history and culture that surely flirts with even the most revered of fantasy epics, the Elder Scrolls games have long been more ambitious than could be supported by the hardware they were built for. Still an incredible game, the sheer size and scope of Oblivion left the experience slightly tarnished by bugginess and perhaps less than impressive combat mechanics.

Thought still not perfect, Skyrim refines everything from Oblivion (and indeed incorporates a lot of good from Bethesda’s other mega-franchise, my beloved Fallout 3) and delivers a knockout punch of a game that will not soon be forgotten. Wonderfully, I’m sure there’s still large swathes of the game that I haven’t even encountered, despite having already sunk a borderline unsettling amount of hours into it.

The action in this game shifts from the southern lands of Cyrodiil to, naturally, the Nordic province of Skyrim which is embroiled in a war between the Imperial Legion and the rebellious Stormcloaks. Your character, who begins in true Elder Scrolls tradition as a prisoner en route to execution, is quickly embroiled in a truly epic battle of Dragons, demons, Jarls, kings, giants, and oh so much more.

Skyrim is truly enormous. But it is never boring. The land is varied, from impossibly tall snow capped peaks, to dense forests, barren wastes, deep underground caverns, rural townships, highly populated cities and massive castles. You could be distracted for hours upon hours simply running around taking it all in. It is no understatement to say I have been left breathless by the land many times, and probably will be again.

Standing on a mountain looking down at a herd of mammoths move across the plains past a encampment of bandits around a bonfire, you may suddenly find the northern lights blooming above, sweeping in front of the twin Nirnian moons. The simulacrum of majesty is utterly impressive. As is the care put into crafting hundreds of unique and meaningful characters.

Though I always enjoy the main quest line, it is the smaller side adventures that really make the game. Whether it be helping a princess (or is she a traitor?) escape from a pack of shadowy assassins, reading entire in-game books of lore, healing Tamriel’s world tree, delivering a love letter, or attending classes at the college of magic, the world seems so lived in you can’t help but fall in love. This is aided by improved scripting, voice acting, and character animation.

Whereas Oblivion’s characters were saddled with bulbous borderline-inhuman faces, here the expressiveness allows for true appreciation of dialogue and nuance. There is also more variety. Argonians and Khajiit no longer look like re-skinned Nords. Weapons and armor are unique and multifaceted, and you might find yourself getting attacked while distracted by the swirling flame cube spell you summon in your outstretched hand.

There are still bugs, sure. With a game of this size and caliber shipping a perfect version is literally impossible. But, as they do, Bethesda will patch it soon and the experience will become even better. If you’re an Elder Scrolls veteran odds are you’re playing this game right now. If not, then this is the perfect time to jump into this rich and rewarding world. Just make sure to clear out your calendar. For real.

More NSFWery! This one more so than the last. Beware.

It really is funny how things work: Toshio Maeda, king of “erotic grotesque” manga, has declared that he got the idea for Demon Beast Invasion as he was trying to circumvent Japanese censorship (forbidding the depiction of sexual appendages in manga) for his previous series Urotsukidoji. Arguably, he probably had other inspiration too. BUT! This is another example in a long series of things that have started with one weird idea and became a veritable cultural institution. Demon Beast Invasion is simple as that: aliens (those demon beasts!) want to invade the earth but since the atmosphere is different down here, they just poke their tentacles through the atmosphere to rape our women and create hybrids that can actually live on earth. Pretty common scenario for the 90s.

The modern day equivalent is Squid Girl starring Ika Musume, a girl whose hair is a squid. She is sent from the sea to the mainland in order to punish humans for polluting the sea but puny humans make her pay for the damages she does and she finds herself having to work as a waitress to repay her debt. The dōjin version has her exact her revenge slightly differently (also: sex toy).

Such is the pattern. Remember our previous discussion on moe: the big eyes, those tiny button noses, crazy hair colors or silly haircuts, these are all part of the moe turn-ons. The Dōjinshi strip them off their clothes and feed the same character to fetishists: see Konata and Kagami in lingerie; see Tsunade and Shizune battle out for big boob supremacy; see Cassandra of Soul Calibur get raped a million ways. Pause?

Please. Fetishes are what they are, hentai are what they are, so – therefore – dōjinshi will venture in gross territory. Incest, pedophilia and rape happen more often in these books than reason would dictate. Sure, they are drawings. They are absurd. Whoever started drawing chibi characters (dwarfed versions like the one you are seeing above) certainly meant it for overwhelming cuteness purposes such as that of baby animals, rather than making the character look like a childlike sexual object. Somewhere down the line that went awry. At best it’s awkward. But it’s no recent phenomenon, and I think that we’re beyond trends at this point; this has market value to some authors.

As you can expect, there have been many attempts to legislate on hentai dōjinshi, but the debate is pretty close to that on video games and pornography before them: if you are reading a story that involves incest, will you be spurn to have incestuous relationships? Or will it on the contrary appease your curiosity for incest so that you will not be tempted to try it yourself? Are we weirdos because we like weird things, or do we like weird things because we are weirdos? Take City Hunter and GTO for example. They are, truthfully speaking, hentai material. And yet no adult in their right mind is going to say they got caught peeping into the women’s locker at the gym because they read these manga. The comical elements clearly offset the pervy ones. So why would it be any different for lewd acts that actually carry a prison sentence? These are imaginary character, our disbelief should be suspended enough as it is. And do you really need to see drawn penises and vaginas to be jacking off to Sailor Moon?

This is not a debate that will be resolved here, so let’s get back to business. Deviant sexual practices aside, there is a lot of room for the more cartoony kinds of moe.

Since we’re talking about Squid Girl, take hairstyles for example. Much like in Western erotica, ponytails, pigtails and bobs are pretty widely accepted as cute stuff. Then there’s the ahoge (“silly hair” a the weird curl/cowlick on top of the character’s head), and hime cut with straightened bangs and sidelocks that basically frame the girl’s face squarely. And then the haircolors. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mention of a character dyeing their hair green or light blue, it’s just an accepted fact of manga. Surely that started out as a fluke: can’t really make a good black highlight with grey so you use a navy hue, and someone thought that looked kind of good and created a character with blue hair, and so forth. Also it comes in pretty handy to make two characters that look somewhat alike distinguishable from one another (See for instance Ranma ½). But some people just get off of girls with purple hair, so you will find dōjinshi crossing storylines of characters from different manga or even medium just to see two purple-haired heroines making out. Or pink on purple hair. Or pink and green hair. You get the point.

And the same applies to characters with darker skin tones which also becomes stuff-to-jerk-off-to, without it being necessarily a racial thing. At least I don’t assume there is a racial thing. Or at least it’s understated. Just like hair color, skin color is never really accounted for either in the canons (except for aliens I guess) or the dōjinshi. Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that the Japanese archetype is pale-skinned with jet black hair. Hang around Japanese and Chinese people long enough and you will hear jokes about the “dark”, “greasy”, “bad” skin of their Vietnamese and Cambodian counterparts (you may even hear self-deprecating from the latter themselves). This is the same obsession with whiteness that created the ganjiro and ganguro kogals (and tanaholics everywhere else you don’t get graced by 300 days of sunshine). Similarly, little girls are still by and large a symbol of innocence in Japanese tradition, it’s not a gratuitous association that can easily be replaced by another visual representation with an equal cultural weight.

I’m assuming that if you’ve been reading thus far, you are at least somewhat familiar with Japanese exploitation cinema, video games, kaiju or some kind of Japanese subculture. You have seen or heard of their love for disproportionalities. I’ve talked about their extreme musics, and dōjinshi are the venue of choice for grossly interpolated literal extremities. Distrophic sexual appendages I mean. But serialized. And these are extremely easy to find on the internets, probably too easy I’d say, because they end up being a novelty when there are tons of perfectly valid dōjinshi out there that do not contain hentai stuff. I am sure that is due in part to the fact that translating complicated stories requires much more effort than interjections and grunts.

This alternative market remains pretty exciting at the end of the day – intellectually speaking – when you keep in mind that this is all derivative work. All this pr0n because someone, somewhere, has to be interested in it. Again, this is a market, an economy. There are high school boys AND girls out there making money off of drawing incest and rape. And what is available on the internet is only a fraction of what is produced annually – and what has been produced in the last 30 years. It boggles the mind.

Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos) – Battlestar Galactica

Vs.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) – Star Trek: The Next Generation

Alright this is a pretty dorky CIY but I want to know who do you want captaining your ship? Who’s hands would you entrust your life in hmmmm? Bald versus a full head of hair! Frack this is a hard one, but whatever… Engage! Choice is Yours…

Every once in a while a Tumblr comes along that’s actually worth a damn; one that’s actually creative and not just photoshopped celebrities holding sandwiches. Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses is blowing up lately, you might’ve seen it already but for those who haven’t – you’re welcome.

The Turtles first got huge 20+ years ago, what took our society so long to see the nose connection? I hope Gucci sees the above photo because I feel like he would really get Raph on his nose and Krang on his money gut

One of the coolest features of action figure packaging back in the day were the little bio cards on the back that you could cut out. Pretty much every line had them on the back bottom right of the packaging. I used to keep all mine in a shoebox. I don’t know if figures come with these anymore. I bought a Star Wars A7-R7 figure the other day and there was no card. It did come with “battle dice” for use in some kinds of galactic battle game. I threw everything out besides the actual figure.

I started looking at old G.I. Joe bio cards from the ’80s the other day and as a kid I never realized how hilarious they were. It never registered with me that any of my Joes or Cobras were chronic gamblers, womanizers, or failed MCs (see: Major Bludd above). Imagine how awesome it would have been to be a copywriter* for Hasbro back in the ’80s?

Much thanks to YoJoe.com and their extensive gallery of vintage filecards. Here are some of my favorites:

Barbeque, a “basic party animal,” can “wrap his lips completely around the bottom of a quart of Coke.” Would you really want that in your government file? It sounds like Barbeque has no sense of duty, he just gets off on riding on the back of a fire engine and, “the icing on the cake,” breaking windows with his axe.

Footloose was an academic champ when all of a sudden he dropped out and became “quite weird” for three years. I can only assume this means Burning Man. Then a cosmic messenger told him to join the Army. The narrative thread of Footloose’s life makes perfect sense.

Clutch actually sounds pretty awesome.

Floridian swamp vehicle operator Copperhead joined COBRA to pay off his bookie. That seems reasonable. The best part of his card is the quote from Gung-Ho at the bottom – the part about having a “heart fulla gimme and a mouth full o’ much obliged.” I’m stealing that for my headstone.

Head over to YoJoe’s card archive to check out the rest!

*That copywriter doing the backs of the cards was actually none other than Larry Hama, the man behind Marvel’s G.I. Joe comic book.

NOTICE: All links following heretofore shall be fortitudinously thought of as NOT SAFE FOR WORK, forthwith. Forsooth. Forealtho.

Not all of them will be smutty, but they may lead you to something that is. So I am taking precautions. As you do, when smut is involved. Dōjin books are called dōjinshi and once again, they are what a lot of people on this side of the Pacific ocean would call “indie” publications: small press, self-published funny books. Literary fanzines, yes. Note that when you speak of manga outside of Japan, it is usually referring to only a tiny portion of the country’s comic book production. First and foremost because a lot of it is so very Japanese that it would take more resources to translate and publish than there would be people willing to buy the darned books. Also because manga production is targeted to specific audiences in terms of age and gender, a practice that is just catching steam in the western world. Wikipedia speaks of a 3.6 billion dollar market in 2007 – by comparison, this article tallies 705 million dollars for comics and graphic novels in the US, with twice the population. Huge.

Most of that money is realized at Comiket, a bi-annual convention held in Tokyo. The first Comiket was started by a group of university students in the summer of ’75 when they got tired of being rejected from the Japan Manga Convention. With an open mind, and empty stomachs, they invited anyone with an interest in manga to participate, regardless of their age, gender or professional status. The result was a few hundred attendees – a majority of them school girls who had been expanding the lives of their favorite shōjo characters outside of the books, into their diaries (there’s your chess clubs, your math clubs, and then there’s the manga clubs). These girls soon formed their own publishing circles, and Comiket has grown from 30-odd authors to 30,000 authors and half a mil attendees. At some point in the 80s, there was actually a rift between those who wanted to keep the even low-key and indie and those who wanted it to expand as far as the eye could see.

And what happens when you gather a bunch of japanese people, nerds, girls, nerdy girls and girly Japaneses all in one place? Well, cosplay, for one thing. Hard to know which started first: if you’re going to obsess over a comic book character to the point of writing stories of your own, why not give them a new life in the real world. This is another paradygm shift that happened in the dōjin world, which I guess happens cross-fandoms: how far can you stray away from the canon? Early dōjinshi explored alternate universes, expanded the storylines when a series was terminated or chronicled what happened in a timelapse. The most famous example would probably be the “Ground Zero” arc of Gundam Wing, taking place between the two anime series but came from a completely different writing staff from the original and which actually got released as a commercial graphic novel in the U.S.

I believe that a big catalyst for cosplay are those few mangas of the 80′s that developed gigantic cosmologies that were not just based on Japanese life. Saint Seiya for example. I was totally obsessed with that series as a kid, maybe it was in part because Seiya turned out to be Sagittarius and everyone knows Sagittarius is the best sign; at first I thought it didn’t make much sense that Seiya and Shun were Pegasus and Andromeda (Greek symbols, I was raised with those) while Shiryu and Hyoga were a dragon and a swan (wtf? a SWAN? that’s scary?) and then there was Ikki who was totally badass and a Phoenix (North African mythology) then I started to understand the whole constellation thing and the Gold Saints made so much more saints and the whole Hades arc was AWESOME. Also, at the same time the younger/more feminine audience was geeked up on that Sailor Moon, once again with several main characters who find their strengths in somewhat arcane references to outer space and short skirts.

Anyway. Everyone can relate to these characters. Everything was ambivalently developed from their spirituality to their sexuality. Seriously, the gender of Shun was always kind of a question mark for me. Not that I cared, but he looked kind of girly, in that pink armor of his. Imagination can, and will, run wild in these cases, and thus the Yaoi (Boy’s Love) genre was born. Of course these pubescent dudes in skimpy outfits had to have side interests when not fighting evil, and it turns out that they made out a bit.

That made a lot of manga companies a bit awkward at first, but they soon realized that dōjin meant no harm. They just represented what a lot of girls (and boys) fantasized about without being able to express it in their daily life. Of course, sometimes they don’t just make out and have pretty raunchy sex; but in this case or the other, if you never dreamed of seeing Shun and Hyoga or Shun and Ikki (??? – they’re supposed to be brothers) in deep embrace, chances are you won’t be acquainted with the circle that produces those books, and you can live on as happy as you did before. I found out many years later that Captain Tsubasa also had a pretty good run for Yaoi storylines. That had never occurred to me.

The same rules apply to literature as they did to music and video games: you don’t produce dōjinshi that’s going to be offensive to your audience. And what used to be unacceptable in different times is not necessarily a taboo any longer: said audience has grown wider, more eager for crazy stuff. What has become known as “moe” (moweh) manga is just focusing on one appealing detail of the character’s description and running away with it. Yaoi and hentai genres are perfect in that respect because they straddle very carefully the line between lust/divergence and love. Both terms are often used to mean something pornographic outside of Japan, but the truth is they refer to graphic, erotic content that is sexualized but not necessarily sexual. Truth is the characters are just so damn cute, you just want to mentally hang out with them – they might just drop their panties in the end. These dōjinshi create endless side romances between characters, just to see what would happen; penetration is not the point of the exercise. Some people would just like to see an effeminate character be a top, and other want to see a badass be a bottom, for a change. As I pointed out earlier, a lot of dōjin, yaoi included, are written by girls or women and yuri (girl on girl) novels are usually written by dudes. The stories/pairings are really an excuse explore the character’s psyche, it’s wordy cosplay produced especially for people who have that obsession with the characters.

It used to be that pervy manga characters allowed the reader to kind of break that fourth wall: Muten Roshi of Dragon Ball, Ryo Saeba of City Hunter (or even Brock of Pokemon) but today it is clear that mainstream manga has completely (and wholeheartedly) caught up with the moe trend. You don’t have to look very far to find characters that are an otaku’s dream: for instance Izumi of Lucky Star or Hayate of Hayate No Gotoku which is essentially turning the Maid moe on its head.
What a beautiful thing it is. Nerds ruling the free world – or is it the other way around? How riba!

Over the weekend at Power-Con, L.A.’s He-Man and Thundercats convention, Mattel held a panel to talk about their 2012 MOTU Club Eternia releases. Amidst exciting reveals like Slushhead, Griffin, and a Goddess exclusively available at cons, they announced a drop that had my nostrils flaring with greedy nostalgia: a Stinkor that reeks of his original funk!

The first Stinkor figure figure, aka “The Evil Master of Odors,” was released in 1985 and was basically a Mer-Man mold painted like a skunk. But the plastic poured into the mold was mixed with the signature scent of hippies: patchouli oil – trapping the stank in Stinkor figures forever.

Mattel also announced the release of The Mighty Spector, a character rejected by Mattel 30 years ago. Spector was designed by Scott Neitlich, Mattel’s Associate Brand Manager, for the original MOTU create-a-character contest. The figure was designed from a sketch made by Scott 30 freaking years ago. Kind of fitting that Spector is a time traveler, amirite?

What I want to know is: anyone out there with the OG Stinkor figure? Does he still stink?

via Action Figure Insider

I realize that it is difficult to separate one cultural realm from the other. I’m sorry. That is how things work. While the first part of this Blogling about music (here) presented an awful lot of video game music, this one will unabashedly start with music video games.

Nearly a decade before Guitar Hero had American teenagers experience the power of rock and Rock Band subsequently brought their families together for some wild weekend jamming to Bon Jovi on the weekend, Japanese dorks had Beatmania. In Beatmania, you are a club DJ whose mission in life is to rock the crowd. Armed with 5 keys and a turntable, you need to reconstruct the song that is playing and to keep tha headz ringin’. For that, you get money. The songs in the game were either original or remixes developed expressly for Konami by more or less renowned artists in genres ranging from soul to “hard tekno.” Not too shabby. Remember this was originally an arcade game, then picture yourself rocking a virtual crowd by yourself in a middle of an actual crowd.

After that, the game was ported on the Playstation and Game Boy Color and even had its own portable console. Several Beatmania cabinets were created along the years with fresh tracklisting and updated graphics, the line was nicknamed “Bemani games” by Konami who laughed at the fat kids all their way to the bank and went on to design Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania. Of course these have all the ingredients to attain cult status and Bemani arranges are still wildly popular (and wildly frowned upon by the copyright holders).

Until a few years ago, I really had no idea about the pervasiveness of these games. Then during the second or third Hado Channel party (more on that in a second), the chat room became animated over this thing they called “Stepmania.” I inquired. These young minds came from a message board called BemaniStyle. It turns out, some Smartypant had released an open-source emulator of DDR, played on the keyboard. Open-source meant that with a little bit of knowhow, you could put any song in the world into the game and dance your fingertips away.
Hado Channel is an online rave party that now spans several nights, with back to back DJs from the J-trance, J-core and gabber persuasion. Of course, shit got real, real fast.

The track in this video is made by m1dy, the man is a kōjin (個人サー) or one-man dōjin. I will probably profile him at some point or another. I hold gabber dear to my heart. I grew up close to the Belgian border and a really stones throw away from Rotterdam – when my friends drove to Amsterdam to sample the vegetation, I had to hop along for the ride and stomp the night away. Gabber is what many people Stateside will call “hardcore techno,” but it has a very specific proletarian/fraternal ethics. Gabbers shave their heads, often wear military gear and braces; at first glance they’re not very different from skinheads. What you may not notice if you’re not paying attention is how sample-heavy, dorky and subversive gabber is. I certainly didn’t realize how much sampling of 80s music, Detroit house, dutch pop and exploitation movies was going at the time I was the most involved in this scene. Then came all the jumpstyle/hardstyle kids (and college) and I kind of lost interest (also I found a refuge in breakcore). All this to say that in addition to the 300+ bpm range making the music unfit for commercial distribution, clearing rights for gabber simply cannot happen – which is why the dōjin format is basically tailor made for it.

First dudes I heard came out of Osaka and quickly it spread to the rest Japan, for a discipline called J-Core (which can be anything from hard tech to splittercore and makina). Associated circles include Mob Squad Tokyo lead by M-Project, C.H.S (Cutie & Headshaking Sounds) lead by T+Pazolite (d(♥.♥)b) or Alice’s Emotion lead by REDALiCE. I hear you, demanding minds. Here are samples.

(more…)