As someone with a background studying literature and related pop culture, I’ve long been intrigued by discussions of canons. How does a comunity decide what makes a list of acknowledged great works in a medium, and what are the criteria used? It’s been a hotly debated topic in capital-l Literature, of course, especially as the culturati have transformed into a multi-culturati and the para-culturati. And I’ve actually played a small part in canon-building in the world of comic book criticism, contributing to a list of the Top 100 Comics of the Twentieth Century for a magazine.
So of course, I’d long mused: Can a canon be made for Japanese idols and their music? And, more relevant to my own experiences, can a canon be made by the overseas wota community? I haven’t come to any final conclusions, but some thoughts I’ve had point not only to how our community is developing, but also highlights just how different we have to be from our domestic counterparts.
What makes a canon so powerful, so compelling, is that it is the closest a society comes to a concensus for cultural standards. That is, everybody can agree that Shakespeare is important and belongs in the literary canon, even if they don’t like his writing or never even read him. Or the Beatles belong in a canon of popular music. In this way, a canon provides a society with shared referents. If you want to better yourself, you can read up on Hamlet and find out where that hawk-and-handsaw reference comes from. If you want to be a rock musician or critic, you don’t have to like The White Album but you should at least be somewhat familiar with it.
This isn’t to say that a canon is a sedentary list which never changes. If anything, our modern age has not only meant a proliferation of canons of all types, but also constant streams of disputation: there will always be some disagreement on choices that may seem obvious to a vast majority of people. However, that state of flux - those arguments - are themselves a part of the ongoing social dialogue concerned with cultural standards. If one is trying to force Shakespeare out of the literary canon or lobby to have Octavia Butler included in same, one must first acknowledge that a community concensus - right or wrong - had been established and its criteria needs to be addressed.
So having said all that, if a canon is to develop for a genre or field, it requires at least a couple things.
First, there has to be a sense of history and continuity - you have to be comparing works that span a certain amount of time. A work that is sui generis is anti-canonical: for example, making a list of great heavy metal songs would’ve been pointless when the first Black Sabbath album came out, but ten years later you could pick and choose from a wide number of artists and songs. You need a context for a canon to be created, never mind make sense.
Second, there has to be an engaged community that cares about critical standards and applying it to the works in question. There’s been decades of coloring books being published but there’s no canon of great coloring books because nobody cares enough. For American comics, I’d say the first attempts at serious canon building took place when the fandoms emerging in the sixties began working together and agreeing on how great the old EC Comics were and that Carl Barks was the “good duck artist” worth paying special attention towards.
So. Does the wota community have a sense of history and continuity, as well as a critical community?
In Japan, I’m guessing there most certainly is. Idols are a part of their culture, everyone grows up with idols and there are certain touchstones that are part of the nation’s cultural frame of reference. (The first thing that comes to mind for me is, of course, Morning Musume’s “Love Machine”.) And while I can’t say for certain, I’d be willing to bet that among the thousands upon thousands of fans of idols - whether nostalgic fans of performers from earlier decades or the current crop of enthusiasts with their lightsticks and wotagei dances - there are people who do debate such matters, who will argue if WINK is better than Princess Princess, or try to rank the best idol songs of all time. Unfortunately, I’m far too removed from any of that to say for sure, or to make anything but the vaguest guesses. But by all indications, I’d say that not only are a wota canon of idols and idol music possible in Japan, but it’s probably thriving beyond our field of vision.
And that exposes how the overseas wota community is a very distinct beast from the domestic wota community. We were born in exile, so to speak, learning secondhand about something that comes naturally to those raised in Japan. We’re like the natives in The Gods Must Be Crazy, except it’s Third Love Paradise that came down from the sky instead of a Coke bottle. And for better or worse, we create our own context for Japanese idols and their music, we use our own frames of reference to better grasp their importance to us. Even if you’re a Japanophile who reveres all things Japanese (or all things Japanese that you want to revere, setting aside the stuff that bores or disturbs you), it’s not like you can intuit or appreciate with a native’s sense of cultural and historical understanding, some nuances are bound to slip through the cracks.
For the most part, I’d say most current overseas wota are ahistorical. We like what we like because of the time we discovered the music and the photobooks and the video clips. There is very little in the way of exploring the past history of idols. We tend to like what is now and what is new. We can get an instant history lesson if we look for it, but too often the overseas wota community is obsessed with what’s coming out next and not what came before. I’ve seen 2007 described in terms that make it sound like ancient history - and in the accelerated world of internet-driven postmodern pop cult, I guess it is.
As for the notion of a critical community by which standards can emerge… Well, a part of me suspects that such a thing takes too great an effort at times, especially for overseas wota. Being a wota is often such a strongly emotional commitment - and outside of Japan, a largely isolated and alienating one - that I wonder how many wota would even care to set aside their passion and make objective decisions on what is good and bad. What they feel is what they go by, and why should they behave otherwise?
On a more basic, crudely dogmatic level, idol worship is not meant to be rational. Too much rational thinking about the whole wota-idol relationship would… well, it would expose it for the weird and silly and often creepy exercise in postmodern media-tion that it is. All of which underlies a certain existential blankness to such a strange cross-cultural pursuit. Otaku-ness carries some bad connotations in Japanese culture, but at least the connotations are there. Overseas, wota are even less defined than otaku (in the Western sense) and the strangeness of the experience to the larger Western community makes us even more potentially isolated and misunderstood. Japanese wota at least can hang out together and see their idols in person on a regular basis. We just tap away at our keyboards and order our overseas products and wait for whatever bones are thrown our way. (This year’s Anime Expo being a bone the size of a brontosaurus, admittedly.)
Or is that really the case? Instead of bemoaning such differences from Japanese wota, of wailing about how bad we have it because we’re not in Japan, I think the overseas community has done a wonderful job creating its own idiom, its own sense of wota-ness, which gives us our own satisfaction. Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but that strikes me as a better path to explore, and provides the seeds for a richer community. Of course, there’s always a desire and a need to communicate with domestic wota, as they set the pace and define the market on which we thrive. But we don’t have to be bottom-feeders completely reliant on what the Home Office is telling us is right and wrong; we can modify the wota values and experiences to our own benefit. Being slavishly imitative does us no good, so it’s best to treat overseas wota-dom as a reclamatory experience, a redefining for a brave new context.
And to be completely fair, there are indeed those of us who promote a sense of idol history, and who encourage a sense of critical community. As far as history goes, blogger MorningBerryz has a body of work that gives us a fuller sense of the world of idols from earlier times, while Encyclopedia Idollica provides its own lessons on the precedents to Hello! Project and AKB48. As for a critical community, I think Paul at Hello! Blog has performed an incredible service with his annual polls. It may be limited strictly to H!P, but compiling such rankings is a significant first step in concensus-building and encouraging overseas wota to think of a “critical we” as much as an “opinionated me”.
Which brings us back to the idea of a canon.
I don’t know that a wota canon is at all necessary for the overseas community, especially if it spoils your experience as a fan. For some people, the passion and irrational worship may well be enough of a thrill, the sense of community and shared values may simply be unnecessary. Rabbinical disputes on whether SPEED is better than Morning Musume or whether Hinoi Team’s “Night of Fire” is superior to dream’s may not be your cup of tea. And if that’s the case, live and let live.
However, some of us live for that kind of thing, and want an active community precisely to wrestle through these kinds of intellectual exercises. For those people, an awareness of a canon could be a blessed thing, could keep one’s fandom thriving by providing benchmarks and measures that deepen our appreciation for the here-and-now as well as for what’s happened before. It’s an option that can be pursued, and undoubtedly can provide a way for overseas wota to distinguish ourselves from our domestic cousins. It may also be a way to more systematically introduce the joy of idols to other people who are curious but don’t know where to start.
(And in that light, I think what’s potentially insidious are fans who claim to be objective and level-minded - who claim some kind of erudition, either with idols in specific or music in general - but cannot push beyond their own tastes when making universal statements on what’s good and what isn’t. They believe everything they like is good and should be acknowledged that way by everyone around them; they further believe everything they don’t like is either bad or beneath their notice, and you’re a fucking loser for being into that stuff. That kind of provincialism and solipsism exists in all fan cultures; it is best left marginalized and ignored.)
Whatever the case may be, the ahistorical nature of the overseas community may just be due to the newness of the pursuit for most of us, as is the lack of a coherent critical community. The potential is there, there just have to be enough people who want these values enough, who believe that standards should emerge, who think an insitutional memory is possible and desirable. Idols may be agents of instant gratification, but they can also embody more than that. A canon may be one way of acknowledging the untapped possibilities, not just in the wota community, but also in the idols we hold so dear.
And all that said, I’ve only scratched the barest surface of this topic: there’s so much more that can be considered, that has to be hashed out by trial and error. There is the issue of whether we should force a canon into place or just let one emerge “naturally”. (Obviously, everything I’ve said indicates a comfort with the former.) There is the issue of criteria - on what basis would an idol be considered worth including in a list of greatest idols? Looks, charisma, singing ability, dancing ability? What about historical importance - does that matter in a community as ahistorical as ours? (That is, if we didn’t listen to SPEED for the most part, does their popularity in Japan even matter to us?) And since idol music is often so derivative and market-driven, what criteria do we use for the best idol songs and performances? And of course, I’ve done my best to avoid listing what I think should belong in such a canon, though I do have an idea or two of who fits and who doesn’t.
This may be a Pandora’s box waiting to be opened, or perhaps just an empty promise that’ll go unfulfilled. With the growing popularity of Jpop in the West, I think history - and community - will wind up on my side with this. But I’m not exactly holding my breath.
Tags: canon, community
WHAT TO DO NOW?