I can’t even remember why I wrote “Himego” in my little running notes document — smartphones! — a few days ago, but it definitely did act as a prompt to look up the never-followed-enough-come-on-you-guys HIMEGOTOZETTAICHI and have several lovely surprises in a row, and I’m going to share them with you even though the first has been completely ruined by the post title.
First! Holy hell, of course there’s a physical release on the way, but I had no idea that Himegoto was dropping digital singles all over the virtual airwaves, like almost one every two weeks since the start of the year:
I sometimes wonder about what really goes on in Watanabe’s head. The person he portrays is a callous, free-wheeling imp who functions largely through a Hegelian series of resolutions of superego and id, but I think it’s pretty clear that the Watanabe who traps girls on islands and makes people go on morning fun runs just to prove their mettle, who forces idol icons to sleep in a car and eat nothing but rice, is in many ways an idol himself; Watanabe (just like Homicidol Maniac!) is a persona more than a person, and so the very essence of what he puts on is not in fact the rotten-egg target posing as manager of BiS and BiSH and EMPiRE and GANG PARADE, but at the very least a calculating, deliberate mind*. Anybody who’s ever read or seen Hamlet knows that playing the fool frees one to expose so many more truths, after all.
Now, I don’t think that Watanabe is quite up to Shakespearean standards, but he is a performance artist in his own right, with human emotion and maybe even an entire industry** as his media. The thing about artists, though, is that they still need to get paid, and getting paid can get complicated, so you wind up with situations like BiSH’s song to promote something called KIRIN LEMON:
There of course can be discussion around whether the SCRAMBLES sound, or the WACK approach in general, has in fact entered freely into the mainstream, and how it obviates the very notion of the “alt” edifice that they largely created, but that’s not this moment. No, right now it’s about the various things that BiSH in particular is doing to make some lucre. Continue reading →
