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It takes 2
We’ve heard rumors that this year’s festival is about to sell out, so whatever the organizers did booking-wise it was obviously the right thing. It takes a lot to get someone to shell out ¥60,000-¥70,000 for a weekend that doesn’t include air travel…or maybe not. Recently, we ran across a blog entry by a Japanese person (we’re assuming a woman, but maybe not) who enthused over the fact that Mike Skinner, formerly of the Brit hip-hop entity The Streets, had retweeted her message about his coming to Fuji with his new outfit The D.O.T. “I was so excited to that he Retweeted my tweet and made my mind to go to see his show definitely at Fuji Rock,” she wrote. “I can’t wait!!!” So there’s another way to get people sitting on the fence to fall into the ticket-buying mood: get the artists to retweet personal messages. Nothing like the personal touch.
What’s particularly interesting in this case is that the blogger seems more interested in Skinner than in the other half of The D.O.T., Rob Harvey, formerly the lead singer of The Music, which had a more dedicated and passionate following here in Japan during its 10-year run. In fact, The Music played Fuji Rock three times, and made Japan the only stop outside of their native UK on the farewell tour. Reportedly, both Skinner and Harvey quit their lucrative gigs because they’d become bored doing the same thing, but what they did was quite different from each other. Skinner’s novelistic raps about his personal life helped boost the fledgling garage/2-step club movement at the dawn of the millennium by basically messing with it and drawing in a bigger audience for the nascent hip-hop subgenre. Though Skinner’s metier was story-telling, his secret weapon was his productions, which he seemed more intense about than his flow. The Music, on the other hand, was strictly a child of Britpop, and one of dozens of new bands hailed as the saviors of English rock to emerge around 2000, which is the sort of praise that can translate as: they won’t sell diddly squat in the States. Actually, they did fairly well, but the whole space rock thing had already passed–except in Japan, where The Music maintained a presence among hardcore Britpop fans whose fanaticism can’t be discounted.
The tasks of the two members of The D.O.T. are clearly delineated: Harvey sings, in that distinctive high register of his, while Skinner produces beats that don’t sound a whole lot different than the ones he produced for The Streets. As demonstrated on their debut EP, Whatever It Takes, the combination of these two seemingly antithetical approaches scans neither hip-hop nor rock but more toward dance pop. On the liveliest cut, “Be Good to You,” they even attempt a duet of sorts, with Skinner’s usually affectless vocals put to surprisingly good use singing. Compellingly tuneful, the songs could conceivably alienate each man’s fan base but likely they’ll just expand it. Still, we doubt too many people who hear them will be inclined to splurge on a ticket and a Shinkansen seat just to see them play for an hour Saturday evening at the Red Marquee, but as long we’re going we’ll definitely check them out, even if Skinner doesn’t retweet this blog post.
13 songs on Soundcloud
