I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

I am an angry person with a cold black heart filled with rage and despair, but there are two things I love: the inscrutable ridiculousness of the Japanese nation and wacky rock-and-roll exploitation movies.

I do not speak Japanese for real so I do not know what’s actually going on in this trailer. It features a fictional band called “The Tightsmen” that would be a good index of worst-case-scenario, unflattering haircuts. The Peppermint Engine is taking screenshots to their barbers as I type.

“Group Sounds” (GS) refers to mid- to late sixties Japanese “garage rock.” A weird chimera of matchy-matchy haircut/outfitted sunny lads and bizarro psychedelia that grew out of The Beatles appearance at the Budokan in 1966. The odd label was coined to minimize embarrassment (the leading killer of Japanese!) created by the pronunciation minefield “rock and roll.”

The Spiders tribute to psychedelia and being confused.

For actual information instead of my unresearched opinions, check out this bilingual resource site or The Video Beat! Movie Page of Info which also has ordering info for GSploitation films such as: WILD SCHEME A-GO-GO, BIG COMMOTION!, HI! LONDON, and HEY YOU, GO! (all of which sound like movie form titles). In the US, if you’re lazy, you’ll probably just have to make due with the high-art, low-rocking-out nonsense of Tokyo Drifter to fill your Japanese psychedelia tank.

But really, a movement is hardly worth discussing unless they’ve sold out and devoted their teen rebellion to selling things so here’s a contemporary commercial for sweaters and jump cut editing (and no GS, so my transition was pointless)—

But let’s go back a couple years and see what the kids were so hopped up about rejecting. A perfectly jazzy animated clothes commercial where dresses turn into hot air balloons and flocks of doves.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under J*Stuff.