Tokyo, Taste, and The Death of Cultural Discovery
the taste economy, harry styles, KATSEYE, and tokyo recos
Like a savvy hooker, the listening bar in Ebisu demands its yen upfront. Its feline maître d ‘, if you can call her that in Japan, firmly wedges herself in the corridor that separates me from the rest of the bar and motions my attention towards a wooden clipboard in her hand. In New York, I am used to a gatekeeper with a clipboard: the PR girlie drunk off power standing outside the club to check if “you’re on the list” before giving the bouncer a sly nod. But tonight, the gatekeeper’s objective is the opposite of publicity; it’s discretion. She holds up the clipboard for me to read the rules, which are written in both Japanese and English with helpful pictures to avoid misinterpretation: whispers only, no photography, and indoor smoking is permitted. She is polite, but firm; she is firm but also fair, and after I nod, enthusiastically consenting to the establishment’s order of operations, she guides me to a seat at the bar with a sudden warmth that dissolves the frank business of the corridor into thin air.
Tonight, the bar’s mahogany caverns are swaddled with the usual crowd: tailored grey suits hang from Japanese businessmen who swap sips of whisky with pulls from cigars in blissful solitude, sixth dates replace define-the-relationship conversations with convivial head bobs to the music, the odd white guy – Australian or Austrian or Welsh or Dutch – Shazams each track as he glugs back highballs under the bar’s amber lights, me, returning to the bar after a year of distance, and, Takeshi, a few seats over, a fifty-seven-year-old movie executive and a regular at this particular listening bar.
Takeshi hasn’t seen me yet. Next to him, in the whispers of conversation, sits a tanned woman roughly half his age. Her black curls bouquet into a messy bun that she re-arranges every now and then with her left hand. Her engagement ring winks at me, taunting the room, and I imagine that she wears the same sense of wonder in her face that I must have when I entered the bar a year ago. But this I can never truly determine, as she has turned herself to face Takeshi, and all I can see is the back of her head.
In front of her is a Guinness and a shallow bowl of chocolate-covered espresso beans, and, spread out across from Takeshi is his usual fare: a ziplock bag with three cigars, a glass bottle of Tansan, a bottle of the French liqueur Lejay Cassis next to a duet of whisky bottles – Japanese and Tennessee, respectively – a tall, bulbous drinking glass with small cubes of ice at its basin, a spray bottle of some sort, and a pale saucer fixed with wedges of lemon. Takeshi also has a small leather bag on the bar counter in front of him, which must be new – Prada, I believe – but I don’t strain, because it would be rude to stare.
Barry White’s voice on wax reminds me why I am here: the music. With the discouragement of chatter and the fear of being scorned for using my phone, my senses attune to the present. The DJ – or ‘selector’ as they are often called in listening bars (and Jamaican dancehall songs) – is behind the bar, just to the right of the three other bartenders, carefully inspecting a shelf of what must be thousands of records before carefully pulling one from its sleeve, queuing up a single song, and placing the record’s artwork under a torched spotlight for display. He does this over and over throughout the evening, this slow inspection and selection, a sonic creation that yields deep cuts from Ryo Fukui, George Benson, Björk, and plenty of others whom I have not heard before.
Tonight’s selector, dressed in a black henley and a Kangol hat that I assume is worn without the awareness of the JFK Jr. style frenzy in the West, plays a song from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and then a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion track. It’s easy to believe that he’s just playing for himself, and perhaps he mostly is, but then he snipes a glance at a Japanese woman with a pixie cut, cloaked in white cashmere, nodding, as she ashes a dart, and I remember something that Takeshi told me that last time, that the selector – who rotates with the rest of the behind-the-bar staff to DJ one night of the week and bartend the remainder – is actively watching, reading cues, and making subtle adjustments to his selections the entire night. I didn’t believe him until that night, my first night where Takeshi acted as my sherpa, the DJ – a stoic Japanese-Pete-Wentz-type who is relegated to making drinks tonight – played Bruce Springsteen, and paused after placing the record artwork on display to smile at Takeshi, knowing Bruce was his favourite. It’s fascinating, in an environment that discourages direct forms of communication – talking, texting, and social media – that people can be read so easily. The selector obviously takes no requests, but in a way, a good DJ always is; he’s observing.
I order a mojito and dark chocolate because what the heck. I settle into a docile submission, allowing the songs to come and go. The selector and his curation begin to feel like a courtship. This is a counter to how music is experienced today, which is to say that it is: anti-algorithm. It is similar in the sense that I suppose the selector is also reading cues and serving me what I will perhaps enjoy, but he also could quite possibly not give a fuck, putting more weight into his own individual taste than what he thinks I, and the rest of the bar, will like. And he’s right for that, because what do we know? He’s the man with the wax.
There has been significant discussion on the increased importance of taste and how it is the only thing that artificial intelligence cannot replace. If you follow this logic, it’s easy to see why ‘good taste’ is a valuable resource that people will pay tremendous amounts of money for, with companies hiring taste consultants like Chris Black, writer and host of the popular How Long Gone podcast, to inform their business decisions. On his website, which displays a roster of culturally fluent clients such as J. Crew, Balenciaga, New Balance, and Thom Browne, Black notes that:
“He’s right at the heart of American culture. He’s the conduit between the worlds of luxury, the arts, entertainment, the media, and society. The bridge between the high and the low; the very high and the very low. He can tell you everything you need to know about the way we live now. He can introduce you to everyone you need to meet. He’ll help you speak to any audience you wish to.”
Some companies are even bringing these ‘taste consultants’ in-house, with Depop recently hiring fashion editor and stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson as its in-house trends spokesperson. In a press release, Depop stated that Karefa-Johnson “will collaborate with the team on identifying and predicting emerging trends through qualitative & quantitative Depop data and cultural moments before it hits the masses.”
Years ago, upstairs in an LES office building, I popped a squat next to a collection of the city’s writers and artists to hear Daisy Alioto deliver her thesis on something she called the taste economy. “For the past 10 years, taste couldn’t be monetized. Soon it will be one of the only things that can.” Alioto argued that magazines like GQ and Vogue were the original ‘containers’ of taste, where an editor would curate across the culture they deemed to be the most important, be it fashion, film, sports, or the arts, and a reader would buy a magazine, essentially opting into this cultural exchange. While in Tokyo, I visited one of my favourite bookstores and stocked up on Japanese lifestyle magazines like BRUTUS and POPEYE, still ripe with cultural potency1. But, as publishing power wanes in the West, tastemakers have become the vessels of cultural discovery – human custodians of culture. Alioto expands on her thesis in Dirt:
“AI produces a lot of stuff, but it lacks brand containers. The more stuff AI produces, the more media platforms will be necessary to curate what is worth paying attention to, whether that curation is top down (editors) or bottom up (UGC).
In business, there is this idea of the moat: the advantage that one business has over their competitors. If the blockchain and AI take hold, those moats will no longer be data and content creation. Which seems like a bad thing–but what’s left? From my perspective as a nascent entrepreneur, future moats fall into three broad categories: proprietary technology, supply chain innovations, and media that can’t be replaced by AI because it comes from a strong POV (taste).
Look around, everyone is trying to be a media company.”
While I don’t believe this particular selector in Ebisu fashions himself as ‘a media company,’ I can trace the dotted line from Alioto’s thesis back to this listening bar. When much of music consumption is governed by phantom powers that can be purchased, such as TikTok algorithms and Spotify discovery playlists, it can feel like we are not being exposed to the best music, but rather, the music that makes itself the easiest to be consumed. True discovery, informed by someone whose taste you trust, is rare. The writer and musician eliza mclamb explores this in an explosive piece, “Fake Fans,” which investigates the marketing agency Chaotic Good, an agency behind the powerful (fake) fan pages that help musicians go viral and expand their audience. The marketing agency has developed ‘fan campaigns’ for artists such as Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes, but more surprisingly, emerging artisans of taste such as Geese, Oklou, Mk.gee, and Laufey. Hearing new music in real time from the careful hands of tonight’s curator feels refreshingly romantic. It’s the sonic equivalent of meeting a lover on a whim or via a meet-cute, rather than on an algorithm-controlled dating app.
The ephemeral nature of listening to music in a listening bar is counter to how we consume art today. Now, when I hear a song I like, there is often an ID tag that nudges me to add it to Spotify. Shazam links directly to the streaming service of your choice. The aspect of discovering a new song is immediately tied to saving it and owning it, as if we need to attach it to ourselves to love it. At the listening bar, it’s bad manners to Shazam, and even as I write down some of the songs I enjoy in my notebook, it feels like copying someone else’s work. Instead, I stay in the present, letting the song come and go, enjoying it in the moment, and moving on immediately as a new song enters, much like a summer fling. In his book The Agony of Eros, the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that the contemporary desire to ‘own’ our lover is what annihilates the potential for real love. I think of this, pop a chocolate-covered espresso bean into the wells of my mouth, and allow a song to love and leave me.
The songs tonight are separate but somehow related. They chime together in a mangled tapestry, a quilt where its patchwork appears distinct up close, but is holistically congruent from far away. The jolt of Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out2” next to Ethiopian jazz demands my attention. I cannot listen on autopilot. Even Takeshi and his excitable-tourist -of -the-night pause to listen. (At this point, I’ve accepted that she has his attention for the evening and have long found companionship with the music). So much of music today asks you to only hear it, but not actually listen. And maybe it is because some artists simply have nothing to say beyond their attractive aesthetic veneer. Harry Styles’ latest album, Disco All The Time. Kiss Occasionally, is well-produced, but is melodic Trazodone: empty in message, with a hollow enough ambiance to fill any room or, more lucratively, playlist. I enjoy the album, “Carla’s Song” and “Season 2 Weight Loss” specifically, but am left with no deeper understanding of just who Styles is as an artist. I don’t feel inhabited by his music the same way I do tonight, undistracted, in this music bar. Similarly, despite the talents of its individual members, KATSEYE continues to make AI-slop music that sounds as if the Wingdings font were dictated orally. The global girl groups’ latest songs, “Gnarly” and “PINKY UP,” are fun to listen to (and dance to) but cater more to the TikTok feed than human comprehension. When the artists of today have begun to engineer their sound to game the algorithms that distribute it, we end up with music that is so concerned with how it will be consumed – its own performance and cooperation – that it runs the risk of being passive. Streaming has changed the way television shows are designed, with shows now created with the expectation that the audience is multi-tasking, leading to a loss of nuance and repetitive, explanatory dialogue in case you missed something while texting. Modern music is approaching a similar fate; like the wildly streamed Netflix’s Emily in Paris, you can play without really listening or engaging, and somehow always have your finger on what is going on.
At certain points in the evening, the selector takes a break from the record player to turn on the projector, appealing to more senses than one, to cast a live performance. Tonight, he plays a clip of Diana Ross performing in Central Park in 1983, and the whole bar’s neck cranes upwards to catch the fiery diva sing “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” A crowd of eight hundred thousand teemed in the park, all dancing and singing as Ross cascaded spritely across the stage, donning a bedazzled, crimson, caped catsuit. It’s a New York I have never lived in but somehow remember. Suddenly, the skies opened up, finally giving way to a summer thunderstorm, pelting the singer and her fans in a vicious frenzy of rain. The legend, whose performance has been immortalized in this clip and who has the entire listening bar in Ebisu’s attention – the bartenders no longer making beverages and their patrons no longer drinking – is unflappable, treating the harsh elements as part of her theatre, the powerful gust of winds turning her cape into angel wings. She laughs. “It took me a lifetime to get here,” Ross beams while on the stage. “I’m not going anywhere!”
It is at this moment that I look in Takeshi’s direction and realize that he is gone, leaving the tourist to herself and leaving Diana Ross to me. The room finds its balance again as the selector quiets the projector, loading up the next record, and the bartender fractures my gaze, breaking my focus, and speaks in a devastatingly crisp tone that cuts tenderly above the music, “Can I get you anything else?”
LOOSEY is a bi-weekly newsletter about culture, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.
More LOOSEY on music:
Finally, with respect to ‘the taste economy,’ and the need for cultural containers, I have prepared a list of recommendations should you ever find yourself in Tokyo. Below are my favourite spots across design, food, shopping, and books, Takeshi not included:
Design and Art
21_21 Design Sight - stunning museum created by the architect Tadao Ando and the designer Issey Miyake. The museum is split between two buildings, and is cut across a rolling green lawn with sculpture work. When I went, there was an exhibit on soup (yes, soup!) and Issey Miyake’s colour selection.
National Film Archive of Japan - a film lover’s dream. There is a permanent exhibit that walks you through the early origins of Japanese filmmaking, which captured Kabuki plays all the way up to Akira Kurosawa’s filmmaking triumph, wth his Venice Film Festival Golden Lion for Rashomon. The rotating exhibit was
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to LOOSEY to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.