Popcorn Noises

Cold Pizza Friday LI

Clive Tanaka and Faking It as Making It

Late last summer, there appeared on a handful of mp3 blogs a track called “Neu Chicago” credited to Clive Tanaka y su orquesta, who had a cassette coming out called Jet Set Siempre 1º. The song was an upbeat slice of bedroom electro-pop indebted to 80s nostalgia and clearly obsessed with a certain air of luxurious, tropical vacationing. I heard it on Altered Zones and liked it enough to include it on a mix tape here one week, but didn’t give it a second thought until a few days later when I received an email from someone called Francis Hofstetler saying that Mr. Tanaka would like to send me a copy of his cassette and would I please reply with my coordinates. Offering free tapes will get you a lot of places with me (Mediafire links: not so much), so for better or worse Tanaka now had my attention and I started doing a little googling.

According to the blogosphere, Clive Tanaka is from Hokkaido, Japan and suffers from Hikikomori, a vague kind of social anxiety disorder that affects young Japanese boys who choose to withdraw from all social interactions and seek weird extremes of isolation. Francis Hofstetler is his Chicago-based medium, sending emails and promotional merchandise to anyone who ever blogged Tanaka’s name under the guise of ‘Tanaka Heavy Industries.’ The return address on my cassette package was indeed a warehouse space in Chicago, but pretty much everything else about this mysterious entity still seemed fishy. There’s a long history of artists shrouding their identities to try to cast people’s attention strictly toward the music, but it almost always backfires. Taking steps to conceal yourself creates visible layers of disguise (and talking points for press/blogs/your friends) that pique people’s curiosity, actually making it that much harder to not attract attention to yourself as the performer. Besides, Tanaka’s debilitating social condition is way too convenient, a perfect excuse not to have live shows, photos, or much in the way of a press bio, and to remain exotic and ‘foreign’ (I have not seen any Japanese blogs featuring his work). I was already suspicious when I reviewed Siempre, but a couple comments on that post erased any lingering doubts: ‘Francis Hofstetler’ was the name of a recurring character on the 80s detective show Magnum P.I., as was Lt. Yoshi Tanaka.

So Clive Tanaka is a fabrication and Francis Hofstetler is a pseudonym for whoever’s actually making and distributing this music. No doubt catching the attention of blogs is a major motivation here, especially since he goes to such great lengths to engender their favor. In the months since my initial tape-earning post, I’ve also received a packaged fortune cookie announcing the early January vinyl release of Siempre and a subsequent copy of the album on wax. Once again, some light blog searching reveals I’m far from alone on this. But is getting a little internet attention really worth the time and money it would take to send out all these packages (for free!)? What kind of underground musician has all these resources readily at his disposal? I can’t deny that it worked: I gave the album careful listening, wrote a long review, and am now writing another long piece about it months later. But I also can’t escape the feeling that there’s something else at work here, that there’s more to be gained from this elaborate ruse.

Lately I’ve tended to think the generated persona of Clive Tanaka integrates vitally into how the music itself functions, that one side needs the other to work. Like I said, this sound owes a sizable debt to the 80s, but it goes beyond a specific nostalgia to a holistic, transportive fantasy. The conjured images are of picturesque beaches and lavish private planes—a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous vibe that was as unattainable for 99.9% of people back then as it is today. I’m trying not to use the word ‘chillwave’ here, but it’s a helpful starting place. If we say that acts like, oh, early Toro Y Moi or Washed Out represent a longing for dead technology and listless, romantic days at the beach in the face of post-collegiate recessional directionlessness, we eventually have to face the fact that there’s something adolescent and self-pitying about it. Though not usually enough to ruin the music, it can still feel like a very small and limited projection (and perhaps by extension a small and limited sound, which seems to fit with a lot of the criticisms of the genre).

The story of Clive Tanaka expands the scope on both sides: a person incapable of going out into the world and experiencing much of anything (especially the ‘Dance’ and ‘Romance’ for which he labels the two sides of his album) fantasizing about living the life of an ultimate social elite. Like The Avalanches’ Since I Left You, Siempre sounds like someone perpetually jetting from paradise to paradise with the luxury of experiencing emotions and desires in the frank and uncomplicated ways he pens in his lyrics (“I want you so bad,” “You need someone tonight…that someone is me”). If you take it at face value, the Tanaka fantasy is far more poignant in its hopeless impossibility than almost any other artist currently working in these transportive environs. He even cloaks his voice in old vocoder sounds to emphasize both the imagined glitzy perfection and his own dehumanized removal from it. Without the pretense of this persona creating those implied dynamics, I don’t think the musical experience would be as vivid. In the end, maybe all this intense blog courting is a way of ensuring that big imaginative scope remains intact, since those outlets thrive on interesting backstories and the energy of the new. The genius of whoever’s actually behind all this lies in finding new ways to dictate context and evade scrutiny in an era that demands instant access.