eri chiemi / eartha kitt

[Birgit Kellner]

"Jonathan M. Hall" wrote:

> I would be curious to hear whether they are truly Turkish lyrics.

I'll try my best to locate a Turkish speaker (which shouldn't be that difficult
in Vienna) and let you know :-)

> Also, it
> would be very interesting to compare the kind of domesticating
> internationalism you locate in Eri Chiemi with what I suspect would be a
> similarly mappable postwar American internationalist imperialism, found for
> example in the songs and lyrics of Eartha Kitt.  Kitt was an easily
> consumed 'medium' of the international other for many Americans, and Kitt
> herself sang a "Turkish folk song'" peppered with false Turkish.

I don't really understand the way in which you apply the notion of
"imperialism" here - without getting overly technical, imperialism to my
understanding refers to the primarily politico-economic enterprise of a
country's extending its reign beyond given limits, accompanied with the
imposition of at least certains of that country's cultural forms and practices
on the newly gained territories.
The phenomenon that you describe however simply stands for the appropriation of
an "other" within a given country that I would not necessarily take to be
limited to a politico-economic imperialist context. Even if we assume a
dichotomy between, bluntly said, "ruler" and "ruled", this mechanism can work
both ways: The ruled appropriates the cultural practices of the ruler, or vice
versa. The power relations might affect what precisely is appropriated, and by
whom, but not the fact that appropriation takes place.
Also, one might want to differentiate what country's cultural practices
precisely are appropriated - when for instance German bands in the Fifties
appropriated American musical styles and lyrics, that was certainly to be
linked to the US-occupation, whereas the presence of Italian or Latin styles
(or what German bands understood to be such) is much more related to postwar
dreams of and first experiences with holidays in the Mediterranean and the
imagery associated with that. In similar ways, it would be interesting to look
at how, and why Japanese singers and also films in the Fifties and Sixties
appropriated not only US-styles, but also made use of Latin or Turkish (why the
hell Turkish?) elements.

> Whenever
> I think of Eri, I think of her famous "Kamonna mai hausu, kammonna mai
> hausu, Ai wanna gibu yuu kyandii."  Her deliberate emphasis on the last
> word of the line, in the Japanese pronunication kyandii (candy) is part of
> a trajectory, I think, that can be traced down to the Southern All Stars,
> Matsuda Seiko, and others who played with English as they sang it.
>

This was actually the first Eri tune I've ever heard, and what instigated my
interest in her.
My interpretation, however, is quite different.
The transliteration of the English lyrics (later on interspersed with a
Japanese translation) in the common style used to transliterate katakana
misleadingly suggests a connection with the "Japanization" of English which I
don't think is there, for her pronunciation is nothing like this - "come on-a
my house, my house, I'm gonna give you caandy - come on-a my house, I'm gonna
give you apple and plum and apricot ... I'm gonna give you everything." There
is at certain places a recognizable accent in her pronounciation, and the main
line "come on-a my house" is surely not standard English (but then again, that
applies to a lot of popular songs in English and is not limited to Japanese
interpreters), but there is *no* trace of the way in which English is
pronounced "katakana-style": She sings "house", and not "haus*u*", "give", and
not "gib*u*", "candy", and not "kyandii". (The emphasis on "candy", moreover,
is simply due to the musical theme.)
This, I suppose, would indeed constitute a difference between her singing and
the use of English in contemporary Japanese pop, where you have insertion of
individual catchwords, pronounced katakana-style, but not (at least as far as I
know) commonly the juxtaposition of larger segments of English and Japanese
lyrics, the ones translating the others. In fact, I see little *play* with
English as Eri sings it - linguistic playfulness I believe comes through, if at
all, in her Japanese-language lyrics.
I don't know enough of her work, nor of that of similar singers, to argue for
this being a distinct "style" or perhaps a historically explicable phenomenon,
understandable perhaps through the roots of such singers in a more adult Jazz
traditionals' culture from the Fifties rather than a youth-oriented rock or pop
culture from the Sixties, but I'd be careful not to equate the linguistic and
musical features of Eri's tunes with e.g. Matsuda Seiko, nor do I see a common
attitude that could be "traced" from the one to the other.

Hoping for further response,

Birgit Kellner