Eri Chiemi and Exotism

[Roland Domenig]

The Singapore pop singer and producer Dick Lee used a similar mixture as Eri
Chiemi in "Usukudara". In his first album, "The Mad Chinaman", there is a
song called "Mustapha" with music a la turca (in fact a song from a Tamil
film musical of his youth) to which Dick Lee wrote a new text, mixing French
and English lyrics (Cherie je t'aime, cherie jet t'adore/My darling I love
you a lot more than you know/Oh Mustapha, oh Mustapha).
It is of course difficult to compare Eri Chiemi and Dick Mine, who works in
an entire different environment and at a different time (the borderless
world-music world of the 1990s), but they have much in common in the way
they use exoticism in their songs. And popular music always has been a
favorite arena for exoticism. This must not be restricted to the songs
alone, as can be seen in German popular music of the 1960s and 1970s where
in fact most stars did not come from Germany but from Greece,
Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark, Jamaica, Egypt, Yugoslavia, France, Italy
and America. 
In the weirdest form of German popular music, the Alpine-style yodel, there
even is a Japanese with the name Ishii. Very peculiar, indeed.

Apropos Exoticism. Does anyone know the title and director of the Japanese
film that Woody Allen used for "What's Up, Tiger Lily"? Weren't there also
some "turks" in this film?


Roland Domenig
Institute for Japanese Studies
University of Vienna