Cornelius: Classic or Dud?

i'm sure he'd been working on stuff for it longer than just this week, but considering the late announcement & the general chaos that's engulfed the planning for the ceremony since covid, i doubt it would have been more than a few months at most.

originally sheena ringo was in charge of the music for it, which would have been perfect, but in late 2020 a new head of the organising committee was installed, who scrapped all the existing plans & forced the existing creative team out

this is the worst and most grievous revelation itt imo

It would be kind of awesome if Cornelius was only given one week to compose the olympics music

Well someone will have to now!

the year the olympics song was just one long trombone note, held as long as possible, getting a little bit more flat with every 5 seconds that pass

the Olympics are a disgusting grift even by sports standards and the IOS are criminal scumbags is how I break it down to an extent

here's just the guy to do it, Karl

https://www.discogs.com/artist/101306-Toshihiro-Koike

oh yeah? how is his lung capacity? i assume as a pro 'boner it's pretty good, but this performer would need to have legendary pipes

can't even imagine what the Cornelius Olympic theme would sound like, all I can picture is the Wii Shop music

Now just in: turn of the director of the opening ceremony to be shown the door over an antisemitic joke in 1998 (!) and a new flurry of official apologies that sound kinda comical themselves by now: "In the short time remaining before the opening ceremony, we offer our deepest apologies for any offence and anguish this matter may have caused to the many people involved in the Olympic Games, as well as to the citizens of Japan and the world". Not sure what difference it makes and how much better everyone feels.

2nd Metafive record has been canned.

"The 2nd ALBUM "META ATEM" (hereinafter referred to as 2 product numbers), which was scheduled to be released on August 11, will be discontinued.

Along with this, the release commemorative talk event scheduled at Tower Records Shibuya will also be cancelled. Please.

In addition, the regular radio program "METAFM" broadcast on InterFM897 will be discontinued due to band activities."

Not surprised... Such a shame. But a lesson to all.

I suspect "discontinued" means "will be released in a few months when this dies down".

the nature of this whole thing is just weird, if he hadn't been tabbed for the Olympics I don't think this would have blown up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5xwwpNwQ70

new album in 2 months

6/28(水)  ニューアルバム「夢中夢 -Dream In Dream-」リリース決定！

6/28 (Wed)  New Album “Dream In Dream” release confirmed!https://t.co/8KUeRIxLCr#夢中夢 #dreamindream #cornelius #コーネリアス #keigooyamada #小山田圭吾 pic.twitter.com/mcwDriKeeu

— Cornelius Info (@cornelius_news) April 25, 2023

that's nice. i really used to like this guy. saw him in concert twice, some of the best concerts i've seen in my life. i don't really see a need to get into how much my queer autistic ass was bullied when i was in school, but i'm probably not going to give this one a listen.

totally understandable of course. I'm not really sure how I feel about it myself, I thought about it when a lot of the Marilyn Manson shit came out and it was revealed that the dude gave a ton of interviews in the 90s where he just admitted to a bunch of over-the-top crimes but no one took it seriously because that was sort of his persona. was this just something people did in the 90s? give interviews where they tried to be as edgy and over the top as possible? obviously this interview was out for decades before anyone even thought to make a big deal out of it. but yeah it's all so blatantly horrible, I can't really listen to any of his stuff the same way anymore.

my suspicion is that it's somewhat true, he probably was a big bully or hung out with people who were, the specific stories I think may have been embelleshed though. I remember hearing that some of his classmates came out and said he was exaggerating some things. also I'm not sure how much we should hold an artist's shitty teen years against them when they're in their 50s. it still feels wrong wanting to hear this. but I'll listen anyway.

it's definitely an individual decision, and for me, it's not really a rational one. i'm not gonna stop listening to prince or david bowie or led zeppelin even though these are all artists who did some pretty terrible things. my girlfriend was a big marilyn manson fan back in the day and it's hard for her, she's pretty much stopped but it's still a big part of her life. i quit listening to magma when i found out they were real nazis and not parody cosplay nazis like laibach. is oyamada doing real, present-day harm to people the way, say, j.k. rowling is? is the current wave of fascism driven by rabid ideologues who are devoted to "mekanik destruktiw kommandoh"? i'd say probably not. on a personal level, though, sometimes it does just fucking hurt to learn these things.

oh man I had no idea about Magma wtf

the man spent 30 years making up a nonsense language just so he could put words that sounded like "fuer mein fuhrer adolf hitler" somewhere in one of his songs

truly galaxy brain shit here

honestly i wish more nazis would try to promote fascism in this manner, if only because of how spectacularly ineffective it turned out to be. i spent 20 years listening to nazi subliminal messages and turned out to be a trans communist anyway. it's like he read norman spinrad's "the iron dream" and was like "yeah but what if i did that in real life?"

right, and I try to make sure I'm not rationalizing this based on which artists I like the most. I guess for me some plausible deniability is important. Har Mar Superstar maybe a good example, most of the accusations against him were kinda vague and I don't think anyone's put their name on it but there were so many people going "yeah I'm from this area and I've heard some shit" that you have to think it's true. I mean I saw him once while he was hammered as shit and there was a real rapey vibe to the show. the Cornelius thing on the other hand hasn't been corroborated by anyone, even in the article they try to reach the family and the family doesn't have anything to say (though it seemed clear that something went on). I guess it's possible, maybe even a little likely, that nothing he did was all that out of the ordinary for a Japanese high school student, and he deliberately played things way up for attention in a way that was weirdly common back then. I mean if that kind of shit happened when I was in high school, everyone would have known about it. the authorities would have been involved. but I don't feel right trying to make that call.

as for Magma...idk about that one either. for one, it's just Vander, the other 893 members are in the clear. It's been discussed a bunch in other places and it's kinda gone from "holy shit, fuck this guy" to "wait there may not actually be any evidence here". iirc it's all based on some things an ex-band member told someone over FB messenger. while Vander does seem like a dick and a control freak who seems to have had some issues with mouthing off while drunk he also draws a ton of inspiration from cultures which the Nazis wanted to exterminate. he also married a Jew. so like, again, maybe there's something to it and maybe it's bad, but if indeed the dude running a band which featured virtually every jazz musician in France was an actual Nazi you'd think it would be more than just one guy saying it.

i hate to say it but your post _does_ kind of come off as... i mean i guess the word i'd use is less rationalizing and more _bargaining_. like i said, for me it's more of an emotional decision than a rational one, and for me, my emotions take a lot longer for me to work through than my thoughts. see how you feel about in a week, is what i'd say.

I guess it's possible, maybe even a little likely, that nothing he did was all that out of the ordinary for a Japanese high school student

lmao wtf is this

yeah this hadn't really been an issue for me but i've struggled to enjoy Cornelius's music since i heard about the bullying. i don't know if it's because he was one of my favorite artists, because i was bullied myself or if my attitude is changing.

it certainly doesn't help that he boasted about it years later. he really seems like he's not a nice person.

in theory, i don't have a problem with liking work made by a shitty person. his music is not exactly intimately personal or self-revealing. but it's an intuitive response, not a rational decision that i get to make.

i enjoyed his last album and tour. i'm sure i'll give the new one a listen or two, but getting into it might be a challenge.

fwiw i don't know if i buy the angle that he was playing up his bad behavior for notoriety. with Marilyn Manson there were always comments circulating about what a smart, normal, reasonable person he is irl and surprise! he turned out to be Marilyn Manson in real life.

xxp

lmao wtf is this

― young sussy (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, April 28, 2023 5:34 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Paraphrasing the Japanese people I know who say bullying is a huge problem and was particularly bad in the 80s and 90s

Again, kinda depends on if you read his comments as being exaggerated and/or made up, which he claims is the case now, but obviously no one knows

fwiw i don't know if i buy the angle that he was playing up his bad behavior for notoriety. with Marilyn Manson there were always comments circulating about what a smart, normal, reasonable person he is irl and surprise! he turned out to be Marilyn Manson in real life.

wish I could find it now but I did read some article explaining that this sort of thing wasn't too uncommon amongst Japanese counterculture artists back then, you had a lot of musicians who for instance would play it mostly straight and then have one song that was absolutely disgusting. iirc the author didn't exactly think he was innocent, but figured that some of the most extreme stuff in that interview shouldn't be taken at face value. but yeah kinda hard to compare the two because Cornelius's stuff is so purely musical and his last album is the only one that felt personal at all. his public persona is just a blank face. pre-Fantasma Cornelius is something else though.

maybe that's who he really is, in a way. one of my best friends who released music on Cornelius's label and traveled to Japan at his invitation says he made himself very scarce. Another friend who collaborated with Cornelius on music in the 90's says they never actually met. i get the impression that he likes to keep his distance.

Paraphrasing the Japanese people I know who say bullying is a huge problem and was particularly bad in the 80s and 90s

i've heard stuff to this effect also, when i asked my friend about it who is Japanese and who's parents currently live in Japan, he seemed very puzzled and pretty weirded out by it, and i was very sorry i asked.

(it was re: Cornelius, he's a fan too)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CT7E-PNhK-q/

he did later deny the worst of the incidents mentioned, saying that one of the magazines had embellished the stories to make him seem like the perpetrator of things he said he'd only witnessed. it's a real mess trying to figure what happened due to the language barrier & lack of access to the original articles - he claims that a blog post (which seems to be one from 2006 that was widely used as a source for the contents of the articles when this all blew up) further embellished the interviews and that in the quick japan interview he did deny being the perpetrator, but obviously that's very difficult to verify on my own. this statement also notably doesn't mention the other bullying incidents at all, just the worst two.

was this just something people did in the 90s? give interviews where they tried to be as edgy and over the top as possible?

yeah there apparently very was much a culture of that in 90s japan, and he used that as an explanation for the tone he took in the interviews at the time: https://archive.is/G0Zhv

it seems likely that he was involved in some of the bullying given that he didn't deny the other incidents, but maybe not the worst of it (but knowing if he really did deny the worst of it at the time as he claims would help to clarify things), and either way he took a pretty terrible attitude to it in the interviews to try to seem edgy.

Paraphrasing the Japanese people I know who say bullying is a huge problem and was particularly bad in the 80s and 90s

― frogbs

mmmm, i mean. bullying was a huge problem where and when i grew up, but i mean... bullying other kids wasn't _out of the ordinary_, the kids who bullied me weren't _unusual_, but it wasn't _normal_ in the same sense that, say, casual transphobia was.

idk, now that i think about it, the guy who bullied me in high school is one of the people i remember most fondly. i think better of him than i do of my childhood best friend, though admittedly that's a pretty low bar to clear.

maybe that's stockholm syndrome or whatever, but it gets back to, again, abuse isn't something bad people do to good people. it's learned behavior. that kid who abused me, i don't know for sure what he went through but it was obvious he had a lot of bad shit happen to him. and the way he looked at me... i don't know, it kind of changed over the course of high school. like i think in his own way he wanted to help me be a normal kid, a normal teenage boy. i mean, wasn't gonna happen, any more than he was gonna be a normal teenage boy, but i understand that desire. you look at someone who's fucked up and weird and it's frustrating, like, why do you have to be so fucked up and weird?

i talk about this with people i know a lot, because "fucked up and weird" comes standard on trans people, and it makes things kind of difficult sometimes.

none of this should be construed as an apologia for oyamada, though. anyone who does that shit needs to live with the consequences, which, i mean, i guess is that i won't listen to his album, a fact which he will neither know nor care about. so yeah. take that, oyamada.

yea thats a messed up thing about it. I grew up in a small town and sometimes you wind up at parties with people you went to middle school with and when they see you 10 years later they act like you're some long lost friend. and you're just like, wait a minute, this dude used to make me feel like shit, but I guess they don't see it that way. I kinda got that impression from that article, where the interviewer asks "well where is he now?" and Cornelius says something like "ah, I dunno, we haven't talked in a while". like he thinks they're friends or something.

one time in high school I snapped on another guy. he was clearly trying to get under my skin and I shoved him against his locker pretty hard and said some mean shit to him. I dunno what got into me, I'm not like that, I just lost it. it sucked because we were friendly with each other before that. and I kept thinking, "he thinks I'm a bully", but seriously it's the only time I did anything like that. I saw him tending bar at a nice place after that and we caught up and all that, all I could think is how bad i felt about what happened, and I'm sure he was thinking about it too. but I felt like bringing it up would make us both feel bad so I didn't.

yea thats a messed up thing about it. I grew up in a small town and sometimes you wind up at parties with people you went to middle school with and when they see you 10 years later they act like you're some long lost friend. and you're just like, wait a minute, this dude used to make me eat my own faeces and masturbate in front of other students.

abuse isn't something bad people do to good people. it's learned behavior.

yeah, sorry for the lazy post, i don't know if i believe there are "good people" and "bad people" or not.

i think in his own way he wanted to help me be a normal kid, a normal teenage boy

omg soooo true. and yet, i'm probably never gonna be ascended enough for my empathy to extend to authoritarian behaviors and personalities.

met my bully at a 4th of July thing about three years after high school and he was being very friendly and I was pretty confident and I said "last time I saw you you were hunting me down to kick my ass" and he said "oh. yeah, sorry. I'm not an angry person any more" and my heart softened because I could see that it was true. he was fucked up then and since then he'd grown. we hugged it out. people's fuckin frontal cortexes don't finish forming until sometime in their twenties, teenagers do fucked up shit. they should be sorry as grownups and make amends when they can but being mercilessly "well but the shit you did was SO FUCKED UP" really doesn't help anybody in this world at all imo. some people are already completely beyond the pale and some people get caught up in some poisonous ways of being when they're young and later see the error of their ways and this shouldn't even be a controversial position

imo

yea thats a messed up thing about it. I grew up in a small town and sometimes you wind up at parties with people you went to middle school with and when they see you 10 years later they act like you're some long lost friend. and you're just like, wait a minute, this dude used to make me eat my own faeces and masturbate in front of other students.

― young sussy (Whiney G. Weingarten)

so there was this guy in our high school who rented out porn tapes to the other kids, right? everybody knew about it, except me, because i was that fucking uncool. and one day this kid who's, i don't know, maybe a little less uncool than me. he had a richard dean anderson mullet and the same k-mart hypercolor t-shirt that i did. anyway for whatever reason the videotape he returned was a videotape of him masturbating with his finger in his ass. (the town had gotten super gentrified since my parents bought a house there, our family was one of the only ones in town without a camcorder.) i don't know if this guy had just accidentally returned the wrong videotape or if he was coming on to this other kid or what.

anyway the kid who was renting out the porn tapes did as you do, he threw a big party and invited everyone (i wasn't invited, of course, because i was that fucking uncool) and showed everybody the videotape. well that made enough of a big splash that even _i_ heard about that one the next monday.

it was a whole big thing, the kid's whole family packed up and moved away because of it.

anyway i don't know what your baseline for "normal bullying" is whiney but what cornelius did is kind of inline with my high school experience.

... i feel like this is pvmic for me

While all that is true, and I know it makes me a lesser person, you will have to pry my blinding hatred of my bullies from my cold, dead, hands, both of them sending middle fingers up to D. Spivy. Burn in hell, shitbag.

I hate going to my old hometown. It’s so small that the chance of running into a painful memory is too high.

xpost how is laughing at the local pervert making revenge porn of himself anything like making a disabled kid eat his own shit?

Disabled kid with a mouth full of “faeces”: boyfs will be boysf

Like I don’t have a horse in the race on whether you should or shouldn’t listen to Shibuya-kei artist Cornelius in 2023, I’m just saying the reasoning and bargaining and gymnastics happening in this thread is very, very funny

thank you so much for policing the thread Whiney, it warms my heart to know good people still exist in ILX

anyway here's a story that is perhaps relevant to the discussion. one of the guys I went to high school with named Matt used to tell stories of his sexual encounters and they were usually kinda rapey. he'd hook up at parties with a girl who had way too much to drink and did stuff while she was either passed out or severely inebriated. I remember asking him "uhhh you sure that's okay dude" and he'd be like "oh yeah, she enjoyed it, I got her phone number after" and so on.

this guy would show up to our parties now and then a few years later. of course by that time I was thinking "yeah, that's 100% rape". one day a group of girls came in including one of the girls he'd mentioned. and so I told her "hey uh just so you know, Matt's here". she said "uhh who?" and I was like "we went to school with him, remember?". she recognized him but was curious why I'd pointed that out, and as it turns out his entire story was just made up. he said it just to impress people, because when you're 17 beer and sex were like, super cool

not saying all his stories were made up, but I do recall some of us wondering where exactly these things were happening. there weren't exactly a lot of parties going on back then. and now I think man, if someone had recorded that, or you had posted about it online, that shit could be really bad for you some day.

anyway I apologize for all the reasoning and bargaining and gymnastics but yes, if nobody's gonna corroborate any of the things said in that interview then I have to think there's at least some chance it was either exaggerated or largely made up, especially when it comes to things that kinda seem incredibly difficult to actually do to another person.

thank you so much for policing the thread Whiney, it warms my heart to know good people still exist in ILX

― frogbs

personally i don't mean it sarcastically, i think it really is cool that whiney still genuinely has the capacity for moral outrage

the point of my little anecdote was not to excuse or mitigate what mr. oyamada did. i don't plan on listening to the album, i'm kinda done with him and his career.

i'm just not really _upset_ about it. i wish i was. i wish i could be. the world is filled with horrible people who do awful things and mostly they're the ones who are the biggest successes, that's how you get to be a success in this world, do awful shit and laugh about it.

i'm burned out. i've been burned out for a long time. i have empathy fatigue. if people want to listen to cornelius or eat chick-fil-a or buy the new harry potter game.

well. i'm glad whiney has the ability to get upset about those things. i think his capacity for outrage makes him a really good ally.