Cornelius: Classic or Dud?

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.