Clazziquai Project

January 14, 2008 5:37 PM

Clazziquai Project is a Korean band fusing jazz, pop, and electropop, leading their music to be described as Shibuya-kei. Several of the band members are Korean-Canadian, including the main man DJ Clazzi, who writes, mixes, and produces. The lyrics are usually a mix of Korean and English, with all-English versions of their songs being released for foreign markets. Their most recent album, Robotica, included remixes by a number of Japanese musicians, such as Fantastic Plastic Machine and Shinichi Osawa.

The band's mascot is a pig, hence the appearance of pigs in their music videos and other promotional materials.

Matchmaking pig in Sweety.
Jazzy flying pigs in Love Mode, featuring PE'Z and VERBAL from m-flo that is Alex from Clazziquai lending guest vocals.
A rather disturbing pig appearance in a promo for a Clazziquai album: Delivery pig.
This same pig makes a less disturbing appearance in a video homage to the Beastie Boys.

Clazziquai with no pigs:
Come to me
Lover Boy

May or may not have pigs, but does have behind-the-scenes footage of their other music videos: Our Lives.

(Bonus: "Love Mode" live - check out the guitarist! - and "Lover Boy" in the bathroom)

posted by needled (18 comments total)

Cool beans! I'm going to check them out.
posted by carter at 6:37 PM on January 14, 2008

What, no Fill This Night?
posted by Sangermaine at 7:53 PM on January 14, 2008

My problem with "Fill This Night" is that I keep thinking Horan is singing "Let's get pants!"
posted by needled at 8:06 PM on January 14, 2008

I hate this band so fucking much.

Even its name--a creatively-impoverished aping of an equally awful name, Jamiroquai ("Jam" + "Iroquoi" = "what the fuck are you dumb-ass Stevie-Wonder-imitating Brits THINKING?")--makes me gag.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 8:18 PM on January 14, 2008

Yes, but Joseph, creatively-impoverished aping of foreign stuff is what so much of the contemporary Korean arts scene is all about! Yeah, I said it. I'd love to be shown counterexamples, though.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:02 PM on January 14, 2008

I currently live in Korea and can testify to stavrosthewonderchicken's comment. Koreans like their music mixed up all crazy with some foreign words here and there, and usually off-key. And add in the dancing girls with tall boots. Needless to say, I prefer Japanese music if only for their willingness to break out of the old and try a new genre that doesn't begin and end with terrible synth-driven beats.
posted by mimikachu at 12:40 AM on January 15, 2008

Stavros, I'd be happy to show you a little more interesting stuff in Seoul. Maybe not your cuppa, but there's a small but thriving creative music community that has begun getting some pretty good international attention lately...for [i]innovation[/i], no less.

Check out Relay (concert series), The Manual (label), Balloon&Needle (label), Bulgasari (concert series).

(Caveat: I'm involved in these things)
posted by Joseph Gurl at 4:36 AM on January 15, 2008

Crap, sorry about the failed html...hanging out on fucking message boards is making me dumb.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 4:37 AM on January 15, 2008

Thanks, Joseph, I will check that stuff out!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:25 AM on January 15, 2008

Thanks Joseph for the recommendations!

Personally I like a number of Clazziquai songs because I have a weak spot for dancy synthpop.

Part of what I found interesting about Clazziquai was the movement and fusion of influences (or "creatively-impoverished aping of foreign stuff" as stavros put it). Koreans emigrate to Canada, but their children move back, bringing with them their exposure to pop culture outside of Korea. But then they link up with Japanese musicians who themselves are reinterpreting Western genres such as jazz (PE'Z) and hip-hop (m-flo). Another twist is that VERBAL is Zainichi Korean who studied in the U.S.

And I like that pig in the Love Mode video.
posted by needled at 6:20 AM on January 15, 2008

or "creatively-impoverished aping of foreign stuff" as stavros put it

Nope, that's how Joseph put it, aptly. I was just agreeing (and expanding).
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:34 AM on January 15, 2008

yes, but is it kosher?
posted by terrapin at 6:52 AM on January 15, 2008

I'm sorry, curious as to whether this "creatively-impoverished aping of foreign stuff" is meant to be said in a good way or a bad way. I, for one, was relieved to hear people like Drunken Tiger and CB Mass bring something different to Korean rap when compared to the really bad rapping you'd hear in the pop music scene with horrible English. People who had lived in America listening to rap and getting what it meant to have a beat and to rhyme would come back to Korea and do their own thing with it. Where before it was just people trying to stuff Korean into a rap-sized tin, but instead people came back and tried to mold a rap tin around Korean. So it seems like a good thing to me that there are people who are trying out something different? If you think the Korean music scene is so creatively-impoverished, isn't it a good thing some people are looking to outside influences to try out some new things? Then maybe mainstream Korean music will finally get out of its rut.

It's been a while since I've been back to Korea, but even I agree some of the mainstream pop stuff is a bit much. Sure a lot of pop is lame stuff, but what country's pop isn't. So I kind of agree yet disagree with mimikachu's comment (or at least how it sounds in my head) that that's all that there is to Korean music. Because yes, I can see some Japanese music fans being annoyed if people thought all of it was Morning Musume or Ayumi Hamasaki. And if that's your cup of tea, that's cool, but then there's people who like bands like Love Psychedelico. It's sort of the same deal, these guys aren't my cup of tea, but I'm glad to see something that takes a step away from 5 girls/guys lip synching to chereography.

There are people in Korea breaking outside of the genres of dance pop, but you have to look for them as you would in any other culture, away from whoever's dancing on the top 10 shows. And yea, some genres are not as sophisticated yet because of that oppressiveness of the mainstream, and I see similar attitudes of people just regarding it as "creatively-impoverished aping." Sorry, that just really grates on my ears even though I agree the mainstream Korean music scene could stand to see a grand overhaul especially with so many cases of plagiarism that plagued it and continues to plague it. Really when you have people going as far as ripping off entire outfits Britney Spears wore (looking at you Lee Hyori), you're really scraping. But it just doesn't sound like constructive criticism and just blasting/discouragement to people who have been trying to do different things even if it's through imitation or influences such as Sannullim, Crying Nut, Sugar Donut, Panic, etc.
posted by kkokkodalk at 10:44 AM on January 15, 2008

kkokkodaik, you've expressed so well the unease I was feeling about "creatively-impoverished aping of foreign stuff" and the implication that somehow Japanese pop music was free of this.

My perspective (and that of kkokkodaik's) is of somebody who has been observing Korean pop culture for a number of years. Taking this longer term view, Korean pop music has come a long way - it would have been hard to imagine in the 70's or 80's that Korea would be producing pop music that would appeal to audiences overseas. Clazziquai jumped out at me because it was music I could imagine being played on pop radio in the U.S., and they made interesting videos that managed to sidestep the propensity towards melodrama or cheesiness in a lot of Korean music videos.

I'm not sure how some aping of foreign stuff can be avoided, considering much of the pop music lexicon was imported, and coming in sporadically until fairly recently. Liberal access to overseas media, and overseas travel, are fairly recent phenomena in Korea. As for the establishment of a robust native pop culture, bear in mind that after 36 years of Japanese occupation that aimed to eradicate Korean culture, followed shortly by the Korean War, didn't leave much to start with. To then jeer at it, saying it's not as good as that of other countries that had more time to work on it, seems unduly harsh and unproductive.
posted by needled at 12:43 PM on January 15, 2008

I brought up the "creatively-impoverished aping" comment, and I did so specifically about the name (which I even went so far as to explain with links yo). I also neither said, meant, nor implied anything at all about Japanese music (or even Corean music, really, aside from this one band which I only said I hate).

Come on.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 7:28 PM on January 15, 2008

Sorry, Joseph, I was appropriating your phrasing only, and did not intend to attribute to you the same argument I was making.

See, I was wielding a broad brush and talking about the music, art, cinema, business culture, politics, design, you name it. I don't live in Seoul so I'm out of the only scene that counts and so perhaps less informed than I could be, and I'll happily admit that I don't give a shit about pop or dance music, but one of my strongest criticisms of Korean culture (about which, don't get me wrong, there are many great things, or I wouldn't still be here 12 years after I first set foot in the place), is that there is a paucity of creativity or willingness or bravery to actually innovate, rather than recycle (and usually improve on, granted) ideas of others. Or to venerate archaic forms out of a feeling of duty, rather than a love for them.

This is nothing unique to Korea, of course. But even though it's possible to find some bright cultural lights, they have been pretty few and far between. How this interpenetrates with cultural norms and recent history, to what extent it is an outgrowth of recent poverty and a moribund educational system that produces good memorizers and abysmal critical thinkers, if and how much it's changing with the newer, somewhat freer generations, or even if it's true, is open to much debate, certainly.

As for the establishment of a robust native pop culture, bear in mind that after 36 years of Japanese occupation that aimed to eradicate Korean culture, followed shortly by the Korean War, didn't leave much to start with. To then jeer at it, saying it's not as good as that of other countries that had more time to work on it, seems unduly harsh and unproductive.

Economically perhaps, but sympathetic as I may be to that argument (and as many times as I've hauled it out and paraded it around too over the years), I think it's unconvincing when talking about art (even popular media stuff). I am in complete agreement that the collective ravages on the Korean psyche over the first half of the 20th century have left deep scars and unresolved pathologies, and did immense damage to the nation at a time when it was too soon out of the protective shell of the backwards-looking hermit-kingdom Choseon Dynasty, but I'd suggest great artistic expression should have been encouraged, not retarded, by those collective experiences. Europe was smashed flat at midcentury, too (but, I'll grant you, received a lot more monetary assistance to rise from the ashes).

I love Korea, but I'm getting more and more weary as the years go by of the same old tired excuses from the older generations, and completely uninterested in hearing them from the young. Like everywhere else, history is forgotten, except where it will help feed nationalistic urges and the lust for wealth, douchebags like 이명박 get elected, and the focus continues to be on making money above all.

I make my criticisms from the perspective of having lived here for over a decade, from reading and writing fairly extensively about the place, and from (if I may be immoderate) a pretty damned well-informed perspective on its history. I am far from being one of the legions of whining half-cocked expats that litter the landscape here (few things about living here annoy me more, in fact).

I stand by what I said, but again, I'm always happy to be proven wrong with specific examples (such as the stuff Joseph pointed to above). I love this place and its people, the goofy underdog bastards, but I still try to be as clear-eyed as I can about its faults as well as its successes.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:47 PM on January 15, 2008

This is nothing unique to Korea, of course. But even though it's possible to find some bright cultural lights, they have been pretty few and far between.

Thanks for clearing your stance up a little, Stav, and I have no beef, but this one quote seems a little lost to me. Corean traditional music is motherfucking UNBELIEVABLY GREAT by any measurable standard (and any unmeasurable one I'm willing to countenance hehe).

In fact, Corea has a long and illustrious history of art and craft, a history that impacted neighboring China and Japan, in fact (not to imply in any way that the impact didn't go both ways, just standing up for the peninsula for a minute).

I don't think it's easy to explain why that may have dried up a bit in recent eras, but I'm pretty sure the occupation, war, and associated extreme poverty had something to do with it.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 12:56 AM on January 16, 2008

In fact, Corea has a long and illustrious history of art and craft, a history that impacted neighboring China and Japan, in fact (not to imply in any way that the impact didn't go both ways, just standing up for the peninsula for a minute).

Absolutely, in centuries past. I think the next few decades, as the oldies who have been responsible both for the great successes and depressing failures of Korea in the last 5 decades or so steadily die off, and their (in my opinion, mostly malign) influence fades, that we will see the country and the culture resurgent (though not without growing pains). We already see indications of this, I think.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:03 AM on January 16, 2008