でんでんガァデン

memory, I’ve heard or read somewhere, is primarily associative. in a mapping of memory to the web, backlinks reinforce the associations that end up also fertilizing factory SEO farms. this is much of the reason why it can be fun to follow the degrees needed to reach hitler on wikipedia, or strain pixiv for uniquely stale pasta that even nicopedia doesn’t touch, when barreling down the web hole until something like THE FIRST TAKE can wring out the brain sponge on HOT LIMIT.

these moments, for me, are where the web looks like it has long cultural context. loftier cultural analyses, like one page from YTMND defending that fads aren’t memes, might instead choose to explain this as parsing the intertextuality of the internet. this lens is how I accept that much of the writing on this site looks when trying to climb out of that web hole. in a race to mine the web for scrap found tilling net junkyards, online intertextuality is definitely useful for understanding that ronald mcdonald will likely one day also be speeding to eurobeat to reach his next advertising campaign. even more useful for me is that it allows building my own wienermobile of cultural critique. if the brands had any duty of care when shifting up, they might also take some responsibility for now making me drink ritalin and its animutation paste.

if you’re not picking up what I’m putting down, it helps to take in that soramimi (空耳) have remained the web’s inner ear balance for remix. there is enough modern enthusiasm of them in net culture, and enough evidence of them beginning in traditional broadcast, that you might hesitate to treat them as any uniquely web phenomenon. even the title of this post, as how I might describe trying to puzzle piece the cultural morphemes using soramimi, comes courtesy of a linguistic study of the soramimi from its main coinage in television.

the story of emergent digital cultures, however, is almost incomprehensibly incomplete if you don’t also acknowledge their wield of pop music as a readymade in this way. particularly as we still attempt to shoehorn global perspectives onto the web, their regional appropriation as soramimi is a great residue of antithesis. moskau is a german song that some americans, apparently, profess is their favorite japanese song. numa numa is, from different angles, a lighting rod in a copyright saga or a second kind of copyright saga. michael jackson loves takoyaki in the breaks between his rat a tat. much as I think bollywood often finds itself cast out of the pop culture discussion, soramimi’s diffusion through buffalax was a status unique enough for “buffalaxing” to be crowned neologism of its year. with soramimi to americans still primarily being cake, the light burning out on buffalaxing and leaving behind only “mondegreen” to communicate misheard lyrics in a more broad awareness is a residue that I believe only the most honest of subcultures leave behind. HOT LIMIT, being charter to one of the must-see “great classic fanimutations” per the animutation portal, will always be able to fan this perfume absent any other accolade.

while THE FIRST TAKE, under the sony music japan (SMEJ) umbrella, is too useful as a j-pop bulletin for it to be totally marred by nostalgia, HOT LIMIT appearing here is laced with an intertextuality that makes it a great study of cultural reach. as much as it is a eurobeat cover and a chiptune cover in the bemani universe, and the template for shaken-up cola, it is also alex chiu’s immortality through the soramimi and the animutation. in recent years before this more direct cover, it was one way to announce your covid test results, preceded by a visual challenge against typhoons more dangerous than even planking.

in digital dreams of the internet’s potential, the animutation is probably closest to what would be invented as its fingerprint in crass, rapidly nonsensical collage like this collection. HOT LIMIT having particular stake in the animutation may not look especially notable itself, if you can’t be convinced of its pollution both in its creative influence on long-living net celebrity and infection by association¹, but it is at least true that it demonstrates pop music’s thread in the creative fabric of the web. an anime composite MAD associating match cuts itself does not require fitting into a complete narrative of TM revolution, or that it has influence greater than me telling you mayochiki deserves your appraisal, unless you also consider how it has floated along with the web’s copyright currents. animutations featuring HOT LIMIT were too young and too amateur as digital media to ever attract serious takedown. this MAD’s original upload on nico only a few years later, instead, was struck down by SMEJ to survive now exclusively as a reupload.

watching SMEJ give star back to HOT LIMIT as a digital event under this weight, worn down by attrition into accepting a youtube red future, is a look into one of the clearest examples of online media and remix finally having the capillary rise needed to overcome the hubris of corporate towers. the temptation to view digital futures as an emergent phenomenon permitted by corporate steering, and not one that reaches back into the trenches of flash subcultures, has always been a bad propensity, but I take stock that the artifacts of the early web can provide the most useful backdrop in still absent narratives for the web simply by surviving long enough for them to be excavated. it is, alas, more difficult to outright misrepresent the longevity of the twink, shimmied into his electrical tape at 55 years old, when he twunks.

commercial utilization of the web’s remixes is some part opportunistic seizure of the feeling that they should remain communal readymades, which took at least one post before this one to wrestle. it is also remix beyond the direct lift that I have taken more time to appreciate as a generational cycle of creative talent. while I would never argue that game development hasn’t been plugged into the web, rhythm heaven groove adding “silly lyrics” is astounding in how bluntly it is just the web’s soramimi. japan’s creative industries, and especially its recording industry, are so notoriously protective of image that I do have a touch of disbelief that this exists coming out of a notoriously stodgy nintendo. undoubtedly it has been retained that nintendo of america has been allowed some independence, but for the reasons that buffalax was judged culturally insensitive even in its era, the sanitization of soramimi requires acknowledging that youtubers today, still, take some pride in not being able to pronounce japanese names or understand that native languages other than their own exist. soramimi of course has japanese cultural DNA, which I’m sure helps in making the pitch², though it is still crass in this pattern, which suggests to me that its presence here is almost entirely the result of turnover in staff that grew up exposed to its tradition online. if there is a delineation most encoded in the sea change of the web at large, it is probably that the crass has morphed into a more outright malicious, but also that the amateur has been fully recontextualized into legitimization in this way.

for as much as I have seen spoken about nostalgia with some superlative, it is removed enough from the web’s ongoing arc of reappraisal that it is probably harmful that we have treated it as the umbrella narrative for many truly organic web cultures. vaporwave’s assembled aesthetic as a digital microgenre, stewarded by twenty-somethings exhuming 80s synthpop and VGM, is overwhelmingly a story of access more than perhaps any other quality. while tape archives and digital packrating are closer to hoarding than a disciplined preservation, reappraisal is a function dependent on this data’s access and awareness, either for remix or digestion into a larger latent space. the extent to which readymades are placed on pedestals in venues like vaporwave is a fuzzy act of curation in a world that may drown itself in data.

while we can acknowledge that the readymade flows more often through being wholesale lift, the groans that expired cultures are now continually dug up for a cheap aesthetic presentation are surely selective when digital media continues with an appreciable full-bank width of remix. the belief that denpa music, in function or totality, is beyond expiration is still a discussion that is had in the comfort of denpa music graduating from mediafire rips to now being accessible by infinitely larger audiences on sactioned streaming. although the discussion in this specific arena has more nuance, and that genres are as much a product of the attitudes and contours of their bedded era, denpa’s huddling into specific characteristics was born entirely from the invention of a shared language among fans and collectors. it is an admittedly charitable interpretation of raking culture for tiktoks that I suggest we can imbue all plucking of culture with this quality, but to argue that online cultures must be dictated linearly, or that they must hockey stick growth only upwards across all time, is to lay wreath to a free culture of remix and transposition. if soramimi is a visible residue of this idea, then its accompanying animutation, with iconography pulled readily from google image searches and photoshops that belong in phriday threads, might more likely be the radiation that is present in the web’s steel.

treating even an online culture as strictly rooted in the web is also often a gloss over the fact that hierarchy is what does ultimately germinate them. relational definition is powerful to the web’s media, but I feel it should be stressed by any cultural examination that it is an incomplete parse even at the crystallization of ideas of a monoculture, itself a relational invention with regional shape. TM revolution will always enjoy exposure through being some of the best anison of all time. the reason I do devour HOT LIMIT specifically in this post, and say not the moonwalk or the harlem shake, is that it does demonstrate unique intersectionality to old world and new world media with regional context. while THE FIRST TAKE certainly primes the discussion today, its value in these dictated contexts probably results more from discussions in japanese professional creative spaces having a shorter throw. indeed, access is component to reappraisal, but malleability will continue to be its overwhelming communication. when super sonico and shimamura uzuki donned the electrical tape, it did not necessarily need appreciation that TM revolution personally distributed the doujinshi with their original key art two years prior at comiket. the refraction of his leather fantasy through fan art, with faster online conduit that will happily draw female characters in tightly bound clothes, is as solid a proof as any that access is its own short throw from being recognized more obviously as a simple contagion.

many pop culture elements with professional backing, including japanese music still, can be unwilling to be found standing in the camp of the amateur. the appetite for remix has also been noticably uneven across locales: while JASRAC does direct traffic on covers, it also is unable to grant licenses that allow for rearrangement and lyrical parodies that might infringe on moral rights. with creation, attribution is already the ego that has birthed producer tags like daisuke being interleaved into HOT LIMIT’s lyrics (ダイスケ的にもオールオッケー). HOT LIMIT, in some sense, has already been willingly stripped of its ego by allowing covers to modify this line to suit their unique character, noticed in my periphery mostly by uzuki at club events (島村的にもオールオッケー) and cruise parties (中川的にもオールオッケー). even decently accepting incursions of remix like this, placing faith in the implicit boundaries set by doujinshi, look miniscule to the web’s freeform. smarter artists who have jumped into a tiktok of cultural telephone have understood how to wield this to their advantage, or to allow it to happen without interference. rhythm heaven, too, has demonstrated how it can take hold of a tradition of remix clearly informed by the web to build itself back. the uncertainty in how copyright and ownership will be ultimately wielded by swarms on a supposedly agentic era for the web is, so far, one that the web has navigated unevenly across its prior two eras and NFT change. from a perspective of free culture, at the vantage point where I have been able to watch how the typhoon winds have blown its rains up until now, I am appreciative that it might end up being all okay. the largest digital folklore project of all time can’t stop long enough for it to be a fad.

さ〜せん、さ〜せん... すっかり"イナズマロック フェス2011"と誕生日終わりで、ぐったりんこしてました... そのせいかどうかは、わかりませんが、台風が東京直撃... 皆さん、本当に危険なので『T.M.Revolutionごっこ』は、おやめ下さい... 改めて、お願いします

— 西川貴教 (@TMR15) Sep 21, 2011