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Henny Vrienten 1948 — 2022

Published on May 1, 2022Leave a comment

Last Monday Henny Vrienten, frontman of the Dutch pop group Doe Maar, passed away and with him a little bit of my youth.

If you’re not Dutch, you’ll likely have never heard of him or Doe Maar, so it may be hard to understand how insanely popular the band was from 1981 to 1984. Every single was a hit, every album went paltinum and every concert had thousands of teenage girls screaming their heads of. Comparing it to Beatlemania would be an understatement. When the band announced they would stop it was the first item on the main television news broadcast that day. I was not even ten when they split up, but I had the buttons, the pink/green scarf and everything. Everybody in my primary school was a fan, not just the girls, the boys too. If you were a child in the early eighties, Doe Maar was the sound track to your youth.

In hindsight the popularity of Doe Maar is utterly bizarre. This wasn’t a manufactured hype, but something that sponteneously erupted at a time the band had almost decided to quit already. Doe Maar was founded in 1978 by a group of musicians in their late twenties, each with a history of playing in other bands; when Vrienten joined in 1980 he was already thirty. Their first hit with him as singer, sinds een Dag of Twee, was about him how strange it was to be falling in love again when you’re thirtytwo. Hardly the stuff that makes teenyboppers swoon. Furthermore their record company at the time had so little faith in them it had shelved their second album. It was only by accident that Dutch radio diskjockeys started playing the single and promoting the album, but it was enough to start the Doe Maar hype. From that point onwards they would become the most popular Dutch band of all times.

What made Doe Maar’s success even more improbable was that at the time, serious Dutch pop music was just not done. Sure, there were people singing in Dutch, but these tended to be either serious folk singer types, or people from the light entertainment world. But if you wanted to be taken seriously as a pop or rock musician, you had to sing in English. Doe Maar never did this. In fact, they’d made their debut on the legendary compilation album Uitholling Overdwars (1979), put out by the Stichting Popmuziek Nederland to promote Dutch language pop music, which also included several other groups that would make it big in the early eighties alongside Doe Maar. That may be Doe Maar’s biggest legacy, making Dutch language pop music respectable and relevant. What made Vrienten’s singing also important was the distinctive Brabant accent in his voice, rather than using the somewhat artificial standard Dutch of your usual light entertainment singer. ‘Provincial’ voices were rarely heard until then, unless in purely regional bands with little national appeal.

What made this small revolution possible was of course punk. The D.I.Y. aesthetic and attitude of punk rock meant there was space to break with the established traditions of ‘serious’ rock and all over Europe you saw bands move away from English towards their own language; most well known being the Neue Deutsche Welle movement of the same time. Nevertheless Doe Maar was never a punk rock group, even if some of the songs on their first eponymous were at least punk in style, like Wees Niet Bang Voor Mijn Lul. No, the secret sauce of Doe Maar’s success was something else entirely: ska and reggea. While on that first album it was all a bit Kinks’ Apeman style parody including dubious accents, from when Vrienten joined Doe Maar it was taken seriously. As a bass player Vrienten himself contributed a lot to the new Doe Maar sound. He even produced an actual dub version of their third album, Doe de Dub in 1982.

I can still remember the frustration and sadness of Doe Maar just deciding to stop at the height of their fame. It was the only thing we talked about on the playground next day: why did they have to stop, why now, why. It didn’t make sense to me then, but it was the best decision they could’ve made at the time. That popularity must’ve been incredibly scary, night after night seeing 13 and 14 year old girls screaming themselves hoarse at you to the point of fainting. Vrienten himself had said that he feared that one day it would all go horribly wrong and somebody would be killed in the crushes that happened during their concerts. The pressure of so much popularity didn’t help relationships within the band itself either and when Doe Maar realised they could just …stop, it must’ve come as a relief.

At the time Doe Maar quit, Vrienten had already brought out his first solo record. Post-Doe Maar he would not only record, but start a new career as a writer of movie music, having been one of the two composers within Doe Maar as well. Movies and musicals would be the main focus of his music, but he also featured in various side projects with other famous Dutch musicians over the years. Doe Maar itself would re-unite in 2000, just as the generation of teenyboppers that were their fans in the early eighties were now in their thirties themselves. It was never quite the same as before, but they did release a new studio album and held regular new tours ever since. In fact, Vrienten’s illness led to the cancellation of their last tour, which would’ve been held last year.

Dit was alles.

Unexpected ikemen in the bagging area

Published on March 7, 2022Leave a comment

Bear with me. One of the more irritating ‘controversies in anime/manga/light novel/etc fandom is the localisation versus literal debate about translations and subtitles. There’s a small but loud group of mostly rightwing fans who prefer their translation to be as literal and as much like the original Japanese as possible and who see all other translations as suspect. This usual goes hand in hand with conspiracy theories about Funimation polluting their precious bodily fluids with SJW language in their translations. The idea that there’s an art to translation, that you can’t just go word by word like some robot and expect anything good or even understandable to come out of it just doesn’t land with these people.

This hasn’t stopped professional translator Sarah Moon, here comparing the excellent, slang laden puntastic official subtitles of My Dress-UP Darling/Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi o Suru with an as literal as possible translation of the spoken Japanese. It’s brilliant and hilarious and it shows just how stilted and awkward this insistence on literalness makes things. You end up with sentences that still make some sort of sense but are just never said in English, sentences that sound as if you had a stroke. It also shows just how good the unknown translator/subtitler of the series is, being able to put so much character in such a limited space. I wish Crunchyroll and other parties would actually credit their translators (and other staff) like Hi-Dive does.

Line goes up…

Published on February 5, 2022Leave a comment

If you wanted to know about NFTs, where they came from, what they’re being used for and especially why they are harmful but were afraid to ask, this is the video for you.

At almost two and a half hours it’s a long sit, but that’s because Dan Olson takes the time to set the context in which NFTs arouse. To understand NFTs you have to understand Bitcoin and all the other electronic currencies that were inspired by it, not to mention the dreaded blockchain and the whole spectre of ‘web3’ technology. As important, Olson understand that just knowing the technological context isn’t enough and therefore starts with the real driving force behind Bitcoin and NFTs: the 2008 recession.

Because in 2008 the world economy crashed and while it may superfically look like the world has recovered since, the truth is it wrecked the opportunities of an entire generation. The idea that if you get the right education, go on to get a good job you can have a good, stable career the way your parents could in the sixties had been undermined for decades of course, but the 2008 recession made it official. The ladder had been pulled up and the normal ways of bettering yourself are no longer available. Even people lucky enough to graduate and start a middle class career are finding life precarious; you may be temporarily affluent but are you secure the way your parents were secure in their careers? And it’s not just careers that are insecure: something as basic as owning your own house is increasingly out of reach of all but the most upper of middle class people. Be it London, new York or Amsterdam, it’s hard to find a house when investors routinely overbid you. The average housing price here in Amsterdam is now 10,000 euros/square metre, which means my own appartment of 48 square metres is worth half a million euros. It’s absurd.

All of which means is that life is as unstable as it has ever been since the 1930ties for the vast majority of people even in rich countries, the gap between the rich and the rest of us as great as it ever has been while ever attempt to level this gap has been smashed. We’ve seen how the establishment in the UK reacted when Jeremy Corbyn almost won the 2017 elections, which led to the Labour right smashing their own party while the entire press conspired to put Johnson in Number 10. When regular politics are no longer allowed and regular ways to have a stable career and life are equally smashed, that leads to people looking for alternatives. In politics, this lead to Trump and Brexit. Similarly, if people cannot get rich conventionally, they’ll seek out other ways of doing so. There’s a huge market of precarious, affluent middle class people ripe for exploitation.

Which brings me to Albania. A former ‘protectorate’ of fascist Italy, after liberation at the end of the Second World War it became a communist dictatorship ruled by Enver Hoxha. Hoxha was a Stalinist so orthodox that he broke with the Warsaw Pact for being too soft. Under his leadership Albania was so closed a country it made North Korea seem positively welcoming. The collapse of communism all over Eastern Europe also reached Albania and in the early nineties it became a normal democratic, capitalist state. Now if you know your recent European history, you know that all these countries that had lived under communism for almost half a century were incredibly vulnerable to capitalist exploitation and were plundered on an unprecedented scale by their own ex-communist elites and western advicers. Albania was worse than most and its economy became dominated by pyramid and ponzi schemes, with millions of people investing their savings in them. When it all collapsed in 1997 it led to civil war.

As Dan Olson argues here, all electronic currencies are pyramid schemes, people buying them to sell to a bigger fool and NFTs even more so. There’s a ready made market for them, of those precarious middle class, usually tech adjecent people who want to find a way to get rich or die trying. Which is worrying. It’s not just the godawful realities of bitcoin and NFTs, it’s that once it all burst, once all these people, already primed by Trump and Qanon, lose their shit, they’ll lose their shit and what will that mean for America?

The sheer hypocrisy

Published on January 15, 2022Leave a comment

You can’t help but sympathise with the guy being interviewed here, a funeral officer who at the height of the Covid pandemic had had to stop people from saying their last farewells, now feeling a fool for having done so when the government that set the rules never had any intent to obey them themselves

What sticks in the craw is that’s James O’Brien he’s talking to, who with his employer LBC was one of the people responsible for destroying the one credible alternative to a Johnson led Tory government back in 2019. What sticks in the craw is that all of the press currently falling over themselves to explain what a bad ‘un Boris Johnson is and who could’ve guessed, could’ve told us that in 2019 but refused to. What sticks in the craw is the pretence that having an office party is what made Johnson bad, that the failed and utterly corrupt covid strategy of the government as a whole isn’t an issue. That for the second time in a decade the Tories are responsible for mass deaths amongst the most vulnerable, first through austerity, second through herd immunity is ignored or outright denied even. But the chance at taking down a prime minister who has become an embarassment without doing damage to the larger Tory project by using this trivial issue has the same people who championed him two years ago chomping at the bit.

First Cameron, then May, now Johnson. The media install Tory prime ministers to do their dirty jobs, then discards them when no longer needed, but never questions the legitimacy of the Tories as a whole. That fate is left for anything that challenges the established order. Tell me, if democracy means that the press is allowed to ruthlessly monster anybody they take a dislike to, that only those candidates and parties acceptable to it are allowed anywhere near power and that allowance can be withdrawn at any time, how much of a democracy is the United Kingdom still?

Why Haruhi is just like Superman — narratives shaped by media

Published on December 17, 2021Leave a comment

Pause and Select‘s video about the anime media mix and the way it can shape narratives and the changes in how it has done so got me thinking. In the interview here with Marc Steinberg, who has written a book about this, they discuss how the media mix works. How a franchise like Star Wars creates a narrative through the use of different media: comics, movies, books, cartoons, television shows and how that changed for the anime media mix with Haruhi with the character becoming the world rather being part of a narrative within that world. No longer on a consistent narrative within one world, but with the narrative changing, the world altered depending on which particular bit of media you’re consuming. You’re reading for Haruhi and it no longer matters which narrative she’s part of.

Which got me thinking.

You know what sounds really similar to how Haruhi is presented and sold? How DC Comics traditionally dealt with Superman. Because what you see there is that from 1938 to the seventies, what they’re selling is not the world of Superman, where you have different stories in different media but all set in the same world, but rather the same character in different contexts. The Superman comics told different stories from the newspaper strip, the Max Fleischer cartoons, the tv and radio shows or the underoos, but had the same recognisable characters. The comics themselves were often not even that consistent, with no real continuity, taken place in an eternal present. Then there were the imaginary stories, where the writers would place Superman in deliberately world ending scenarios and presented it explicitly as not real in a very different way from how every other Superman story was not real.

In this context, the Haruhi media mix is the older model and it was Marvel which introduced the media mix as narrative, by explicitly setting its comics in the same world, with a continuity that means one story is set after another and characters can cross over into other stories, expecting the reader to pay attention and directly refering to the older story when relevant through recapping or editorial notes. At first this was of course only limited to the comics themselves, with any other media adaptations just being that, adaptations, but its ultimate form is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having introduced superhero comics continuity to the cinema, where stories can continue in different movies, tv shows and even comic books!

What sets the Haruhi media mix model apart from the Superman model is a greater self consciousness and awareness of the media mix as a whole, rather than seeing the comics or the movies as the primary component and the rest as mere adaptations, optional elements, to be discarded when no longer relevant. (Sometimes even discarding its own primary continuity, as in Crisis on Infinite Earths.) Haruhi has character as primary mode of engagement much more than Superman ever had, which still had a rough consistency across all its media elements, elements that once added, would crop up everywhere. With Haruhi on the other hand it’s just enough she’s Haruhi.

Which of course brings me to vtubers. The ultimate form of character as world, with the narrative rising organically from day to day streaming, where the core elements of the character (Subaru is a loud duck, La+ is a chuuni fork) are what sticks but the context in which they’re established barely matters. Meaning created out of thin air. The ultimate post-modern entertainment.