Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting MP3 favorites from the wild-west days of the early internet: the B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today’s track…
Utada Hikaru, “Can You Keep a Secret?”
Hit it off like this.
The internet has always been a series stubbornly closed-off garden walls. Even before moments like the brief TikTok hiatus or siloing within Discord channels, the Internet was an excellent demonstration of how disparate cultures had their own version of nostalgia, obsessions, soundtracks. My experience with the early internet was America-centric, a cavalcade of Simpsons roundups and Hostess Fruit-Pie tributes and the latest news on American blockbusters. When something even slightly outside that silo popped up, such as those astonishing Polish movie posters, it became an all-consuming thing to me. The internet gave up treasures that felt like another world entirely, so far beyond my little corner of the world that they could have come from another time, another place. (After all, I didn’t become semi-locally-famous for documenting the history of westerners in Japanese commercials sui generously; I had wayward Yahoo! searches to thank for that.) We are all one world but we all live so differently. Even our superstars aren’t universal.
The world’s biggest-selling music phenomenon was completely unknown in mainstream America, and she would have passed me by if I hadn’t seen one passing reference to them on a message board.
How was this even possible? American pop press, from Entertainment Weekly to Billboard, breathlessly recounted how quickly ‘NSync’s No Strings Attached sold in its first week, and here’s an album beating that record by 500,000 copies in a country with 100 Million fewer people. Distance sold three million copies its first seven days in Japan, so how did it have zero presence in the States? It was produced by (among others) Darkchild and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, and it didn’t merit a stateside release? Maybe I was running with the wrong crowd, but it’s wild to me that there wasn’t even a bit of a push to place a single on radio in Los Angeles or New York.
Hell, Hiki’s my age and also from Manhattan. You’re telling me there wouldn’t be a market for one of our own on Z100 or KTU?
The internet is a series of walled gardens, the world is splintered into its own small civilizations. No matter how interconnected we get and no matter how much we live in the age of globalization, it will always be so. There will always be Kalle Anka at Christmas. There will always be Egg Creams. We don’t all live on the exact same Earth, so when something huge from somewhere else appears in your field of vision it can feel like a little miracle.
Napster afforded me the chance to seek out those Japanese artists I had only seen mentioned on the international charts way at the back of Billboard. After years I could finally hear what the big deal was with SMAP or GLAY or Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. It was intentional but with only a few remembered names to go on. This search was behind the curve; I was getting the mid-90s from Japan. It would take time and happenstance to find myself in the present.
The switch to Kazaa–and high-speed internet at university–meant one thing: video. Suddenly I had access to that Muppet Weezer video any time I wanted. I could grab fansubs of Excel Saga with impunity. And most of all I could get up to speed with artists who went from total unknowns in America to my new obsession in no time flat. Who was this Japanese artist who made music that felt familiar and yet totally new, who blended two languages seamlessly in service of the beat?
Turns out Utada Hikaru was from the UES and went to Columbia. Sometimes it’s a small world too.
But what she was creating out of Japan felt like an alternate present. I gravitated towards “Can You Keep a Secret” because it took all these bits of R&B and dance pop that America had discarded quickly at the end of the Millennium and turned them into a new sound. There’s the pseudo-Spanish guitar, the stop-start beat, the “wee-oo-wee-oooh” of the MIDI behind them, reminisces of Enrique Iglesias, Ray of Light Madonna, Brandy & Monica. Over here we had taken a hard right turn after those hits; 2000 took a Eurobeat stance when it let dance music back on the charts. America was ballads, rockers, hip-hop with southern roots, and even country topping the overall charts for the first time in forty years.
What if the jump to the 21st Century had gone slightly differently? Here was an American-born artist recording Japanese-language pop in the Twin Cities that felt like the natural evolution of “The Boy is Mine”. Those garden walls have doors, and we have to be purposeful in walking through them. We don’t find anything if we don’t look.
If you’re an American and you’re aware of Utada, it’s most likely because of their theme song for the Kingdom Hearts franchise. Those games to me always felt like the perfect distillation of an American-oriented view of pop culture: it has the mechanics of the video games that got popular here but it leans heavily into a craven remember-this of Disney properties. I’m from the Eighties, so of course you could get my attention by saying TRON or the Gummy Ship. There’s a lot of standing around and watching cutscenes and going on side-quests–MC Chris did an excellent bit about its pace–but most stick with it because of the immersive nostalgia and connection to the characters. And, of course, the soundtrack absolutely rips. “Simple and Clean”, especially in its oft-used remix version, is a propulsive bit of pop that seems to drag the listener back to its own present, so it wouldn’t chart in America until 2019, where even the nostalgia had nostalgia for itself. The original Japanese version, “Hikari”, is more in line with Utada’s local output, attuned for what their fans were expecting after record-breaking success.
Kingdom Hearts and everything associated with it is overdetermined art, drawing from multiple sources over myriad cultural movements to create something singular. It’s a global success featuring global icons; Goofy, Mickey, and Donald speak every language and had the foothold they needed to break a JRPG worldwide. Kalle Anka for every season, not just Christmas. There’s something for everyone, or at least something to get them intrigued.
So what of Utada Hikaru, record-breaker in Asia and forever tied to one project everywhere else? Why didn’t America embrace them the way they had, say, Kyu Sakamoto for a moment in the 60s? Our worlds were too different in 2001, perhaps. The silo didn’t have room for something different in the boy-band and me-too-Britneys deluge of the beginning of the year, and it certainly didn’t have anything in an end of the year that vacillated between performative mournfulness and uniquely-American vengeance. No radio station would pick up “Can You Keep a Secret” between plays of “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” and “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue”. Here we had this amalgam of Japanese and American influences, fully throwing themselves into an evolutionary track that drove a country absolutely crazy. (It’s worth noting that a Beatles-like intensity to putting out new LPs let to similar sales rampages in 2002.)
It was up to us to find the doors in the garden walls, to say “I’ve never heard of that” and be curious. We would find those out in the world who spoke our language, and blockbusters from across the world became like our own secrets to be kept. What else didn’t we know? There was only one way to find out.
Next Time: That’s all right, that’s okay. I never loved you anyway…