A J-Pop Kawaii candy coated nightmare.
“Our stance on cultural appropriation is that it’s great, and in this case doubly great for creating a cycle of appropriation by appropriating from the greatest of cultural appropriators: the Japanese. They’ve borrowed from the west, and now we’re re-borrowing their half-borrowed medium - whose culture is really discernible in J-pop anyway? It’s an appropriated medium! The sitcom we made for Randa is an equally blatant appropriation of a medium that originates in a culture that isn’t ours. We dressed up as J-pop because of that industry’s blatant production-line approach to music as commerce, with little consideration for the individuality of the people it packages. Western music can be blamed for the same thing to a lesser (or just less-obvious) extent - and that’s the association we’re trying to make.” - THUNDERLIPS
