Oolong Iced Tea: Real By Any Means Necessary

Hello!

The last newsletter was a doozy, so here's one I've been so excited for that it's been taking days for me to get it right: about Japanese hip-hop, the politics of racial aesthetics, and the conflicts of 'keeping it real'.

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Without further ado, here's some tea!

To The Next, To The Top Of The World

There's a Japanese rap duo that has been having perhaps the best 2024 ever as an act, and I have been so jazzed about it. Three songs peaking at the top ten of Billboard Japan Hot 100, including two at #1; those two top songs racking up a combined 350 million views on YouTube; a debut at the Kōhaku Uta Gassen; and their fourth album Legion reaching #3 on the Billboard Japan Hot Albums list and #15 in the Billboard US World Albums list. They have absolutely been on a tear last year, and their momentum hasn't stopped.

And if I hadn't had such a weird feeling about their name several years ago, I'd be into them since the 2010s—ironic, since their name was an overthought born of the assumption that they would never blow up as hard as they presently have.

Creepy Nuts is undeniably giving international hip-hop a great name. Japan does have a strong roster of high-caliber rappers in my opinion, and Creepy Nuts ranks very high among their number. The duo of producer (and 2019 DMC Battle for World Supremacy turntable-battle winner) DJ Matsunaga and lyricist (and 3-time UMB Grand Championship winner) R-Shitei seem to very obviously care about the culture, down to R-Shitei quitting high-school basketball to take rapping more seriously, and Matsunaga dropping out of school altogether to perfect his turntable skill. Three albums, four EPs, and one overpowered Mashle OP later, they're pretty much on top of the world.

But what's immediately interesting to me as a listener is that when 'Bling-Bang-Bang-Born' was revealed to be the second-season opener for the popular Mashle anime, it wasn't just a hit because it was catchy, energetic, and matched the tone of the anime (although it did in fact do all of these things). It was also because American—particularly Black American audiences—knew exactly what their influences were.

Several strong subgenres of Black music internationally have been coalescing and re-evolving in the last few decades and growing in prominence online, and one of them is the sounds of Jersey and Baltimore club. These and a lot of others alike in fame—Brazilian phonk, Nola bounce, and afrobeats come to mind immediately—have been such a hard shift from just last decade's premier sounds that you couldn't shake a stick on the internet without accidentally dowsing a dance vid or anime fancam on TikTok with a thumping bass pattern that makes you feel like the protag of an action movie, or a remix of a classic song or silly video neatly riding a bounce vibe. I am not immune to propaganda: I wake myself up on particularly exhausted mornings with a mini-playlist that features a Nola bounce remix of 'Human Nature' and a Jersey Club remix of 'Poison'; I am deep into a rabbit hole of the further collision that is 'zess bounce', which features some percussive production elements unique to current trends in Trinidad and Tobago's dancehall sound; some of the most entertaining videos I've seen all month are of Twitch streamers' random musical moments being chopped in this way.

I say all this to say: when 'Bling-Bang-Bang-Born' dropped, many Black anime fans immediately went Leonardo DiCaprio Points At TV—and it is most definitely by creative design. Y'all, even Ne-Yo was rocking with it. (Also of note, after having watched many reaction videos of the above, is how many Japanese people were also incredibly excited to share a moment of joy with Black American audiences through the song, like in the comments to this video reacting to their First Take performance.)

The space between this and 'Otonoke', their OP for the hit anime DanDaDan, is just about nine months apart, but this song carries a lot of the same energy and many of the same elements, it locked them in even more in the zeitgeist. A hip-hop OP that's not as cheesy as we could have otherwise feared, actually lyrically astute, and a genuine banger? Twice in a row in the same year?

Surely some part of this must be manufactured—a plant, something constructed specifically to win the attention of careless foreigners. Right? Is this genuine appreciation, or a work? I mean, when a K-pop group is very obviously wearing graceless attachments to Motown on their shiny pressed sleeves, it immediately rubs me the wrong way. What about this—a thing that could very easily just be two guys latching onto a trend they see catching fire on the internet—doesn't feel the same way?

Here's the thing, though: you can tell these are two different songs, with two very different, very strong vibes. Even if we can cynically assume that DJ Matsunaga is a sucker for the five-beat kick pattern, he's very talented at making each song feel fresh and carry their own energy—to say nothing of R-Shitei's poetic capacity and breadth of context, which can span from 'I am the very best because I can kill you with my rhymes' to embracing the horror and comedy of scary stories.

Hell, Creepy Nuts brings a similar vibe again on a track in the middle of these two tracks: the album's second single, 'Nidone' (which is the theme song for the very endearing and pretty funny TBS/Netflix dramedy Extremely Inappropriate!, which I still mean to watch) is similarly high-tempo and thumping, but is also a very heartwarming narrative about seeking solace in the world of dreams and fairy tales when real life is too much to deal with. Fast forward now to July 2025, where their latest single, 'Mirage', the second-season OP for Call of the Night (an anime I only recently learned is named after one of their early songs?!?!) is a similarly bittersweet song about the balance of the responsibilities of daylight and the temptation to fade into the midnight—what R-Shitei described on the anime's website as 'a festering relationship with the night'—but this time with the trappings of afrobeats as its rhythm.

And it still doesn't feel like something is being appropriated. It feels like two well-read artists are speaking deeply to genre.

Despite their name, Creepy Nuts' vibes seem much more chill and non-invasive than the alternative. They are definitely fans of the art form, genuinely curious, seriously creatively driven and immensely poetic. It isn't just a jam—or a job—to them.

Here's why this distinction matters to me: I listen to a lot of music, and try to be patient even about genres that I don't enjoy. My past experience as a high-school music reviewer instilled in me a somewhat misinformed duty to give grace to even music I don't immediately enjoy. But as a Black adult, there is no denying that a lot of international music doesn't butter my bread because its aesthetic is undeniably caricatured.

In the realm of a lot of Asian continental pop music, it is obvious that there is a... mastication of Black aesthetic that is core to several subgenres' performance and structure. I want to be sure that this, like many of the other crueler and less ideal parts of j-pop and K-pop (like agencies encouraging fans to develop dangerous parasocial relationships and even stalk their faves, or working underage girls to the point of illness and injury, to all kinds of more intense abuses besides), this is by corporate design: when your producer puts ten writers in a room to construct a song with international appeal, surely one of the metrics they're using to justify consuming Black aesthetics is the way everything else consumes Black aesthetics.

The problem with a lot of boy-band and girl-band K-pop (and j-pop, but more from the boys than the girls) isn't merely that it feels like an agency's appropriation of Black music, but it feels like R&B written by committee, polished for the unique purpose of drawing my attention and nothing more. It's like candy on the shelf next to the cashier: it's supposed to be sweet and eye-catching and make me spend my money and get attached, but it is absolutely going to ruin my appetite. Meanwhile, Creepy Nuts is in a genre that should very apparently lend itself to the same problem, but does indeed feel like they're keeping it real. Legion has songs about how much it sucks to have to eat cheap snacks at the izakaya, and how much it sucks for Japanese identity to be caricatured in Hollywood films, and the childlike desire to escape one's problems into the depths of fairytales, and the curious feeling of having fulfilled your middle-school dreams while having not matured at all.

I'm not even necessarily saying idol-group music can't be similarly interesting and arresting—Perfume and Atarashii Gakko! exist, after all—but the genre overall has the same problem as a lot of English-language pop: when most modern group pop is constructed to be sweet and colourful and palatable to the largest contingent of people, it is sacrificing other flavour and texture. I am not necessarily judging anyone for liking what they like—sweets are addictive for a reason that says nothing negative about who eats it—or saying it is morally negative for label execs to be invested in paying a half-dozen producers and songwriters to craft The Perfect Song every single time. But when all those songs do mostly the same series of things over and over, it can feel refreshing to consume something two people wrote in someone else's bedroom studio about being too broke to go out for dinner with your boys.

The truth is, when DJ Matsunaga produces a Jersey club beat on the OP for a shounen anime, it feels like he's making room to respect a well-liked subgenre of Black music in order to draw us into a genuinely fire flow about how he doesn't have to prove he's the best with flashy gold or cars but with pure lyrical brawn.

When Number_i calls themselves 'the new GOAT', now it feels like mockery.

It doesn't feel like they're leaning into any comparison of culture, or respecting their performance enough to be layered, interesting, or revelatory. It feels like they think I'm stupid. In fact, it feels like they think non-Black people are even more stupid—selfish enough to lap up Black musical culture no matter what form it comes in, and undiscerning enough to not ask any deeper questions about whether the music is performing anything deep or curious—which becomes even more insulting, because at least white Americana can purchase the fresh-squeezed culture locally, and comes back around to feeling like non-Black audiences are so eager to accept what feels like minstrelsy in any form it can arrive that they'll shift their racism several degrees to the east to get it.

Or, put another way: there are a great many channels on YouTube about learning Japanese where the crux of their content is how textbook language-learning is stunted and dry, and doesn't actually capture the experience of actually speaking any language. When you put all of them together, a pattern emerges: not just that relying on one easy source to learn how to communicate will leave you wrapped up in expressing yourself in only one way, from one far end of overly rigid textbook speech to the other of embarrassing and eccentric anime-voice. Performing Japanese—merely going through the motions of it as instructed by a book or by popular media—is not the same as speaking it, and will probably confuse or upset someone far more than it will lead to understanding.

Surely the same must be true for other cultural communications, no?

The powerful thing about any form of communication—even and especially music—is when one culture tries to reach another by purely capturing that other culture's language, but in their own voice, and not a constructed one.

And that's what I get from Creepy Nuts: hip-hop from people who breathe it deeply, and are eager to share the vibes that speak to them. And it means something that by doing so, they're putting Japanese commenters beneath Black people's YouTube videos, sharing joy.

Tasting Notes

Despite the part that makes me very happy about this newsletter, a lot of words are dedicated to documenting how actually terrible a particular subspace of Asian popular music is, and I can be compelled to ramble at length about how angering it can be to discover how the industry level of pop music is brutal, destructive, and untrustworthy,

but instead of me rambling, you should just read Hybrid Heart by Iori Kusano—a very sharply written novella about the ways that gendered expectations, a rotten entertainment industry, and technology intersect to make the lives of femme-bodied performers a living hell. I mean it—stop what you're doing, including but not limited to literally reading this newsletter, and read Hybrid Heart.

A reminder that this newsletter, as well as the rest of my writing and game design work, thrives with your support. My Patreon is where you can find snippets of new TTRPG projects, exclusive writing drafts, and more:

Today's Tunes

Clipse | Let God Sort Em Out

They're back!

Pusha T and Malice haven't made an album as the Clipse in nearly two decades, and now that they've returned to their usual form, I can gladly say:

this album slaps, as expected. Album of the Year, surely.

I can say no more than this: Let God Sort Em Out is the caliber of hip-hop poetry that, barring perhaps the work of the other guy who recently ethered Drake in a rap beef, is sorely missing in the mainstream.

So it definitely doesn't hurt that Kendrick Lamar is in fact on a track.

The press tour for this album has been noteworthy in part because, almost accidentally, Pusha T seems to have public comment on the entire state of hip-hop: he's back in the studio as one of the greatest duos of the past two decades, their producer Pharrell is working with them for the first time post-Neptunes breakup, he's not on speaking terms with Kanye West any more due to all the racism, he has shots for Travis Scott for not being loyal during the Drake beef, and his decision to have Kendrick on a track was so divisive it led to them dropping Def Jam as their label.

There is, in a lot of ways, nothing more real than witnessing a lot of judgments and artificial objections get in the way of making your art, and making it anyway. Not only is it a quintessential Clipse record, but the very story of its creation now carries the energy of rebellion in the face of resistance, of creation by any means necessary.

But it's also hard as hell. Instrumentally blessed, lyrically ascendant, incredibly tonally wide while still being consistently hype. Pharrell's production is standout here: flipping the theme to '70s crime drama Sarge for Nas' verse on 'Let God Sort Em Out/Chandeliers', the infamous James Bond Theme interpolation on 'By The Grace of God', and of course the well-received Talal Maddah sample on 'So Be It', all are inspired decisions to me. But it's also worth noting that these are some killer features as well: it goes without saying that Nas, Kendrick, and Tyler, The Creator are impeccable lyricists, but goddamn, the Stove God Cooks hook on 'F.I.C.O.' is crazy.

If this is your flavour of rap (and I dare say even if it isn't), definitely check this out if you haven't already.

What's On TV?

Mogura

Since we're talking about hip-hop, I may as well have a lot of feelings about Mogura, shouldn't I?

Netflix has recently acquired the 2025 ABEMA TV series Mogura, a... rap musical crime drama about a Japanese police officer recently transferred to the Narcotics Division in their crackdown on marijuana possession, who is tasked on his very second day on the team to go undercover in a popular rap group to help the cops discover where they've been growing their weed.

Now, I am not entirely confused by this setup. Japan is notorious for strict laws on marijuana that have only become stricter and less nuanced in the current year, which I have feelings about but can't obviously affect. Japanese television also loves police dramas just as much as the West, so it only follows that their narcotics-crime stories would be about weed.

It's just where the story and the production seem to meet in curious ways which intrigue and confuse me, revealing some of my hangups about the intensity with which critics view marijuana compared to other drugs, my curiosities about hip-hop on television, and more.

So far, I've only seen the first three episodes (the first of which is also on YouTube, sadly without subs), and it is wild. After a predictable text crawl about the scourge of marijuana that the Japanese police is attempting to curb and the foreshadowing of the successful raid that will end the story (as well as a note about how this is based on an alleged true story), our protagonist, Izanagi Shokichi (played by the very talented actual rapper Hannya), fresh from being bounced from several other police branches and about to start his first day in Narcotics, makes breakfast for his kid, during which as an apparent bonding ritual the kid plays a track from the cool new rap group Kumon before heading to school—only for papa Shokichi to stop the kid at the door and remind him of the lesson that whenever he sees someone in need he is duty-bound to help. Which... I kinda dig, in a no-one's-parents-actually-talked-to-them-like-that sorta way.

Then we cut to Shokichi moving his things to his new Narcotics Department office, and... within seconds we now have a narration, in the form of a rap verse by the show's 'navigator' Katabira, played by Mummy-D, about why Shokichi has been struggling to keep his cool in his other roles, how he wants to be a great role model for his son after the loss of his wife, and how he and his kid can only currently speak the shared language of hip-hop in order to relate to each other.

And the thing is... it's hard, y'all. Mummy-D is also a very talented actual rapper. In fact, nearly half the main cast are made up of very talented actual rappers—everyone who actually spits in this show is played by a genuine performer, a few of whom in their very first film role. But the whole time I'm thinking, 'surely this could have been a story about how hip-hop is actually not a den of iniquity and untrustworthiness, and how rappers use their lyrical talent to tell critical and curious stories instead of build hype to sling grass backstage, no?'

This first episode also sets up that the show has a peculiar and fascinating attachment to 'keeping it real'. The group Kumon, the apparent antagonists (despite what the end of the episode seems to set up about their far more ruthless rival crew RED HEAD), have but one apparent rule: when you rap, you aren't allowed to lie. The intensity with which leader Kayaku says it implies that you can even not give a damn about their drug trade so long as you ain't making stuff up in your rhymes, and the punishment is either making it true or death—complicated by the fact that the freestyle that Shokichi performed to win the group's favour is full of the wildest embellishments that it's a miracle anyone would assume it true. I am admittedly intrigued to see that actually go somewhere riveting, but it's also enthralling to a nearly comical point that this 'keeping it real' theme has an image in the very drugs they sell: Kumon only sells the bonafide cannabis plant, whereas RED HEAD sells modified synthetic THC, and Kumon feels very strongly about that.

This only makes it so much stranger that a room full of narcotics officers, let alone the rappers who believe that the herb is the healing of the nation, never once bring up how much the harder drugs are obviously more destructive. Really? In the entire narcotics division, this one dusty room and the three people in it are dedicated to one undercover weed sting when meth and cocaine are still out here in the streets and Shokichi hasn't met barely any of his peers? The second episode even implies that RED HEAD is dealing in Heaven, implied to be a designer drug in its own class, capable of rendering people into brutal zombies after just a few hits, and after not only learning that but watching their crew threaten to poison a guy on an Instagram Live, all he gets is the mild confirmation that a colleague's looking into it. Hell, in these three episodes you have probably only seen Kumon actually trade leaves for money once. Meanwhile Heaven has kids shanking cops. Who is actually the bad guy here?

I'm also strongly amused by the implication that this is a true story. I'm not necessarily saying it's impossible (although it does strike me as an overall peculiar arrangement on its face), but the only apparent source for the story is Kan a.k.a. GAMI, a rapper most hilariously known for being arrested twice in the space of six weeks in 2020 for possessing less than an ounce of green. Of note is that Kumon's name bears a close resemblance to Kan's own 9sari Group, but all that corroborates is that Kan is the inspiration for the story. He is credited, however, so either it is indeed a very strange true story, or the entire pitch is just his getback for being hounded by the cops.

All of this sounds like a very good reason to write it all off as a joke. But it is also strangely entrancing, even when it seems like it's entirely being a comedy. Hannya is a compelling performer, often pivoting wildly from earnest humanity to the most intense comedy without feeling artificial. The show isn't afraid to lean into the inherent hilarity of bureaucracy at times, and I suspect that is part of the point—there is a mayor character here who comes across as a perfect caricature of politicians who hope to remain in the public eye with hollow platitudes rather than work, with a regular tagline that literally appears as if he's trying to hypnotise people. There is even a (reasonably accurate but) sudden and hilarious moment when Katabira interrupts an otherwise not very dramatic scene to spit a verse about the history of the term 'Babylon' that I can only assume is a writer's attempt to go, 'here is some real hip-hop knowledge for your dumb ass'.

I have to believe the end goal of this series is to tell the story of Shokichi coming to some radical hip-hop revelation about how the system (yes, Babylon system) has constructed a state of villainy around marijuana that is neither well-informed nor critical. Episode three begins to set up that state of doubt—that just because it is a law doesn't mean it's a good or useful one, and that not having a proper defense for why something is illegal beyond the fact that it is law is a circular argument—and implies that the bias toward rappers as peddlers of vice without conscience or true soulfulness is not merely ignorance, but a fabrication for the sake of social control. I have no idea why it needs to be set up as an otherwise straight police drama from the jump to tell this story, but if it does take that turn it would be a wild follow-through, and I'd like to see what turns it takes in its last few episodes, so they got me anyway.

Mogura is available on Netflix.

The Leaves

You got a lot of tea this week! That's all for today.

A reminder: if you aren't aware, next week I travel to Gen Con, and then later to Seattle Worldcon! I just posted some of the stuff I'll be up to during both cons, so I look forward to seeing you all, playing games, and talking about poetry while we're together!

If you're able, I'd love to take care of travel incidentals and some other expenses, which becomes more urgent as we're now so close to Gen Con weekend, so I'd love it if you especially supported me this week via a Ko-Fi donation or a Ko-Fi purchase of my latest game The God of Spite and Violence, or sending a donation via PayPal. You can also support me in the long-term by joining me over on Patreon or buying one of my other TTRPGs on Itch!

Until next time, I hope you enjoyed the tea!