Serdar | Genji Press

In the year 2000, the incredibly talented animation team Production I.G. released a 48-minute film that rocked the socks off everyone from James Cameron on down: Blood: The Last Vampire.  The story was simple enough: Saya, a vampire hunter who only looks like a teenage girl, goes undercover at an air force base in Japan to destroy demons lurking there and finds a great deal more than she bargained for.  It looks and sounds terrific, has become a perennial best seller on home video, and a live-action version directed by Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu is imminent.

There are months that go by when I don't read a single novel or work of fiction in any form, if only because I find my attention captured by a nonfiction book that makes all the fiction I could have picked up during that time look like ... well, fiction.  That was the case back in April of 2005, when I spent most of the month reading and re-reading Richard Rhodes's Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist.  This was, and is, one of those rare books that provides you with a perspective-shattering point of view on a previously well-worn subject: Why are some people violent and remorseless monsters and not others?

I once got into an argument with someone about a certain record—I think it was possibly one of the early Merzbow discs, believe it or not—because he didn’t believe that I would really want to listen to such rubbish, let alone savor it or enjoy it. He seemed to be of the opinion that most of the records people say they like are simply records that they want to impress other people with having known about, and that their own enjoyment comes second. I found that paranoid in the extreme, and I know that in my case I don’t believe that for a second. Sure, there are many records that are important and influential and name-droppable that I could toss around as being among my favorites, but I don’t listen to them. I have better things to do, like listen to things I enjoy and enjoy them.

Maybe it’s a matter of mere taste, and taste can often be impenetrable—which is why I wouldn’t try to explain why I would listen to any Merzbow disc instead of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Sure, the latter album may have been the “original,” and it may have been “influential” and “important”, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth more than a casual survey of a listen because it consists of one idea beaten to death for four sides. One theory was that Reed recorded it to get out of his RCA contract, and only after other people (like Lester Bangs, who [insanely enough] loved the record) started championing it did he go back and claim that he had had importance and artistic integrity in mind all along. Right. As far as Merzbow goes, you could pick any dozen of his records that are as minimally assembled as MMM, and any one of them would be more interesting.

Whenever you put two artists of strong temperament together, you either get genius or dissonance. Most of us probably still remember the supergroups of the Seventies—generally ill-fated attempts to forcibly engineer a rock band by taking the brightest stars from various outfits and sticking them in a studio together. Sometimes the offspring from such a crossbreeding had a decently long life—Blind Faith, for instance, is still a pretty decent record even if nothing truly spectacular—but most of the results didn’t merit more than a paragraph in the All-Music Guide. Who here remembers bands like GTR? (Who wants to?)

This sort of thing hasn’t died out entirely, but evolved a bit and become less a mark of something to avoid at all costs as being a sign of sheer marketing greed. Consider Pigface, drummer Martyn Atkin’s revolving pick-up band that consists of him and whoever else happens to be in the studio that week. This approach has produced a few excellent and listenable tracks and a lot of dross, but even the dross is interesting thanks to the caliber of the people involved: Shonen Knife, Michael Gira, Jello Biafra, the Einstürzende Neubauten gang, and on and on.

Whenever I review anything that has a legacy behind it, I try to put the legacy aside and look at the thing in itself.  It’s only fair, after all—there are many people reading this who have never heard of Vampire Hunter D, who know nothing of the massive fanbase it has on all sides of the Pacific, and wouldn’t know Yoshitaka Amano or Hideyuki Kikuchi from anyone they’d brushed shoulders with on the subway.  For their sake, and for my own, I approached D as a friendly stranger, someone unfamiliar with the territory but curious enough to learn it.  I hope I don’t sound ungrateful when I say the first of Kikuchi’s D books left me wondering, to a degree, what all the screaming has been about.