gil asakawa | pop stuff

From my Nikkei View blog: The racist reaction to the PSY/MC Hammer collaboration is disturbing, but I think there’s a profound significance to the choice of Hammer performing with PSY.

I’ll write a blog post about this, but the US charts have had a string of foreign hits over the decades (most notably, for Asian artists, “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto in the early ’60s). It’s cool but you have to wonder if foreign language artists really can have viable careers, or if they’re just a momentary exotic blip. So, kudos to Korean artist PSY for getting a US deal, but I hope he has lasting power.