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Mar 4, 202157 min read

HARAJUKU

The outrageous street-style tribes of Harajuku

The wild, cartoonish street styles born in the Harajuku district in Tokyo marked a revolution in Japanese style. Lindsay Baker finds out if this spirit has been tamed.

“The fresh, colourful harvest of Japanese fashion,” is how pioneering photographer Shoichi Aoki describes his subject – the wild and quirky street style of Tokyo.

The city has long been known for its expressive and cartoonish styles, and its Harajuku district as the gathering place for the most flamboyant and eclectic youth tribes of all. This cradle of sartorial eccentricity, full of fabulously inventive teen subgroups, boomed in the 1990s. And it was immortalised in monthly print magazine FRUiTS, a bible of innovative, outrageous personal style, created and published by the much-revered Aoki. The magazine was ground-breaking and hugely influential, in both fashion and photography. Japanese teen tribes in all their style-conscious variety and dizzying complexity could be found in the pages of FRUiTS. From the girly Dolly Kei and Lolita to Gyaru, Decora and Ura-Hara, along with proponents of all things kawaii (cute), each tribe came with its own highly specific and inventive dress codes, concepts and rituals. “Fashion is an act of self-expression, linked to the foundation of humanity,” Aoki tells BBC Designed through a translator. “It is as important as art, music and literature. And when I say ‘fashion’ I don’t mean ‘fashion business’.”

I decided to make it my project to record street style – Soichi Aoki

Interest in Aoki’s work has exploded in recent years, and a book was recently published of his images from the streets of London. His 1980s magazine, STREET, focused on Paris and London fashion “which were the most creative and interesting,” he says. “At the time, magazines were at the forefront of media, and it was media that I could publish myself... the internet did not exist.” “At that time in Japan, the street fashion was not interesting to me,” adds Aoki. “Ten years later, in 1996, the new fashion in Harajuku was born. I believed that was the fashion revolution in Japan, and I decided to make FRUITS.”

As the UK’s ID magazine had done in the 1980s, Aoki and his team captured the looks of individuals while also showcasing the wider groups and networks to which they belonged, all before social media or hashtags even existed. “Most acts of expression have a system of being recorded and preserved, but there was no such system for street fashion,” he says. “I decided to make it my project to record street style.”

No more cool kids

But earlier this year Aoki made the decision to close the print edition of FRUiTS, saying at the time: “There are no more cool kids left to photograph.” This year, the magazine has been celebrating its legacy in association with retailer Opening Ceremony, with an installation at the brand’s New York store, alongside a release of merchandise and archive FRUiTS editions.

So why did the Harajuku district cease to be an epicentre of street style? And what does that mean for the state of Japanese youth culture? Has Japan’s fashion identity gone from cool to bland, wild to tame, edgy to mass market? To understand that, it’s important to understand how Harajuku’s street style phenomenon came about.

The district’s distinctive creative buzz was largely due to Hokoten says Aoki, referring to a shortened version of the Japanese phrase Hokousha Tengoku which means ‘pedestrian paradise’. The term describes a district of streets that are closed to traffic so that pedestrians can enjoy mingling. Harajuku was the most famous Hokoten in Tokyo, and its young people were bravely unorthodox in a traditionally conformist society, although each group undoubtedly conformed to its own codes.

It seems that when the decision was made to allow traffic into Harajuku, it was the beginning of the end for its street-style mecca status. Harajuku as a gathering place ceased to be, and opportunities for its young and style-conscious inhabitants to mingle, impress and compare dwindled. By extension, this was also the beginning of the end for FRUiTS. “It’s necessary to have a real space… Hokoten played an important role in maturing Harajuku fashion, and the fact that Hokoten disappeared was a big negative influence on it,” says Aoki. “The biggest reason I closed FRUiTS was that fashionable kids decreased in Harajuku. I couldn’t take enough photographs to publish monthly.” “The significance of paper magazines changed too, and social media became more important than the position of fashion as self-expression or relationships with friends.”

Cheap clothing robs the existing space for young designers – Soichi Aoki

The proliferation of corporate high-street retailers in the area also contributed to the demise of Harajuku’s cutting-edge style credentials: “Cheap clothing robs the existing space for young designers,” says Aoki. Added to this has been the entrance of Japanese street fashion into mainstream pop culture (look no further than Gwen Stefani’s music video for Harajuku Girls).

Japanese street fashion entered mainstream pop culture with Gwen Stefani’s video for Harajuku Girls, while the US artist named her 2005 live tour Harajuku Lovers (Credit: Alamy)

As far as Aoki is concerned, street fashion ceases to be ‘street’ when it enters the mass media: “I think truly interesting street fashion would not enter the mass media; by that time street fashion should have moved on to the next thing.” Making statements Exciting though the scene was, in Aoki’s view, there was no message of rebellion or even any value system in the flamboyant dress codes: “Nothing, just a fun expression. I like that.” Yuniya Kawamura sees it differently. “The phenomenon is an ideological one,” she writes in her book Fashioning Japanese Subcultures. A Professor of Sociology at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, Kawamura is also the author of the best-selling Fashion-ology and the recent Sneakers: Fashion, Gender and Subculture, and sees the street-style scene as more than just a bit of fun. She tells BBC Culture: “It’s not just about a group of youngsters in distinct clothes. Their stylistic expression is a reflection of their values, norms, beliefs. The emergence of a subculture means that there is a community trying to send a social message to the public. Sometimes, the members themselves are not even aware of it.”

Their stylistic expression is a reflection of their values, norms, beliefs - Yuniya Kawamura

She points to the Gyaru group, from Tokyo’s Shibuya district, which is typically characterized by heavily bleached or dyed hair, highly decorated nails, and dramatic makeup. “The Gyaru phenomenon started in the mid-1990s as Japan went into deep recession... They tanned skin artificially to look tough and dressed in bright sexy clothes. Their basic life philosophy is: engage in rowdy behaviour such as drinking, smoking and partying hard while you are young. Then you will later become a decent adult because you’ve done everything you wanted to.”

Teen subgroups of Tokyo: Manami Abe dressed in classic Lolita; Momo Matsuura in classic Lolita, Sphere in Ouji style and Haru in sweet Lolita (Credit: Masato Imai/Momo Matsuura)

Harajuku’s Lolita subculture emerged in the late 1990s in opposition to Gyaru, says Kawamura. “Lolita girls are hyper feminine and cute. They make an effort to look like a Victorian doll or princess and wear a dress with lots of ruffles and lace trimmings,” she explains. “They have their own dress code such as not making the skirt hem above the knees and exposing too much skin. They don’t smoke or drink. They go to tea parties, they usually don’t drink coffee.” She notes that some associate the Lolita style with the novel of the same name, but stresses this subculture has “nothing to do with a middle-aged man and a young girl.” A sense of belonging Subculture style is all about a sense of belonging, says Kawamura, with adherents bonded by sharing the same or similar fashion. “Many of the girls I have interviewed said ‘I have made so many new friends that I would have never met if I did not belong to this subculture.’ Their distinct fashion stands out, and sometimes it is ridiculed or looked down on but when they meet their fellow members, they know they are accepted as a member of the community.” “There is a sense of camaraderie,” she adds. “Each district or a specific retailer in each district functions as a mecca for subcultural members. They can buy anything online, but making a trip to these places and buying at these stores give them a status and respect within the community.”

Belonging to a teen-tribe community gives members a sense of camaraderie and self respect, says author and sociologist Yuniya Kawamura (Credit: Shoichi Aoki/FRUiTS)

Did the teenagers Aoki photographed seem to get a sense of belonging through membership of their particular tribe? “Yes, particularly for women it’s important, and when they become adults as well,” he says, adding the Harajuku styles have certainly influenced designer fashion, too, not just in Japan (he points to Yohji Yamamoto in particular) but internationally.

No one is immersed into a subculture 24/7 these days. It is no longer a lifestyle as it used to be - Yuniya Kawamura

Kawamura has also noticed over several years of research, that genuine, die-hard dedication to subcultures is in demise, and many of these groups are either declining or no longer in existence. “Subcultures are usually marginal, hidden and underground. But once they are popularised and commercialised, they spread widely to the masses which goes against the basic subcultural values.”

The district of Harajuku in Tokyo has always attracted inventive teen subgroups (Credit: Carl Court/Getty Images)

“Such a phenomenon could potentially alienate the authentic members. For instance, one may dress in Lolita only on weekends because she saw a celebrity wearing it. Some scholars say the term is outdated because no one is immersed into a subculture 24/7 these days. It is no longer a lifestyle as it used to be.” She also echoes Aoki’s point that globalisation and digital progress have played their part, noting in particular the RuffleCon convention in Connecticut, which has grown in popularity in recent years, bringing together Lolita enthusiasts from all over the US. “Somehow, Japanese Lolita is attracting Western girls,” she says. “Many of them have never been to Japan but found out about the subculture online.” In her latest book, Kawamura coined the term ‘upperground’ to describe a subculture that emerges from underground to become recognisable to the masses. “I treat it as something in-between underground and mainstream,” she says.

Teen subgroups are declining in Harajuku, though some can still be spotted now, such as these Lolita girls dressed in frills, pictured in September 2017 (Credit: Joshua Lawrence)

What does the future hold, then, for Japanese street fashion? “My theory is the more distinct a style is, the more it binds followers together, and thus, it gives them a sense of community,” says Kawamura. “But if people do not feel the need to be part of a subculture, it begins to fade away. I think that today’s Japanese teens are well protected by their families that they don’t need to be part of anything or to make a social statement through fashion.” Aoki is more optimistic. “Boys’ fashion is becoming interesting lately,” he says. Maybe the FRUiTS archive will help inspire the next generation? “Yes, I plan to do something with the archive,” says the photographer. And besides, he adds: “I like change. And I believe in Japanese DNA.”

Baker, L., 2017. The outrageous street-style tribes of Harajuku. [online] Bbc.com. Available at: <https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170920-the-outrageous-street-style-tribes-of-harajuku> [Accessed 4 March 2021]

Harajuku - District of Anti Fashion

INTRODUCTION

In order to understand Harajuku (a district of Tokyo), one of the most exciting places to know Japanese fashion, I prefer to focus not on its sophisticated fashion trends but on its more casual and diverse “anti-fashion” styles which have no place to go. An objection against such an approach may be raised, saying that Harajuku has experienced noticeable changes. Large-scale construction of sophisticated apartments symbolizing a new urban lifestyle in the 1970s, expansion of brands and companies after the advent of “La Foret Harajuku” (a pioneering department store striving to be on the cutting edge), and development of Ura-Harajuku’s creative area as a mecca of men’s fashion, have all helped to form a “cool” reputation of Harajuku through Japanese and foreign media. Indeed, these observations could be true and I am not willing to ignore Harajuku’s contribution to high fashion trends. In this article, however, I will focus on rather unrefined or extreme fashions which completely deviate from the main vogue path. In fact, people practicing these offbeat fashions have devoted all their energy to the invention of their own creative styles. I believe observing this “anti-fashion” will lead us to understand “Harajuku-ness”, the essence of this quarter.

Map of Harajuku area

I will lay out three remarkable phenomena to illustrate exactly what happened in the realm of fashion in Harajuku. The first one is Takenoko-zoku (Bamboo shoot tribe), a phenomena of dancing groups on the sidewalk of Harajuku which became widely popular in the 1980s. The second is Gyaru*1, a subgroup of teenage girls that played on the schoolgirl image (miniskirt, knee socks), and dominated Japanese society in the 1990s. Finally I will discusss a third phenomenon called Lolita or Gothic Lolita in which girls, unlike Gyaru, live peacefully and aloof in their own dream world. Through these discussions I hope to show what Harajuku fashion or “Harajuku-ness” signifies.

In the first part, the history of Harajuku will be briefly explained. In the second part, I will interpret these three phenomena (Takenoko-zoku, Gyaru culture and Gothic Lolita) from the viewpoint of …. so that I conclude they are key phenomena to understand Harajukuness.

Takenoko-zoku

1. HARAJUKU – changing its identity just like changing clothes

No other city constantly changes its identity like Harajuku, while still managing to hold a place in mainstream Japanese fashion. Cities famous for fashion have often been developed by associating with traditional manufactures, by accumulating location-based results at maisons and ateliers. It takes long a time to form a characteristic fashion district. So once it has been formed, it comes to be durable with vicissitude. When it comes to Harajuku, this principle does not hold true. Much like high fashion department store mannequins perpetually changing their clothes, Harajuku took off what was just worn at lightning speed, always striving for tomorrow’s world. This is the way things were in Harajuku, but I believe it will never be possible to return to this old manner of constant re-invention. Why ? Consider this brief outline of the history of Harajuku.

Background

Harajuku is located in Meiji Jingu Mae **1, in Shibuya ward, Tokyo. In the 1960s, during the Japanese post-war economic miracle, Japanese having admired the Occidental urban lifestyle built stylish mansions in Shibuya and Harajuku one after another. This brought a concentrated population, gathering fashionable people together into this area.

The dawn of Harajuku as a famous district for fashion dates from the 1970s where Shinjuku, the precedent centre of Japanese fashion, was replaced by Shibuya and Harajuku. Then, popular magazines for young people such as an an and non no introduced Harajuku as one of the most cutting edge places for fashion in Tokyo. In addition, La Foret Harajuku, a department store founded in 1978, became the heart of fashion with a sensibility to haute couture trends. Finally, in 1977, Tokyo Prefecture decided to open Sundays’ Hokoten (Pedestrian Zone, Hokosha-Tengoku) near Yoyogi park, which was a first clue to the flowering of Harajuku.

Explosion of movements – Harajuku Pedestrian Zone

Mentioning Harajuku in a historical context, many Japanese would recall a famous movement, “Takenoko-zoku“**2, in the Harajuku Pedestrian Zone in the 1980s.

Rokkun-rora-zoku

In Japan, downtown streets are sometimes turned into pedestrian zones on weekends or for certain special events. Recognizing the importance of pedestrian zone’s roles is key to understanding the Takenoko-zoku movement. In 1977, near Yoyogi park in Harajuku district, a large zone became open to pedestrians on Sundays. In its early days, dozens of teenagers wearing extremely bright costumes in vivid colors gathered to dance there. Their exciting performance gathered such attention that the number of members rapidly increased, separating them into many small groups. Takenoko-zoku composed of more than 2000 young dancers attracted 1 million spectators at the peak of this craze. In addition to Takenoko-zoku, diverse collection of other styles popped up such as Rokkun-rora-zoku **3(Rock’n’roller’s tribe) imitating 1950s’ American music style. They flourished then fell into decay at the end of the 1980s.

Multiple waves

My teenage schooling took place during the second half of the1990s, that is, after the disappearance of this dance phenomena. For me, the most strong impression of Harajuku is not that of young dancers in their costume. In the later 1990s Harajuku was dominated by Joshi-kosei, female high school students. Takeshita Street, located just in front of JR Harajuku Station, was filled with shops selling cheap accessories for wearing in original disarray on school uniforms. There were also specialized boutiques called “Tarento-shop” where young people could purchase various goods such as cards and photos of teenage popular stars. These high school girls were commonly called “Gyaru“**4. Gyaru was classified into a few sub-groups according to the district they were based. One of them was Shibuya-gyaru, who were characterized as mature and sexy girls, and featured on such magazines as Pichi-Remon (Fresh lemon) and Egg. In contrast, Harajuku-gyaru was supposed to be creative girls whose fashion style was represented in magazines like Zipper. Thus, Harajuku became a popular cool place for creative young people.

Gyaru

Since then, Harajuku has been turned into a sort of theme park or touristic spot in an extreme way. People who found the situation boring cut open a new path from Jungu-mae to Sendagaya along Meiji Street as well as the street leading to Shibuya (generally called “Harajuku Cat Street”) in order to form a new mecca for Mens’ Fashion. Ura-Harajuku (backside of Harajuku), which re-introduced a sophistication into Japanese mens’ fashion, began to develop.

Several years later, Ebisu-kei (popular fashion of Ebisu) based on Ebisu area next to JR Harajuku Station replaced Ura-Harajuku-kei (popular fashion of Ura-Harajuku) as the latest center of fashion. All that remains in Harajuku after these waves’ prosperity and decline is a traditionalized creative style: Cosplay (an extreme creative style that involves disguising as characters), and Lolita style was born around 1998 in this distinct. Harajuku remains a place to show off eccentric fashion and continues to attract domestic and foreign media’s attentions.

By the end of the 2000s, a novel, monstrous Joshi-kosei boom had worn off. Today, however some contemporary stars are categorized as Harajuku-kei (popular fashion of Harajuku) such as Kyari-pamyu-pamyu**5, Japanese fashion model and popular singer. Harajuku is considered a pioneer district in the revival of 1950s’ American culture and welcomes young people with unique creativity; with color contact lenses, colorful clothes and kitschy items as seen on foreign TV programs.

Kyari-pamyu-pamyu

2.

a. Takenoko-zoku – never taking the train in costume

Takenoko-zoku costumes are vastly different from typical fashion of that period. There was such a lack of taste that there was no chance of Takenoko-zoku being appreciated by a sophisticated crowd. Vivid red, pink and violet, were classic Takenoko-zoku colors, imitating Kimono or Chinese dress style. In addition to distinct colors, Takenoko-zoku was characterized by extremely gaudy, cheap materials cut extremely loosely. These clothes had no relation to general fashion sense and would certainly not allow for a leisurely stroll along a cool broad avenue. “Haremu-sutsu“**6 (Harem Suits), Takenoko-zoku‘s iconic apparel, were a typical style of clothing shop “Boutiuqe Takenoko” (Boutique Bamboo shoot) which opened in 1978. The “Takenoko-zoku” crowd derived its name from this boutique which was a hotspot for dancers to buy their costumes or find inspiration for their own hand-made costumes. Haremu-sutsu shared both style traits and behavior with other groups in Japanese society. Style similarities are evident in Yankee*2 and Tsuppari‘s loose-fitting uniforms or Tokko-fuku**7, motorcycle gang uniforms ( reference : film “Shimotsuma Monogatari, Kamikaze Girls“*3). In examining the groups’ behavior, Takenoko-zoku members sometimes had collusive relations with motorcycle gangs or yakuza, causing troubles that required police involvement. In short, the population that promoted the first Harajuku boom was young, dissident, energetic and anti-establishment.

Haremu-sutsu

It is important to notice in this Takenoko-zoku phenomenon that their costume was reserved for performance before an audience. Takenoko-zoku dancers travelled to and from Harajuku in their “ordinary clothes” and changed into their noble costumes, “Harem Suitsu“, exclusively when it came time to perform. They danced all day each Sunday not just for self exhibition, but also to let off steam, and for a vacation from the pressures of daily life, in the presence of an enormous, attentive audience. The Takenoko-zoku movement concerned a groups representation of self through their own special means. The Takenoko-zoku phenomenon followed an eccentric sensibility that was completely inverse to fashion trends at the time, allowing members to deviate from the social standard in the same way people today can choose to participate in costume parties or “Cosplay” communities.

b. School Girl’s Culture – Gyaru, Wretchedly made up creatures linger in the streets of Harajuku

Harajuku in the 1990s, after the collapse of the bubble economy, was occupied by Joshi-kosei, school girls. A typical Gyaru was a school girl wearing a miniskirt, loose socks, loafer shoes, dyed brown hair, careful makeup, and expensive brand-name bags or accessories (Louis Vuitton and Coach were in favor). The group rose suddenly to become powerful consumers in the apparel and cellular phone industries. The hottest trends of that period, such as the use of beepers and cellular phones, were determined by the Gyaru, making this group of girls the eminent leader in shaping cultural trends in Japanese society. These girls loved to wear school uniforms in uncommon ways. They exchanged, modified and arranged their uniforms, inspiring companies to begin mass-producing similar articles.

Tokko-fuku (left): Yankee (left) and Lolita (right) from a Japanese film “Kamikaze Girls”

Joshi-kosei sometimes scandalized Japanese conservative society through their radical liberalism in open-minded sexuality, practicing casual sexual relationships with their young male peers, participating in paid dating (Enjo-Kosai) schemes, and selling their used uniforms and underwear (Burusera). Gyaru would be split into two distinct factions. The first is the typical Kawaii (cute) school girl style, the second includes types such as “Ganguro-gyaru“**8 and “Yamanba-gyaru“**9. These monster-like girls, while maintaining Joshi-kosei‘s pretty loose socks, brown hair, miniskirt and platform boots, altered the style into a crazy or even anti-esthetic fashion, which was hardly bearable for ordinary adults to look at. The majority of Japanese women are unquestionably interested in whitening their skin and avoid sunburn. On the contrary, “Ganguro-gyaru” (Ganguro means deeply sunburned) repeatedly visited tanning salons and applied deep-brown powder foundation, white eyeliner and white lipstick which contrasted with the artificial dark skin color. These vividly painted faces were never discreet. They stood out glaringly in a street scene. (photos) The expression “Yamanba” of “Yamanba-gyaru” means Japanese-mountain-witch-like monster. Like Ganguro-gyaru, “Yamanba-gyaru” were eccentric and unbeautiful. This group differentiated itself by looking like aliens. Their territory extended from Harajuku to Shibuya and Ikebukuro.

Ganguro-gyaru : “Egg”, a magazine for Gyaru girls

Unlike Takenoko-zoku, Gyaru did not reserve their costumes for certain days but wore their peculiar, extreme look on a daily basis. Their makeup-caked faces and their vulgar, tight-fitting clothes and platform sandals became a second skin, rather than a costume.

c. No more Yankee, no more Gyaru – the naissance of Gothic Lolita

Lolita fashion, one of the most well-known contemporary Japanese subcultures worldwide, was born in Harajuku between 1998 and 2000. One could hypothesize that Lolita fashion was inspired by certain parts of Western culture such as the Rococo in France, the universe of “Alice in Wonderland” or Nabokov’s novel “Lolita.” In part this is true, but the founders of Gothic Lolita built from this western inspiration and added their own influences drawing from gothic, Visual-Kei**10 and punk makeup and fashion.

Yamanba-gyaru

Lolita’s extremely infantile style, along with other Japanese pop cultures such as cosplay and manga, has achieved a strong presence in foreign media. In Paris, for example, it is possible to witness many girls imitating Lolita and Gothic Lolita**11 style in Japan Expo and Tokyo Crazy Kawaii*4.

Like Gyaru, the Gothic Lolita’s “anti-fashion,” represents an opposition to social standards and imposed codes, but Gothic Lolita opposition to the standard is expressed in her own, completely different way. The Gothic Lolita is fiercely anti-gyaru fashion and also against school and social standards. She detests the violent and rude Yankee and despises the Gyaru practice of paid dating and coquettish, sexualizing behavior. She is indifferent to all attention, male or female, preferring to exist in her own personal dream-land. Refusing all codes, she has no way to go, and ends in meeting an impasse. Her severe detachment from reality makes her the most isolated of all. She uses European Rococo style and Gothic-literature inspired fashion to bring out her anti-ism. She rambles elegantly in Harajuku wearing her favorite frill dress.

Visual-Kei : Visual-kei Band, Malice Mizer

Conclusion – Harajuku-ness in fashion

Multiple important fashion movements have occurred in Harajuku, making the city an attraction for fashion leaders worldwide. Despite Harajuku’s important role in fashion, my article has focused on unfashionable or aberrant vestments as the heart of Harajuk-uness.

One essential key to understanding the spectacular occurrence of multiple divergent fashion movements in Harajuku, is by remarking the aberrant, counter-to-fashion styles of dress. As Harajuku is geographically situated very near mainstream fashion centers (Omotesando or Roppongi), those who participated in various Harajuku counter-cultures were courageous in choosing to ignore the mainstream and propose alternative styles. There is a baseline of morals, philosophy, thoughts, and slogans behind visible, superficial elements of these phenomena. Takenoko-zoku, as well as Yamanba-Gyaru and Gothic Lolita would have disappeared without a trace if Harajuku had not been able to withstand their monstrous energy. Harajuku has accepted, saved, covered these subcultures. It is as if these people have escaped from reality and wandered into a different dimension, Harajuku.

The modality of dressing up has changed as time passed. While Harem-Sutsu of Takenoko-zoku was reserved like Cinderella’s dress for just one night, Gyaru maintained her odd makeup and eccentric vestments all day long and day after day. When it comes to Gothic Lolita, the fashion is no more the question of style, but permeates into her way of living, becoming a philosophy, a code to control her behavior. Overtime, the unusual costume assimilates into the performers’ body, representing their policy and becoming a medium of expression.

Where will they have to go after the successful assimilation of their costume into the body ? You might say that they have already made their dreams come true in the real world. Lolita girls have achieved their dream in wearing Rococo style dress as their everyday clothes. It is no longer a special costume reserved for wearing in a dreamland. All actions they undertake are towards continuing to perfect the transformation of their own personal dreamland into a reality. However, their challenge will often confront cul-de-sacs in this savage, violent society.

Gothic Lolita

As it happens, virtual Cosplay and Lolita communities now provide members with a solution to breaking through these impasses, by serving as secret passage. In the same way, today, those who feel they move against the grain of their real-life communities can now find a place to be themselves thanks to new relationship-based online communities. These communities protect and support members from exposure to a warlike, homogenous society. Harajuku is no longer necessary for a unique person who seeks belonging. The internet now exists as a refuge. So, Harajuku is emptying, losing its strange cohesiveness, and being cleared of its ontological meaning, but, “who knows?” Harajuku may become its old self once again. Harajuku says that you wake up from a dream only to dream again.

It is a sort of catalyst.

Okubo, M., 2015. Design, Style and Fashion | HARAJUKU – DISTRICT FOR ANTI-FASHION. [online] Fashion.semiotix.org. Available at: <http://fashion.semiotix.org/2014/02/harajuku-district-for-anti-fashion/> [Accessed 4 March 2021].

Is Harajuku Fashion Dying?

Is Harajuku fashion dying? – Tokyo is famous for its wild and crazy, pure and creative, limitless and shocking fashion. Even the locals agree that imagination and spirit lies in this city, and Harajuku is basically where all the action happens. There is a special kind of energy that flows in the area, and anyone who’s ever been there has felt it.

Gossip and words began to spread initially only in the fashion world about the “death” and demise of Harajuku’s original essence and, well, fashion. In recent years, this topic of discussion became widespread and even those who were not keeping tabs are searching the webs and scrolling feeds everywhere. How can the famous area that was once known as the birthplace of legendary streetwear brands like BAPE, Undercover and Neighborhood be sucked out dry of creativity?

Media, especially international media, can sometimes blow things out of proportion. Here’s a not-so-short rundown and a little insight from one who’s humbly a certified fashion expert.

The rise of Harajuku style

Just for the record, there isn’t a specific style to describe Harajuku fashion. If there was, it basically cancels out the rule of no rules and the very definition of originality and creativity. From gothic lolitas and weekend cosplayers to the retro rock ‘n roll to kawaii put-together, this mix of non-mixing is what made Harajuku oh so special and enticing.

There were many “zones” in Harajuku that effectively make up the neighbourhood. From the reigns of designer fashion by labels such as Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garcons, to pioneering Japanese streetwear labels like A Bathing Ape and Undercover, it’s safe to say Harajuku had it all. Even the ones that were not flashy in style were considered a style. As streetwear became prevalent during this time, multiple subcultures were formed, and to this date many have studied them, making them legendary in history, technically.

If you have not heard, many associate the oversized, laid-back casual look to be Japanese-esque, as well as the all-black look. Elements from Japanese culture and tradition, as well as slight Western influence, was what birth the aesthetics. Much like how brightly-styled, cute, neon looks are also linked back to being Japanese-esque, due to the exposure of lolita and kawaii. It only goes to show that, even though these looks are total opposites, they still resemble the same thing. And it just proves the initial statement: there is no one style to Harajuku fashion.

Many who were witnesses of the shifting array of styles claimed that the decline, and eventually fall, of Harajuku fashion was prominent. The change in Harajuku’s fashion scene was instantly judged as the absence and drainage of its original essence.

It is true, however, that the neighbourhood that was originally a unique, one-of-a-kind fashion crate had now included high fashion and major, fast fashion brands. With tourism booming and the full-on effects of globalization to Japan, the once sacred fashion area became a soul-sapping, tourist attraction as 100yen stores filled up every other corner and even businesses and banks have appeared.

Forcefully pushing these creative talents into a corner, several fashion subcultures had to follow suit to this trend of mainstreaming. Having to adapt to the different access of clothing as well as the prices of clothing, it is no wonder it had a major effect in the Harajuku scene.

(Re)evolutionof Harajuku

Credits: IG / tokyofashion

While it is extremely prominent that the styles of Harajuku fashion has changed drastically since its original days, the truth is it is merely evolving. Much like everything else, the re-evolution of something does not necessarily have to be in its original form.

As mentioned a couple of times, Harajuku fashion has never been one specific style. The title does not only belong to the flashy ones and the loud, strange looks as what majority of people presumed. It refers to a special zone of no judgements, and limitless creativity. If the past few decades have not shown already, fashion changes so fast that if it stays too long, it might as well be weird.

Harajuku’s present and future

Credits: IG / tokyofashion

While it is extremely prominent that colours have distinctly faded from the streets of Harajuku, the ever-so passionate souls are always lingering. This neighbourhood has become the heart and soul for the people who desire to express themselves. It has become a safe zone to some, and home to others. People interact and connect, friendships are made daily, and new talents are often discovered.

People all around the world come to Tokyo just to experience the Harajuku vibe. While it may not be what you see in publications such as FRUiTS, it is the modern day Harajuku, still oozing with energy and bustling with new fashion tribes. It is still the spot where fashion trends are born and made.

Conclusion

It is safe to say that Harajuku is not dead. It has never been, and it will never be. Just like how the Harajuku people are trying out new clothes and styles to experiment with, so is the area itself. It’s a change, not and end. Sometimes the devil is in the details, and maybe that is what the creative fashioners are experimenting in these next few decades. Who knows, in the next century, this is what they define as Harajuku fashion.

Syakirah, A., 2020. Is Harajuku Fashion Dying? - Your Japan. [online] Your Japan. Available at: <https://itsyourjapan.com/is-harajuku-fashion-dying/> [Accessed 4 March 2021].

MEME

What Defines a Meme?

Our world is a place where information can behave like human genes and ideas can replicate, mutate and evolve

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions,” Richard Dawkins declared in 1986. Already one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, he had caught the spirit of a new age. The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment. “If you want to understand life,” Dawkins wrote, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”

We have become surrounded by information technology; our furniture includes iPods and plasma displays, and our skills include texting and Googling. But our capacity to understand the role of information has been sorely taxed. “TMI,” we say. Stand back, however, and the past does come back into focus. The rise of information theory aided and abetted a new view of life. The genetic code—no longer a mere metaphor—was being deciphered. Scientists spoke grandly of the biosphere: an entity composed of all the earth’s life-forms, teeming with information, replicating and evolving. And biologists, having absorbed the methods and vocabulary of communications science, went further to make their own contributions to the understanding of information itself.

Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1965 for working out the role of messenger RNA in the transfer of genetic information, proposed an analogy: just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas.

“Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,” he wrote. “Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”

Ideas have “spreading power,” he noted—“infectivity, as it were”—and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are “just as real” as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said:

Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.

Monod added, “I shall not hazard a theory of the selection of ideas.” There was no need. Others were willing.

Dawkins made his own jump from the evolution of genes to the evolution of ideas. For him the starring role belongs to the replicator, and it scarcely matters whether replicators were made of nucleic acid. His rule is “All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.” Wherever there is life, there must be replicators. Perhaps on other worlds replicators could arise in a silicon-based chemistry—or in no chemistry at all.

What would it mean for a replicator to exist without chemistry? “I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet,” Dawkins proclaimed near the end of his first book, The Selfish Gene, in 1976. “It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.” That “soup” is human culture; the vector of transmission is language, and the spawning ground is the brain.

For this bodiless replicator itself, Dawkins proposed a name. He called it the meme, and it became his most memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytizing against religiosity. “Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation,” he wrote. They compete with one another for limited resources: brain time or bandwidth. They compete most of all for attention. For example:

Ideas. Whether an idea arises uniquely or reappears many times, it may thrive in the meme pool or it may dwindle and vanish. The belief in God is an example Dawkins offers—an ancient idea, replicating itself not just in words but in music and art. The belief that Earth orbits the Sun is no less a meme, competing with others for survival. (Truth may be a helpful quality for a meme, but it is only one among many.)

Tunes. This tune has spread for centuries across several continents.

Catchphrases. One text snippet, “What hath God wrought?” appeared early and spread rapidly in more than one medium. Another, “Read my lips,” charted a peculiar path through late 20th-century America. “Survival of the fittest” is a meme that, like other memes, mutates wildly (“survival of the fattest”; “survival of the sickest”; “survival of the fakest”; “survival of the twittest”).

Images. In Isaac Newton’s lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, even though he was one of England’s most famous men. Yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea—based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits. Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa, The Scream of Edvard Munch and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of their own, independent of any physical reality. “This may not be what George Washington looked like then,” a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart portrait at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “but this is what he looks like now.” Exactly.

Memes emerge in brains and travel outward, establishing beachheads on paper and celluloid and silicon and anywhere else information can go. They are not to be thought of as elementary particles but as organisms. The number three is not a meme; nor is the color blue, nor any simple thought, any more than a single nucleotide can be a gene. Memes are complex units, distinct and memorable—units with staying power.

Also, an object is not a meme. The hula hoop is not a meme; it is made of plastic, not of bits. When this species of toy spread worldwide in a mad epidemic in 1958, it was the product, the physical manifestation, of a meme, or memes: the craving for hula hoops; the swaying, swinging, twirling skill set of hula-hooping. The hula hoop itself is a meme vehicle. So, for that matter, is each human hula hooper—a strikingly effective meme vehicle, in the sense neatly explained by the philosopher Daniel Dennett: “A wagon with spoked wheels carries not only grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind.” Hula hoopers did that for the hula hoop’s memes—and in 1958 they found a new transmission vector, broadcast television, sending its messages immeasurably faster and farther than any wagon. The moving image of the hula hooper seduced new minds by hundreds, and then by thousands, and then by millions. The meme is not the dancer but the dance.

For most of our biological history memes existed fleetingly; their main mode of transmission was the one called “word of mouth.” Lately, however, they have managed to adhere in solid substance: clay tablets, cave walls, paper sheets. They achieve longevity through our pens and printing presses, magnetic tapes and optical disks. They spread via broadcast towers and digital networks. Memes may be stories, recipes, skills, legends or fashions. We copy them, one person at a time. Alternatively, in Dawkins’ meme-centered perspective, they copy themselves.

“I believe that, given the right conditions, replicators automatically band together to create systems, or machines, that carry them around and work to favor their continued replication,” he wrote. This was not to suggest that memes are conscious actors; only that they are entities with interests that can be furthered by natural selection. Their interests are not our interests. “A meme,” Dennett says, “is an information-packet with attitude.” When we speak of fighting for a principle or dying for an idea, we may be more literal than we know.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor....Rhyme and rhythm help people remember bits of text. Or: rhyme and rhythm help bits of text get remembered. Rhyme and rhythm are qualities that aid a meme’s survival, just as strength and speed aid an animal’s. Patterned language has an evolutionary advantage. Rhyme, rhythm and reason—for reason, too, is a form of pattern. I was promised on a time to have reason for my rhyme; from that time unto this season, I received nor rhyme nor reason.

Like genes, memes have effects on the wide world beyond themselves. In some cases (the meme for making fire; for wearing clothes; for the resurrection of Jesus) the effects can be powerful indeed. As they broadcast their influence on the world, memes thus influence the conditions affecting their own chances of survival. The meme or memes comprising Morse code had strong positive feedback effects. Some memes have evident benefits for their human hosts (“Look before you leap,” knowledge of CPR, belief in hand washing before cooking), but memetic success and genetic success are not the same. Memes can replicate with impressive virulence while leaving swaths of collateral damage—patent medicines and psychic surgery, astrology and satanism, racist myths, superstitions and (a special case) computer viruses. In a way, these are the most interesting—the memes that thrive to their hosts’ detriment, such as the idea that suicide bombers will find their reward in heaven.

Memes could travel wordlessly even before language was born. Plain mimicry is enough to replicate knowledge—how to chip an arrowhead or start a fire. Among animals, chimpanzees and gorillas are known to acquire behaviors by imitation. Some species of songbirds learn their songs, or at least song variants, after hearing them from neighboring birds (or, more recently, from ornithologists with audio players). Birds develop song repertoires and song dialects—in short, they exhibit a birdsong culture that predates human culture by eons. These special cases notwithstanding, for most of human history memes and language have gone hand in glove. (Clichés are memes.) Language serves as culture’s first catalyst. It supersedes mere imitation, spreading knowledge by abstraction and encoding.

Perhaps the analogy with disease was inevitable. Before anyone understood anything of epidemiology, its language was applied to species of information. An emotion can be infectious, a tune catchy, a habit contagious. “From look to look, contagious through the crowd / The panic runs,” wrote the poet James Thomson in 1730. Lust, likewise, according to Milton: “Eve, whose eye darted contagious fire.” But only in the new millennium, in the time of global electronic transmission, has the identification become second nature. Ours is the age of virality: viral education, viral marketing, viral e-mail and video and networking. Researchers studying the Internet itself as a medium—crowdsourcing, collective attention, social networking and resource allocation—employ not only the language but also the mathematical principles of epidemiology.

One of the first to use the terms “viral text” and “viral sentences” seems to have been a reader of Dawkins named Stephen Walton of New York City, corresponding in 1981 with the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter. Thinking logically—perhaps in the mode of a computer—Walton proposed simple self-replicating sentences along the lines of “Say me!” “Copy me!” and “If you copy me, I’ll grant you three wishes!” Hofstadter, then a columnist for Scientific American, found the term “viral text” itself to be even catchier.

Well, now, Walton’s own viral text, as you can see here before your eyes, has managed to commandeer the facilities of a very powerful host—an entire magazine and printing press and distribution service. It has leapt aboard and is now—even as you read this viral sentence—propagating itself madly throughout the ideosphere!

Hofstadter gaily declared himself infected by the meme meme.

One source of resistance—or at least unease—was the shoving of us humans toward the wings. It was bad enough to say that a person is merely a gene’s way of making more genes. Now humans are to be considered as vehicles for the propagation of memes, too. No one likes to be called a puppet. Dennett summed up the problem this way: “I don’t know about you, but I am not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other people’s ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational diaspora.... Who’s in charge, according to this vision—we or our memes?”

He answered his own question by reminding us that, like it or not, we are seldom “in charge” of our own minds. He might have quoted Freud; instead he quoted Mozart (or so he thought): “In the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind.... Whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it.”

Later Dennett was informed that this well-known quotation was not Mozart’s after all. It had taken on a life of its own; it was a fairly successful meme.

For anyone taken with the idea of memes, the landscape was changing faster than Dawkins had imagined possible in 1976, when he wrote, “The computers in which memes live are human brains.” By 1989, the time of the second edition of The Selfish Gene, having become an adept programmer himself, he had to amend that: “It was obviously predictable that manufactured electronic computers, too, would eventually play host to self-replicating patterns of information.” Information was passing from one computer to another “when their owners pass floppy discs around,” and he could see another phenomenon on the near horizon: computers connected in networks. “Many of them,” he wrote, “are literally wired up together in electronic mail exchange.... It is a perfect milieu for self-replicating programs to flourish.” Indeed, the Internet was in its birth throes. Not only did it provide memes with a nutrient-rich culture medium, it also gave wings to the idea of memes. Meme itself quickly became an Internet buzzword. Awareness of memes fostered their spread.

A notorious example of a meme that could not have emerged in pre-Internet culture was the phrase “jumped the shark.” Loopy self-reference characterized every phase of its existence. To jump the shark means to pass a peak of quality or popularity and begin an irreversible decline. The phrase was thought to have been used first in 1985 by a college student named Sean J. Connolly, in reference to an episode of the television series “Happy Days” in which the character Fonzie (Henry Winkler), on water skies, jumps over a shark. The origin of the phrase requires a certain amount of explanation without which it could not have been initially understood. Perhaps for that reason, there is no recorded usage until 1997, when Connolly’s roommate, Jon Hein, registered the domain name jumptheshark.com and created a web site devoted to its promotion. The web site soon featured a list of frequently asked questions:

Q. Did “jump the shark” originate from this web site, or did you create the site to capitalize on the phrase?

A. This site went up December 24, 1997, and gave birth to the phrase “jump the shark.” As the site continues to grow in popularity, the term has become more commonplace. The site is the chicken, the egg and now a Catch-22.

It spread to more traditional media in the next year; Maureen Dowd devoted a column to explaining it in the New York Times in 2001; in 2002 the same newspaper’s “On Language” columnist, William Safire, called it “the popular culture’s phrase of the year”; soon after that, people were using the phrase in speech and in print without self-consciousness—no quotation marks or explanation—and eventually, inevitably, various cultural observers asked, “Has ‘jump the shark’ jumped the shark?” Like any good meme, it spawned mutations. The “jumping the shark” entry in Wikipedia advised in 2009, “See also: jumping the couch; nuking the fridge.”

Is this science? In his 1983 column, Hofstadter proposed the obvious memetic label for such a discipline: memetics. The study of memes has attracted researchers from fields as far apart as computer science and microbiology. In bioinformatics, chain letters are an object of study. They are memes; they have evolutionary histories. The very purpose of a chain letter is replication; whatever else a chain letter may say, it embodies one message: Copy me. One student of chain-letter evolution, Daniel W. VanArsdale, listed many variants, in chain letters and even earlier texts: “Make seven copies of it exactly as it is written” (1902); “Copy this in full and send to nine friends” (1923); “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life” (Revelation 22:19). Chain letters flourished with the help of a new 19th-century technology: “carbonic paper,” sandwiched between sheets of writing paper in stacks. Then carbon paper made a symbiotic partnership with another technology, the typewriter. Viral outbreaks of chain letters occurred all through the early 20th century. Two subsequent technologies, when their use became widespread, provided orders-of-magnitude boosts in chain-letter fecundity: photocopying (c. 1950) and e-mail (c. 1995).

Inspired by a chance conversation on a hike in the Hong Kong mountains, information scientists Charles H. Bennett from IBM in New York and Ming Li and Bin Ma from Ontario, Canada, began an analysis of a set of chain letters collected during the photocopier era. They had 33, all variants of a single letter, with mutations in the form of misspellings, omissions and transposed words and phrases. “These letters have passed from host to host, mutating and evolving,” they reported in 2003.

Like a gene, their average length is about 2,000 characters. Like a potent virus, the letter threatens to kill you and induces you to pass it on to your “friends and associates”—some variation of this letter has probably reached millions of people. Like an inheritable trait, it promises benefits for you and the people you pass it on to. Like genomes, chain letters undergo natural selection and sometimes parts even get transferred between coexisting “species.”

Reaching beyond these appealing metaphors, the three researchers set out to use the letters as a “test bed” for algorithms used in evolutionary biology. The algorithms were designed to take the genomes of various modern creatures and work backward, by inference and deduction, to reconstruct their phylogeny—their evolutionary trees. If these mathematical methods worked with genes, the scientists suggested, they should work with chain letters, too. In both cases the researchers were able to verify mutation rates and relatedness measures.

Still, most of the elements of culture change and blur too easily to qualify as stable replicators. They are rarely as neatly fixed as a sequence of DNA. Dawkins himself emphasized that he had never imagined founding anything like a new science of memetics. A peer-reviewed Journal of Memetics came to life in 1997—published online, naturally—and then faded away after eight years partly spent in self-conscious debate over status, mission and terminology. Even compared with genes, memes are hard to mathematize or even to define rigorously. So the gene-meme analogy causes uneasiness and the genetics-memetics analogy even more.

Genes at least have a grounding in physical substance. Memes are abstract, intangible and unmeasurable. Genes replicate with near-perfect fidelity, and evolution depends on that: some variation is essential, but mutations need to be rare. Memes are seldom copied exactly; their boundaries are always fuzzy, and they mutate with a wild flexibility that would be fatal in biology. The term “meme” could be applied to a suspicious cornucopia of entities, from small to large. For Dennett, the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (quoted above) were “clearly” a meme, along with Homer’s Odyssey (or at least the idea of the Odyssey), the wheel, anti-Semitism and writing. “Memes have not yet found their Watson and Crick,” said Dawkins; “they even lack their Mendel.”

Yet here they are. As the arc of information flow bends toward ever greater connectivity, memes evolve faster and spread farther. Their presence is felt if not seen in herd behavior, bank runs, informational cascades and financial bubbles. Diets rise and fall in popularity, their very names becoming catchphrases—the South Beach Diet and the Atkins Diet, the Scarsdale Diet, the Cookie Diet and the Drinking Man’s Diet all replicating according to a dynamic about which the science of nutrition has nothing to say. Medical practice, too, experiences “surgical fads” and “iatro-epidemics”—epidemics caused by fashions in treatment—like the iatro-epidemic of children’s tonsillectomies that swept the United States and parts of Europe in the mid-20th century. Some false memes spread with disingenuous assistance, like the apparently unkillable notion that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii. And in cyberspace every new social network becomes a new incubator of memes. Making the rounds of Facebook in the summer and fall of 2010 was a classic in new garb:

Sometimes I Just Want to Copy Someone Else's Status, Word for Word, and See If They Notice.

Then it mutated again, and in January 2011 Twitter saw an outbreak of:

One day I want to copy someone's Tweet word for word and see if they notice.

By then one of the most popular of all Twitter hashtags (the “hashtag” being a genetic—or, rather, memetic—marker) was simply the word “#Viral.”

In the competition for space in our brains and in the culture, the effective combatants are the messages. The new, oblique, looping views of genes and memes have enriched us. They give us paradoxes to write on Möbius strips. “The human world is made of stories, not people,” writes the novelist David Mitchell. “The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.” Margaret Atwood writes: “As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.” Nearing death, John Updike reflected on

A life poured into words—apparent waste intended to preserve the thing consumed.

Fred Dretske, a philosopher of mind and knowledge, wrote in 1981: “In the beginning there was information. The word came later.” He added this explanation: “The transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.” Now we might add, thanks to Dawkins, that the transition was achieved by the information itself, surviving and perpetuating its kind and selectively exploiting organisms.

Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us—not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception. We are aware of the many species of information. We name their types sardonically, as though to reassure ourselves that we understand: urban myths and zombie lies. We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms. But we cannot own them. When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?

Gleick, J., 2011. What Defines a Meme?. [online] Smithsonian Magazine. Available at: <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/what-defines-a-meme-1904778/> [Accessed 4 March 2021].

The surprising academic origins of memes

There’s never a dull moment on the internet, and that’s got a lot to do with the fact that the content shared online is constantly changing – thanks in part to the creativity of users who remix, parody or caption popular images or videos, to create memes.

Punchy and humorous, memes are the perfect fodder for an internet culture shaped by viral sharing and creative participation. They may seem basic, but from a linguistic point of view, they’re surprisingly sophisticated. Meme creators use “multimodal grammar” (in other words, images and captions) to express and share ideas and opinions. By tagging their friends in memes shared on social networks, people add their own personal meanings to the content.

Despite their popularity, it’s not widely known that the meme has its origins in the world of academia. The term “meme” is rooted in evolutionary biology, and was coined by Richard Dawkins in his famous 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. According to Dawkins, a meme is “a unit of cultural transmission or imitation”: his examples include the concept of God, nursery rhymes and jokes, catchphrases and fashion trends.

The word comes from the Greek “mimema”, meaning imitated, which Dawkins supposedly shortened to rhyme with gene; a nod to the similarities between the survival of certain memes through the evolution of culture, and the survival of certain genes through the process of natural selection.

Going viral

Internet memes, as we know them today, are units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated and transformed by users. Limor Shifman, a key scholar in the study of internet memes, argues that a meme is not a single idea or image which is spread across social sites, but a group of items that were created with awareness of each other. For example, the famous Grumpy Cat meme is not the cat himself, but the whole set of memes generated with his image.

The first meme on the internet was actually the sideways “smiley” – :-) – created in 1982 by American computer scientist Scott E. Fahlman. The practice of using punctuation markers to show emotion was quickly picked up by internet users all over the world, and several other expressions, such as :-( and ;-), were added to the repertoire of the “emoticon” meme.

In 1998, when the web was enjoying more mainstream use, the Hampster Dance meme – depicting rows of dancing hamster GIFs, on the website of Canadian art student Deidre Lacarte – became popular. By the end of June 1999, the site had been visited 17m times. It later spawned a catchy song by the Cuban Boys and a viral remix by Hampton the Hamster, as well as several copycat sites. This meme, as simple as it may be, is one of the first examples of viral digital content.

Next gen memes

New breeds of memes emerged in the second half of the naughties, alongside the proliferation of pet photos shared online. The well-known examples were Advice Dog, LOLCats and Grumpy Cat. Animals with human characteristics have long been a part of human culture – from ancient Egyptian gods to children’s stories such as Peter Rabbit – so it’s hardly surprising to see them revived in the digital era as memes.

Starting from the late naughties, memes began to feature celebrities and ordinary people. Examples include Charlie Bit My Finger, Kanye Interrupts, Leave Britney Alone and Cash Me Ousside/How Bah Dah. These memes all came from a media event or a viral video, which agile internet users parodied, imitated, remixed and mashed up.

Memes are also used by people to promote certain political ideas or ideologies. Pepe the Frog, for example, was appropriated from the comic series Boy’s Club by the alt-Right, ultimately becoming a racist symbol before being killed off by his creator Matt Furie.

Using websites such as Meme Generator, people can use the biting humour of memes to try to delegitimise the arguments and leaders of rival political movements. This kind of activity ramped up around major political events such as the US and UK elections – and met with varying degrees of success.

Memes will continue evolving, along with the advances and changes in digital communication. Yet one thing that remains the same is humans’ desire to connect with one another and create a shared culture. Trivial as they may seem, memes contribute to this shared culture by fostering people’s imagination, creativity and involvement in society through new media.

Asla, E., 2018. The surprising academic origins of memes. [online] The Conversation. Available at: <https://theconversation.com/the-surprising-academic-origins-of-memes-90607> [Accessed 4 March 2021].

MEMES - A UNIT OF CULTURE

By Dr. Orville Leverne Clubb, Head of BTEC Centre, ITS Education Asia

This is 2nd in a series from Dr. Clubb. The 1st can be found here.

It is time to stop the mealy-mouthed euphemisms: ‘Nationalists’, ‘Loyalists’,’Communities’, ‘Ethnic Groups’, ‘Cultures’, Civilizations’. Religions is the word you need. Religion is the word you are struggling hypocritically to avoid.

-Richard Dawkins

I was introduced to the meme while having dinner with my son who at the time was pursuing his linguistic degree. As a lifelong learner, after hearing about memes I surfed the WWW to find out what I could about the concept. I learned that the meme was conceptualized by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene” (free book downloads on the meme concept). Dawkins conceived the meme to explain how cultural information spreads in a Darwinian fashion. A meme is characterized by being a small unit of cultural information that is self-replicating and its method of spreading is modeled on the behavior of biological genes.

The meme concept has developed a following and a field of study, Memetics, has been developed for studying the changes in cultural knowledge based on a metaphor of Darwinian evolution. The meme is encoded with the use of a language, ritual, etc.

Since memes are naturally selected from the cultural environment there is little room for us as an “individual” in a vast cultural evolutionary process which we do not control. Memetics appears to suggest that humans are biological robots fighting for survival of their culture and DNA. This implies free will and consciousness is an illusion, and self is only a complex collection of memes that are copied from ones’ cultural environment.

As with natural selection, the meme concept has shaken the foundations of theology since the concept suggests we are products of our environment instead of being created as a part of a grand divine scheme, and of course, Richard Dawkins is a famous atheist. Being an evolutionary biologist, he had great difficulty accepting the Christian belief that the book of Genesis was a literal factual account of the creation of the earth. Myself, being from a Christian background and an American originally from Mississippi, I remember the emotional anti-evolution views of people around me. Fundamentalist preaches in the deep south believe that the King James Version of the Bible is the “sacred law” and every word is the truth. As I heard a preacher once say: “It is as if the scriptures printed in the book were faxed down from God”. As an adult I have accepted that natural selection happens.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is iconoclastic and still battling to lose the title “theory” and be considered fact. There was a celebration of the anniversary of Darwin’s 200 birthday in 2009, and yet the fight still goes on. The underlining concepts of evolution have proven to be persistent and are winning over more converts. A great discussion of the battle of divine plan vs. evolution is in the article Why the Feud between Darwin and religion?

Dawkins’ religious views have been labeled by some as Atheist Fundamentalism. Maybe Dawkins beliefs have been modified by religious memes of his past. Dawkins is now calling himself a “secular Christian”. In an article Is Richard Dawkins Close to Christianity? we see an explanation by Dr. William Oddie that Dawkins was brought up as an Anglican but turned atheist in his early teens after learning the theory of evolution. Being a retired academic I know that my views have changed over time with each year and new experiences. I have not totally given up my belief that there is a superior being that bring order to the cosmos. Many of our past beliefs are past memes that stay with us to come back and haunt us.

In my previous blog I stated “In my next blog of this series, I will continue the discussion and go into the operations of memes and explore Virtual Tribalism.” I will go into Virtual Tribalism and Social Identity Theory in my next blog.

Leverne Clubb, O., n.d. ITS Education Asia Article - Memes - A unit of culture. [online] Itseducation.asia. Available at: <https://www.itseducation.asia/article/memes-a-unit-of-culture> [Accessed 4 March 2021].

TURNTABLE

Enjoying Turntables Without Obsessing

Buying records is easy. You can find them by the milk crate at yard sales, for a few dollars apiece in used record stores, and there are new, special pressings by contemporary musicians like Shelby Lynne, whose “Just a Little Lovin’” album, at $30, is a top seller. But buying the instrument needed to listen to them, a turntable, is a different matter. “Young people didn’t grow up with turntables,” said Kenny Bowers, manager at Needle Doctor, a Minnesota store specializing in turntables. “It seems mysterious and complicated because you don’t just push a button and have it play for you.” Record sales have climbed for five years. Now turntable sales are growing. They were up 50 percent in January over January last year. Hi-fi elitists may debate competing technologies of moving coil versus moving magnet cartridges as if Middle East peace depended on the answer, but turntables are really simple machines. It doesn’t cost a great deal to get a good one, and today’s turntables give you more for your money than they did when vinyl ruled. The celebrated Thorens 125 MKII, with tonearm, cost about $500 in 1975. (That’s about $2,000 in today’s dollars.) A comparable one in performance today, like the Music Hall MMF-2.2 or the Pro-Ject Debut III Esprit, costs $300 to $500. You are paying for two things, precision and craftsmanship. So here’s a guide to some of the costs. (It was just as confusing back in the 1960s, kids.) A turntable is basically three assemblies: the revolving platform the record sits on, called the platter, and the motor and drive; the tonearm, which moves across the record as it plays; and the cartridge and needle, which sit on the end of the tonearm and pick up the vibrations recorded in a record’s grooves. Turntables are machines that read vibrations, but they often can’t distinguish a good vibration from a Beach Boys album and a bad one from your stomping across the room. A good turntable is designed to isolate it from the real world. The motor needs to provide noiseless, consistent speed. A heavy platter helps to keep the speed from varying. But it’s an engineering game of Whac-A-Mole. Heavier platters need bigger motors, which may be noisier (and they cost more). Light platters can more easily transmit vibrations that can cause a ringing sound. The rule of thumb is make sure the table weighs at least 10 pounds. “If not, it’s made of plastic compound. It will sing along with music,” said Harry Weisfeld, the owner of the turntable maker VPI, based in Cliffwood, N.J. He advocates metal platters. You can also buy mats and special feet to isolate the turntable from outside vibrations. The kind of motor is even more hotly debated. One way the motor drives the platter is with a belt; the other is to mount the platter directly on the motor. Direct-drive mounting is preferred by some people because there is less chance the speed will vary. Rubber belts can stretch and loosen over time. But a direct-drive turntable is more likely to transmit noise, whereas rubber belts absorb motor vibrations. Editors’ Picks

The crazy thing is that the least and most expensive turntables tend to be belt-driven. It’s really a personal preference. Trust your ears. The tonearm needs to keep the needle where it picks the most vibrations from the record without so much pressure that it damages the grooves. “The main thing is the weight,” said Scott Shaw, audio solutions specialist for Audio-Technica, an audio equipment maker. “Lighter tracking forces tend to provide better audio quality,” he said. With some exceptions, the better tonearms are machined in one piece of lightweight steel, not cast or pressed. There are more exotic tonearms of carbon fiber, composites, even wood, but you are going to find that only on turntables that cost more than $1,000, said Mr. Shaw. The cartridge is mounted on the end of the tonearm and holds the stylus, or needle. “The stylus is where everything happens,” said Michael Pettersen, director of applications engineering for Shure, which makes cartridges. “When you buy a $100 cartridge,” he said, “the needle is $90 of the cost.” Needles are either elliptical or spherical, with no significant price difference. Elliptical tends to be better at reproducing high-pitched sounds, said Mr. Pettersen. Spherical does a better job riding over flaws in vinyl, though, and may be better for 45s and worn records. (An even older form of record, the 78, require a special, larger stylus.) “If I have a very nasty record, I’ll use the spherical,” Mr. Shaw said. There are also two kinds of cartridges, moving magnet and moving coil. Most cartridges are moving magnet. While they tend to be heavier than moving coil, you can change the stylus yourself, which you may want to do to adjust to the condition of your vinyl or change the sound you get. Moving coil is the type often favored by audiophiles because it has less weight, but changing a stylus requires a trip to the manufacturer. Both types typically wear out in 600 to 800 hours of use. Although the sky is the limit on price, a very good cartridge costs $75 to $100, said Mr. Pettersen.

Getting the most from a turntable requires careful setup, although maybe not as careful as people who sell calibration equipment would have you believe. “Setting up the turntable doesn’t have to be as complicated as they make it,” said Mr. Shaw. There can be leeway from the exact specifications, he said, adding, “Set it up fairly close, it will be fine. My point is, don’t obsess.” One additional piece of gear Mr. Shaw recommends is a stylus gauge to measure the weight the cartridge is putting on the record. “Don’t rely on the little numbers on the back of the tonearm,” he said. “They are very inaccurate.” Mr. Bowers of Needle Doctor recommends the Shure scale, the SFG-2, available online for $20 to $40. It may also be worthwhile to buy a tool to make sure the cartridge is lined up properly. Mr. Bowers recommended the Mobile Fidelity Geo-Disc, which is $50 to $80. Finally, you can check some of your work with a test record, like the Cardas Frequency Sweep and Burn-In Record ($15 to $30), which plays tones that help confirm that the setup is correct. You may find that what sounds best is not the recommended settings, or what the gauges and protractors dictate. In the end, it’s as much art as science. And isn’t that the beauty of analog?Buying records is easy. You can find them by the milk crate at yard sales, for a few dollars apiece in used record stores, and there are new, special pressings by contemporary musicians like Shelby Lynne, whose “Just a Little Lovin’” album, at $30, is a top seller. But buying the instrument needed to listen to them, a turntable, is a different matter. “Young people didn’t grow up with turntables,” said Kenny Bowers, manager at Needle Doctor, a Minnesota store specializing in turntables. “It seems mysterious and complicated because you don’t just push a button and have it play for you.” Record sales have climbed for five years. Now turntable sales are growing. They were up 50 percent in January over January last year. Hi-fi elitists may debate competing technologies of moving coil versus moving magnet cartridges as if Middle East peace depended on the answer, but turntables are really simple machines. It doesn’t cost a great deal to get a good one, and today’s turntables give you more for your money than they did when vinyl ruled. The celebrated Thorens 125 MKII, with tonearm, cost about $500 in 1975. (That’s about $2,000 in today’s dollars.) A comparable one in performance today, like the Music Hall MMF-2.2 or the Pro-Ject Debut III Esprit, costs $300 to $500. You are paying for two things, precision and craftsmanship. So here’s a guide to some of the costs. (It was just as confusing back in the 1960s, kids.) A turntable is basically three assemblies: the revolving platform the record sits on, called the platter, and the motor and drive; the tonearm, which moves across the record as it plays; and the cartridge and needle, which sit on the end of the tonearm and pick up the vibrations recorded in a record’s grooves. Turntables are machines that read vibrations, but they often can’t distinguish a good vibration from a Beach Boys album and a bad one from your stomping across the room. A good turntable is designed to isolate it from the real world. The motor needs to provide noiseless, consistent speed. A heavy platter helps to keep the speed from varying. But it’s an engineering game of Whac-A-Mole. Heavier platters need bigger motors, which may be noisier (and they cost more). Light platters can more easily transmit vibrations that can cause a ringing sound. The rule of thumb is make sure the table weighs at least 10 pounds. “If not, it’s made of plastic compound. It will sing along with music,” said Harry Weisfeld, the owner of the turntable maker VPI, based in Cliffwood, N.J. He advocates metal platters. You can also buy mats and special feet to isolate the turntable from outside vibrations. The kind of motor is even more hotly debated. One way the motor drives the platter is with a belt; the other is to mount the platter directly on the motor. Direct-drive mounting is preferred by some people because there is less chance the speed will vary. Rubber belts can stretch and loosen over time. But a direct-drive turntable is more likely to transmit noise, whereas rubber belts absorb motor vibrations.

Furchgott, R., 2012. Enjoying Turntables Without Obsessing (Published 2012). [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: <https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/technology/personaltech/how-to-enjoy-turntables-without-obsessing-over-them.html> [Accessed 4 March 2021].

Are Turntables Becoming Popular Again?

Vinyl just won't die. The 8-track and cassette tape challenged its might in the 1970s and 1980s. CDs took over the market in the 1990s. iTunes drove a digital download revolution in the 2000s. As each new format challenged the record player with advances in technology and portability, the vinyl market grew smaller and smaller. But it didn't die.

And then, something strange happened. Vinyl sales picked up. And they kept going up. In 2011, new vinyl record sales grew 39 percent over 2010 sales, to 3.9 million records — higher than they'd been in 20 years [source: [url='https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2012/01/04/vinylsalesup39/[/url']]. Are turntables becoming popular again? The statistics speak for themselves — you've got to have something on which to play all those newly-purchased vinyl records. But the real question is this: Why is vinyl making a comeback? Even with big growth in 2010 and 2011, vinyl's hardly set to upstage the Internet or even the CD as a popular music format. What do people see in vinyl?

Well, the trusty record has two things playing to its advantage. One: the unique sound of analog, something missing from digital formats. Two: collectability, driven by the increased space for album artwork and the special care poured into the creation of many modern vinyl runs. Vinyl albums and the turntables that play them have taken on a niche role in the modern music scene. While they were once the inferior technology for conveniently listening to music, they're now the coolest alternative to the simplicity of an MP3. Let's take a deeper look at why turntables are still selling and what that means for the music market.

The Sweet Sound of Vinyl

The wistful strum of an acoustic guitar in Led Zeppelin's "Going to California," the mournful voice of Joni Mitchell in every song of her album "Blue" — there's just something about that music that sounds like it was born for vinyl. Vinyl's defenders prefer the format for listening to music for a variety of reasons. Some prefer the "warmer" sound of vinyl, though that's a vague description that can mean different things to different people. For some, it might just refer to the snaps, crackles and pops that can be heard in vinyl playback. More serious audiophile listeners might not want to hear those pops at all. A high quality turntable and sound system can remove many of the imperfections picked up by cheaper gear. Still, those vinyl defenders could define a "warm" sound as the greater dynamic range of analog audio. The grooves in a vinyl album more accurately reflect the sound waves of an audio signal than a digital file, but audiophiles will forever argue about the merits of analog versus digital audio and which one is truly superior. There are even some vinyl listeners who aren't in it for the sound: In the digital age, big 12 inch records offer a really cool way to collect music.

Collecting Music on Vinyl

A massive collection of music on iTunes is awesome. A subscription to a streaming service like Spotify or Rdio gives computer users access to millions upon millions of songs at any given moment. But those songs are just files. There's no physicality, no liner notes to pore over or elaborate artwork to lovingly scrutinize. That's something only physical media, such as vinyl records and CDs, can offer. But to a lot of music fans, CDs are boring — their cases are too small to depict album art with the same boldness as a vinyl record sleeve. Another point in vinyl's favor: As albums have become more popular among collectors in the 2000s, limited releases have made records cooler than ever with colored and split-color vinyl. Most vinyl albums are black, but they don't have to be — pigmented materials can make albums red, blue, pink, white, orange or practically any other color. Mixing together multiple vinyl pellets while pressing a record can turn out albums that are completely one-of-a-kind. While there are decades' worth of classic albums still available on vinyl at low prices, modern artists often put lots of work into vinyl releases to make them special products for diehard fans. Vinyl sales are climbing, but they're still a small niche of the music business. Digital is now the standard for buying music — vinyl is the special release for fans who want something more. Sales are up year after year, but we have to keep them in perspective. CDs are still the most popular physical music format purchased.

Sales of Vinyl Albums and Turntables

Vinyl album sales have climbed every year since 2006, jumping from less than 1 million annual sales up to nearly 4 million sales in 2011 [source: DigitalMusicNews]. Those figures only account for new vinyl sales, too — record stores around the world still sell old and used albums that aren't tracked in sales statistics. That's huge growth for the vinyl market, but still only represents a small portion of the overall music market. Physical album sales continued to shrink in 2011, but they still crossed the 228 million mark. Four million vinyl records are still a drop in the bucket. Digital sales, meanwhile, passed 50 percent market share for the first time in 2011 [source: Time]. In the 2000s, some turntable manufacturers started designing record players that capitalized on the old school appeal of vinyl. Many retro or nostalgia turntables look like players or radios from the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Those record players represent a small section of the market and include other features like CD players. Of course, audiophiles prefer dedicated record players with features like direct drive turntables and calibrated tonearms. As of 2012, turntables are readily available — at price points from $150 to $1000. There are affordable players out there for vinyl newcomers, and expensive tables out there for DJs and audiophiles. USB turntables offer an appealing entry point for modern vinyl purchasers: They can be used to convert albums to digital and are often affordable, making them useful for vinyl lovers with big music collections and newcomers looking for a cheap record player.

Author's Note

I didn't grow up listening to vinyl. My dad was all about the CD revolution. But in high school, I got the bug. One of my friends had a retro turntable and a small collection of awesome albums, and the first time I heard Led Zeppelin blasted over the turntable's wimpy built-in speakers (complete with some background noise and the occasional pop), I was hooked. Since then, I've built up a small collection of my own (thanks for the abandoned box of 70s records, Dad!) and done my fair share of writing about and researching record players. I'm glad to see vinyl making a comeback, mostly because I think colored vinyl is extremely rad. The prizes of my collection are a bright orange record by Ra Ra Riot and a red-and-blue transparent album by The Protomen.

Fenlon, W., 2012. Are Turntables Becoming Popular Again?. [online] HowStuffWorks. Available at: <https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/audio-music/turntables-becoming-popular-again.htm> [Accessed 4 March 2021].

How My Record Player Helped Me Feel the Music

BEFORE THE PANDEMIC began, I had one record. It sat atop my red Ikea bookshelf, collecting dust. The Great Ray Charles. I picked it up at an event I attended a little more than a year ago, in the Before Times. I figured I'd find a way to play it at some point. But then, in mid-August, a turntable arrived at my doorstep.

My colleague and WIRED audio nerd extraordinaire, Parker Hall, recoiling after hearing I use a pair of decade-old, $30 computer speakers for my TV's audio output, loaned me a pair of Klipsch speakers and a Fluance turntable. And just like that, four months later, my once pathetic record collection has swiftly grown to 16 pieces.

I don't think I can forget the day I finally peeled the shrink-wrap from the Ray Charles album, choking from the mist of dust that sloughed off it. I had just finished setting up the Fluance RT80, which, by the way, was very easy. That surprised me. I always had this idea that turntables had a complicated and involved setup process, but I had it up and running in 10 minutes.

Inspired by the ease of it all, and with a manual by my side, I put the record on the spindle. I pushed the cue lever down. I moved the stylus to the edge of the vinyl, and I flipped the knob to 33.3 rotations per minute. The record began to spin. The minute a barrage of hurried piano keys began barreling out of the speakers, I turned to my partner and said, "It's like magic."

I Remember Touch

I'm no stranger to physical media. I had a Sony Walkman when I was a kid. Up until 2015, I drove my mum's squeaky 2004 Toyota Sienna equipped with a stereo that didn't have Bluetooth or an aux input. I just relied on the music I burned onto seven or so CDs to get me through my commutes to and from work. (It was that or WNYC, depending on the mood.)

Since then, I haven't touched music in a similar fashion. My fingers have gotten used to tapping my phone's screen to cycle through my digital library on a streaming service, but holding a record has brought back a sense of connectedness I haven't felt in years.

I've gone down the rabbit hole of hunting for some of my favorite albums in a vinyl format, actually paying attention to album names, song titles, and artists again. It's a stark difference from my digital music listening experience of late, where I've found myself picking a random playlist and streaming an endless river of tunes as I work from home. That's a rather lazy way of listening, but it's a quick and easy way to drown out ambient sounds and help my mind focus when I need to write.

But the physicality of picking up a record and placing it on a platter—and the need to get out of my chair to flip it when it hits the run-out groove on side A—has me appreciating each song all the more. Plus, the wonder of seeing a spinning disc with grooves producing harmonic sound never fades. My partner and I even slow-danced to Zooey Deschanel's "The Christmas Song" from A Very She & Him Christmas, which only felt natural surrounded by the warmth of our miniature Christmas tree (and our dog nestled in two thick blankets).

A part of this has to do with the fact that I sort of have to give the turntable my attention. I can't watch my TV when the turntable is in use, since both devices are connected to the same speakers. And my headphones finally come off when work's done and the record's on, which means I'm also away from my desk and more in tune with my surroundings. The music isn't hiding in the background, as it is when I'm streaming digitally. Instead, it's front and center.

There are subtle ironies too. We're living in a time when we have to avoid physical touch with others outside of our quarantine bubble. I can't hug my parents, brother, or sister. But I can flip a record after listening to “Touch” from Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, or after Sinatra wraps up “It Was a Very Good Year.” (It was not.) A turntable in no way replaces the feeling of being very close to my loved ones, but it does, if ever so briefly—records go by really fast!—make me think about something other than the pandemic.

An Addicting Hobby

The last thing I'm going to tell you to do is to buy a turntable and a pair of powered speakers, especially in the middle of a pandemic and an economic crisis when millions of Americans are facing eviction at the start of the new year. The equipment I was loaned amount to a total of $1,050. That's without factoring in the cost of records, which often sell for about $20 each.

The Klipsch speakers are largely to blame for the high price. The RT80 is $250, which is affordable as far as turntables go, but it's not the turntable audiophiles will recommend if you're chasing music fidelity. But music quality isn't why I've been so enamored by this new hobby. It's that physical experience of using a turntable; the sensation of the soft crackle before a track begins; along with finding, curating, and seeing a stack of records grow in my media console that's made the most dramatic impact.

When I joined a streaming service, I stopped buying albums. Instead, I just add artists to my library faster than I can listen to all their tracks. I can't mentally place the songs on an album in their correct order, let alone remember all the titles, as I once was able to do listening to the same few CDs in my mum's car over and over again. I think that's partly what's prevented me from feeling a deeper connection to the musicians I really like. That's changing now.

We recommend a record player as low as $150 in our Best Turntables guide. After getting one of those, all you need is a set of speakers to plug it into. (Back in the day, record players used to require an external preamp; today's models ship with all the necessary electronics built in.) I'd recommend getting a pair of powered speakers with an RCA connection, like these $100 Edifiers. It's still spendy, but if you share my feeling of disconnection with digital music libraries, and you're craving a new hobby to distract yourself as we await large-scale vaccine deployment, dive into this vinyl world. The first record you spin will have you grinning ear to ear.

Chokkattu, J., 2020. How My Record Player Helped Me Feel the Music. [online] Wired. Available at: <https://www.wired.com/story/record-player-vinyl-rave/> [Accessed 4 March 2021].