Make Believe Mailer #99: No Place I'd Rather Be
Ten Years Of Clean Bandit's "Rather Be" Video, And A New Japan Fascination
Late into the video for Clean Bandit’s “Rather Be,” the English group accidentally became a nuisance. The main character, played by actor Haruka Abe1, is haunted by the image of Clean Bandit, who keep appearing to her as…hallucinations maybe? She runs through Shinjuku trying to escape the violin-assisted electronic act. She ends up on the station platform, and boards a train, implied by editing to be the Yamanote Line but the presence of square seats facing one another indicates it’s actually the Shonan-Shinjuku Line. Nice try, gang.
Safe from the persistent threat of upbeat dance-pop? No no no, as Clean Bandit and a series of “commuters” pop up and deliver a little hand dance aimed at Abe’s character, causing her to faint.
Here’s what the group wrote shortly after the video came out:
Totally by accident, Clean Bandit2 offered a preview of the next ten years of Tokyo’s tourism era. It’s totally anodyne in retrospect (I’d say a complicating factor they didn’t pick up on is they are doing all of this in the priority area, which is an extra bad look) but foreshadowed tensions as the number of foreign visitors into Japan raised year on year until the COVID-19 pandemic. Heck, this year — with the return of inbound travel — saw panics over teens carving their names into trees and the months-long drama over misbehaving streamers like Johnny Somali, who would often act inappropriately on trains for the views.
Nobody was going to arrest Clean Bandit for their list JR dance routine, but they offered a peak at Tokyo’s future. Fitting, seeing as the video for “Rather Be” is arguably the starting point for how the city — and perhaps country — would be interpreted from abroad.
“Rather Be,” featuring Jess Glynne, turned 10 this week. The song is…fine? I gave it a [5] back on The Singles Jukebox and that still sounds about right a decade on. The video though, oh man, this should be studied in university classes. Not because of the aforementioned plot — Japanese woman hallucinates a gaggle of Brits — but because of how Tokyo is presented. Within these four minutes and 30 seconds, a viewer in 2013 would get a peak at the dominant tourism aesthetics of the future.
Previous music videos by Western artists in Tokyo presented the city in one of two ways — exciting backdrop for artists to walk around and pose in front of, or wacky metropolis full of cool pop culture and weird shit (see: anything featuring the now-deceased Robot Restaurant). Usually, the two would merge together. The Killers mostly just hung around Shinjuku and Yoyogi Park in the 2007 clip for “Read My Mind,” but they do meet up with an Elvis impersonator (wacky!) and Gachapin (pop culture! Also wacky!). Kanye West’s “Stronger” is just one big Akira cosplay. The Black Eyed Peas largely look out of taxi and hotel windows on 2011’s “Just Can’t Get Enough,” though they also stop by Shibuya Aughts staple / fashion viper pit Trump Room. Muse’s “Panic Station”... I don’t even know where to start. Arguably the most famous of this genre, Beastie Boys’ “Intergalatic,” is half loving tribute to kaiju hijinks and half opportunity for the group to run around Tokyo having fun.
Having not watched this video in a long time…and having never thought about it when I saw it all the time as a junior high schooler…totally forgot part of “Intergalatic” finds Beastie Boys ALSO acting up on a train, around what looks like people just trying to commute. Probably a good history lurking within here. Especially when you add in The Police’s “So Lonely” — nobody knows how to act on trains!
Something was changing about how Tokyo appeared in videos by 2013, and “Rather Be” offers the first glimpse into what it would morph into. Specifically, a pretty unexciting one. The metropolis Clean Bandit focuses on veers towards ho-hum daily life, with extended periods spent in an izakaya and only flashes of busy neighborhoods. The central backdrop is Tsukiji Fish Market, a tourist attraction but hardly a “crazy” one…especially when the video focuses on a woman buying fish. The most surreal any of this clip gets is during a dream sequence, wherein our main character, now wearing school sailor suit, spins around with a Clean Bandit member for a few seconds. That’s in Shibuya…but not even in the crossing! There’s probably a tour agency that allows you to do this.
That’s the exception though, and for the majority of “Rather Be” Tokyo appears to be…a city. It’s not exoticizing anything or even trying to be cool. It’s celebrating the mundane.
Forget “cool Japan.” Enter “calm Japan.”
Perhaps owing to total burnout related to “weird Japan” content near the start of the 2010s3…or more likely because around 2013 is when travel to Japan became much more reasonable and tourism numbers started climbing up…what people wanted to see and experience about Japan changed. Sure, some bizarre faux-trends and zany eateries (again, Robot Restaurant) clung to relevance. But Japan became a point of fascination for its mundanity. The same sort of atmosphere captured so well in the “Rather Be” video.
I’ll just rattle off some of the major Japanese pop culture success stories of the last decade to underline the “calm Japan” ethos taking center stage. You had Old Enough, Marie Kondo, interest in “forest bathing,” the ongoing fascination with Japanese convenience stores (deserved, I admit), Kankyo Ongaku and the ultimate example (until it wasn’t an example) of so-dull-its-thrilling reality show Terrace House. Exaggerated game shows out, Netflix’s Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories in. Which plays out in a mundane izakaya, by the way.
The actual best manifestation of this came from regular people. The tourism boom of the 2010s (and now) intersected perfectly with the singularity between social media and real life, meaning anyone coming in for a vacation could offer their own perspective on what makes the country neat. Simultaneously, the “J-Vlogger” era played out, with non-Japanese residents of the country filming their relatively ho-hum lives coupled with glances into parts of the Tokyo-and-beyond experience that never would have received focus before. Think tiny apartments, trips to the rural corners of the capital, convenience store reviews and so on. And of course you had the Logan Pauls of the world coming by to annoy everyone, albeit in ways far more grating than dancing on the train.
It’s rarely trying to present Tokyo as anything beyond a chill place. There’s an entire popular genre of YouTube channel devoted to just walking around the city, from Shibuya to the sticks. For me, that’s a daily commute. For someone outside the country in the 2020s, there’s no place they’d rather be.
When it comes to music videos by non-Japanese acts, I don’t want to give Clean Bandit too much credit for shifting the visual paradigm. Just as important was Lost In Translation’s slow-burning impact on pop culture, best captured in the humans-connecting-in-strange-to-them-land theme of Tove Styrke. Yet it’s trickled down since, and you can see a fusion of the two approaches to Tokyo play out in videos from the likes of HONNE, and a more “Rather Be” indebted example courtesy of ROSALÍA, above (bonus points for featuring another landmark of modern Japanese tourism…Ichiran ramen). She also has the Sofia Coppola homage down elsewhere.
I don’t know how much longer this specific view of Japan will hold — tourism has surged back to levels higher than they were before the pandemic, and for the most part those visitors are creating similar content. You can see some shifts — a greater emphasis on “hidden” Japan (like the “secret” island of…Okinawa, though they changed it), a creep back towards the weird via vending machine videos and a boom in “I rented a person” content, and of course nuisance streamers4 — but for now it’s still all about the everyday experience.
That leaves “Rather Be” feeling more important as a document of shifting views5 on what people outside of the country want out of Japan, a music video marker right ahead of the country’s tourism boom. Honestly, a better legacy than the other major hit released on the exact same day, and also celebrating ten years, below. What a December.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
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Currently the voice of Noodle in Gorillaz…there’s a fun fact for you.
Some context: I’ve been obsessed with this video since it came out not because of its portrayal of Tokyo (that bloomed later), but because the TV the father character watches features the logo for a website called MTV 81, which was Viacom’s effort to cash in on a percieved interest in Japanese music. I was one of the primary writers for the site during its existence — so seeing it feature prominently in this video jolted me.
To understand why people today still harp about “weird Japan” stories, you need to revisit things like “Bagel heads” and the general perception of Japanese game shows from this period.
Which, to be totally fair, is also a huge domestic content issue…Johnny Somali sucks, but he didn’t get kaiten sushi erased from the national culinary scene like several teens did via “sushi terrorism.”
This could be a whole other post, but 2013 is also the year of The Weeknd’s Kiss Land, which feels to me like an important moment in the history of people throwing katakana on everything as a means to achieve coolness (I don’t follow fashion though, probably happened there first). For me, the lasting legacy of this period is the single greatest aritst photo of the 21st century.
