Best Japanese Song: Electric Eel Shock "Rock & Roll Can Rescue the World"

With its rigorously drilled "idol" groups, "cute" tone-deaf singers, rampant cross-media marketing, and questionable music charts, the Japanese music scene can sometimes seem a particularly loveless and Orwellian place. Anyone aiming for the freedom and joie de vivre normally associated with rock 'n' roll would be well advised to follow the trail blazed by Electric Eel Shock.

In tune with the real spirit of rock, the three-piece from Osaka spend more of their time touring grungy venues in Europe and America in a beat-up jalopy than hanging around the offices of Tokyo management companies, practicing their bows and keigo for an appearance on Music Station. This is reflected in their road-tested version of old school '80s hard rock, which comes with wit, "interrigible" English lyrics, and a real sense of the lads enjoying themselves. Rock & Roll Can Rescue the World from 1999 extends the personal epiphany they have found through garage metal into a message of global hope via some fantastic riffing, searing Eddie Van Halen-style breaks, and a strategically placed burp. Enjoy!

Colin Liddell
Metropolis
2009

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!