Album Review: Various, "Peace Not War Japan"

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE (OR AT LEAST BUY THE CD)

Nowadays, we live in a time of constant crises and conflict. As soon as one flashpoint in the World dies down, another one flares up somewhere else. If it's not the threat of war with North Korea, it's an invasion or insurgency in the Middle East or an ethnic or tribal conflict somewhere in Africa. The cost in human terms is always horrendous. More than ever before we have to work hard to achieve peace and raise awareness.

With this in mind, Peace Not War Japan (PNWJ), the local branch of the UK-founded Peace Not War (PNW) movement, released a CD compilation album on August 19 that collects rising artistic voices in Japan that are calling for an end to war and for peace in our time.

This excellent compilation of Japanese peace music is part of an international movement to redefine protest music for the 21st Century. Among the artists involved are already renowned performers such as SOUL FLOWER UNION, DRY & HEAVY, RYUKYU UNDERGROUND and BHANG LASSI/CAPTAIN FUNK, as well as previously unknowns. The album also brings together a range of musical voices from across Japan (including artists from regions such as Tokyo, Osaka, Hiroshima and Okinawa) as well as offering genres as diverse as rock, hip-hop, breakbeat, dub, and much more.

The UK organization of Peace Not War has pioneered such launches in the UK with two double CDs of pro-peace/anti-war songs by internationally renowned artists and independent, grassroots musicians, including the likes of SONIC YOUTH, JANE'S ADDICTION, MASSIVE ATTACK, COLDCUT, ROOTS MANUVA, JURASSIC 5, and many others. In the same spirit, Japan now produces its own definitive soundtrack for the new peace movement. Get involved!

Colin Liddell
Tokyo Journal
September, 2006

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!