Kids today

"My generation grew up obsessed with Western rock music and the counterculture, all that coolness and heaviness and authenticity. In comparison all the Japanese rock bands were just leaden imitators. People talk about Flower Travellin' Band today, but how many people would honestly choose them as being more original than Led Zeppelin? They might have added a few Oriental flourishes, but Zeppelin were far cooler. We had so little information that we always had to use our own imagination. I'd see photos of a stack of Marshall amps and imagine they were all turned up to ten. I never realised that most of them were just spares. I imagined that they played at crushing volume and I'd try to do the same. Or I'd see some guitarist whirling their guitar around and imagine that they played like that through their whole set. When I picked up a guitar I thought that was how you had to play it. Our whole rock culture began from those kinds of misconceptions. But those misconceptions and the fantasies they allowed to exist have almost all gone now. Kids today grow up on J-pop and hardly listen to any Western music at all. In both a good and bad way, they've lost that yearning for something other."

Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple in The Wire October 2008.