I don’t always look at the color of someone’s eyes.
Anyway, it’s not the first thing I notice.
Maybe that’s because so many people I know hide their eyes behind a pair of shades, day or night, inside or out. Or they look away instead of right at you. But I think it goes to something deeper. I’ll notice someone’s clothes or their makeup or their hair—and I’ll definitely check out their kicks!—but the eyes kind of disappear into the background for me … unless they’re a striking shade, like a deep hazel, or an unusual green like you sometimes see in Sweden and Denmark. Then I’ll stop and stare. But if they’re brown, I might not even notice.
You’d think, with the way people shout about having blue eyes, or crushing on someone with blue eyes, I’d pay more attention. Western music is filled with the romantic notion of blue-eyed love. Rock, country, punk, hardcore … you’ve even got the Chairman of the Fucking Board, the entertainer who put my city on the map, Sinatra himself, known forevermore as Ol’ Blue Eyes.
Remix all those songs, mash up all those messages and images, and what you come away with is the idea that when you look out at the world through a blue lens, the world smiles back. Hard. Funny thing, though: I’ve been told that you don’t see blue eyes all that often in people from Japan. I’d never really noticed, but this is true, now that I think of it. Really, I can’t think of anyone in my family with blue eyes. Can’t think of any blue-eyed Japanese heroes or leaders. In fact, most Asians are brown-eyed—but then, if you look at a lot of the cutting-edge art that’s coming out of that part of the world, the blue-eyed ideal is very much a thing.
In Japanese anime art, for example, you’ll often see heroes or heroines with blue eyes … and, say, yellow hair. Why is that, do you think? I have a theory, and it ties back to how traditional Japanese culture is rooted in conformity. We’ve been over this, yeah, but this is the ground I’ve walked my whole fucking life, so let’s go over it again. In Japan, nobody wants to stand out, so we stand down. We keep quiet, dress quiet, live quiet, so when you look at anime you see that the characters with dark hair and dark eyes are the most common. Makes sense, right? But if you study it, do a quick survey, you’ll also see that the characters with dark hair or dark eyes don’t have a whole lot to do with the story that’s being told. They’re in a supporting role—meaning, in support of whatever or whoever is extraordinary.
Okay, so I’m generalizing here. It’s not like I’ve done this comprehensive study, but follow my thought and see if you don’t agree. In the world of anime, dark hair seems to represent the majority, the great many, while it’s the exceptional characters that are drawn with yellow hair—signifying a special quality, perhaps—or bright green eyes, or whatever. You’ll even see blue hair, from time to time, usually on a character with great strength or resolve. Red, purple, pink … you can probably do a whole thesis on the use of color in anime art and come up with character traits connected to every shade, every body part, and there in the background you’ll find a crowd of everyday folks with their same-seeming hair, their same-seeming eyes.
But that’s just fantasy, right? In our reality, only way we can look out at the world with blue eyes is to put on blue lenses. To think boldly, to grab at the idea that we’re seeing the world with blue eyes. Because even as we seek to be different—in our art, in our dreams—we stay as we are, very much the same.
So what does this all mean? Fuck, I’m not even sure … but as long as I’m jumping to conclusions, I’ll jump to this one: maybe, just maybe, the young Japanese artists breaking through the culture are looking to shed these old traditions. Maybe they’re tired of standing down, tired of the ways their brothers and sisters have been made to stand down, and they want to push us to stand and be counted.
To stand out.
Better believe it, I can see these traditions fading at my shows, in the United States and all over the world. My Asian fans turn out in big numbers with brightly colored hair—lately, pink. They’re wearing blue—like a bright neon. They’re doing whatever they can to call attention to whatever it is they’re into. They want to pop and sizzle and make an impression, to step from the background and stand front and center. So when I look out from the stage at that sea of bodies colliding in time to my music, dotted here and there with a mop of hair dyed a screaming shade of blue—the blue of nonconformity!—I know there’s a young person beneath those bright colors hoping to make some serious noise.
Someone exceptional.