‘What The Fuck Is Going On Right Now?’: A Conversation With Thundercat in Japan

“In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment,” Toru, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“I feel weird,” Thundercat, “Captain Stupido”

Trapped at the bottom of a well, Toru watches helplessly as it begins to fill with water around him. The apathetic, unemployed 30-something first discovered the hole in the ground while looking for his bent-tailed cat. Its cool confines and soft ground make it perfect for thinking and napping, he decides, so he spends afternoons drifting off in the darkness, letting the outside world be reduced to a sliver of sky. His dreams take a turn for the surreal, though: He starts to cross over to another plane, a hotel filled with mysterious characters, including his missing wife. Toru returns to the alternate universe to find her, but is confronted by a faceless knife-wielding man, whom he cracks over the head with a bat before waking up, bruised and battered. His ladder is gone and whatever obstructed the vein of water in the ground has been loosened.

The magical well, a key backdrop in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, appears ominously in my mind as I sit underground in the Chuo Ward of Osaka, Japan, 20 feet below a maze of tiny streets and neon, in a room with no windows. Across from me is Thundercat, hair frazzled and draped in various trinkets of gold, pouring out shots of Yamazaki, a local single malt whiskey. The bassist is decompressing in the wake of his first solo tour of Japan, a benchmark hit after years of playing it alongside others, from enlightened soul goddess Erykah Badu to OG thrash band Suicidal Tendencies. Each gig has been as mobbed as Shibuya Crossing, with tonight’s performance, located in a basement space stacked below four stories of cryptic hole-in-the-wall nightlife, selling out in less than an hour.

One local bar owner——an American blues-themed tavern across from my Airbnb——conveyed to me beforehand with an eager smile and broken english that it was the hottest ticket around, an astonishing notion when you realize just how much is going on in this metropolis. Osaka, much like Tokyo, is an endless labyrinth of pachinko dens, karaoke lounges and open-air markets. But like Toru, Thundercat——real name Stephen Bruner——is caught between worlds. In one universe, he’s relishing in a recent run of career highs, cherried by the release of his latest album, Drunk, and a world tour. In the other, he’s in a hole in the ground, wondering how the hell he got here and what the universe has planned for him next.  

“It’s like this weird, surreal, slightly euphoric smeared painting a lot of the time,” he explains softly, eyes pointed forward but concentration resting far off in the expanse of his mind. “You know the song ‘You can’t bring me down” by Suicidal? Rocky George is doing this crazy thing with the guitar and then [singer] Mike Muir is like, ‘What the hell is going on around here?’ It’s this zero-to-60 moment.”

Wedged on a leather couch backstage between two middle-aged Japanese women waiting on a meet and greet and British R&B singer Lianne La Havas, Bruner appears both calm and confused by his surroundings. It’s a familiar sensation for any outsider visiting Japan, a place that can make your mind glow with both intense satisfaction and profound loneliness. Exploring its massive cities and quiet countryside, you’ll be enamored by shrines that extend whole mountain sides, freshly constructed seawalls large enough to take on 14-foot waves of cold blue water (an outcome of the devastation caused by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami) and cityscapes that seem to stretch on forever. Yet the scope of these wonders can bring forth thoughts of mortality, never more fragile than in the presence of structures built to preserve an ancient society, one that has endured centuries of war and disaster, honor and prosperity.

Bruner undergoes a similar culture shock when he returns here, despite being much more familiar with Japan than many outsiders. Growing up 5,000 miles away in Los Angeles, he was profoundly shaped by its culture, a love affair that started with a Dragon Ball Z wrist bracelet given to him as a kid by the dentist that “fucking ruined” him. From then on he became a connoisseur of anime, appreciating its fantastical elements as much as its “finer points,” the commentary that reflects real-world issues like race and politics, he tells me. He also became entranced by Japanese video games, often inserting Sonic The Hedgehog in his Sega Genesis just to get lost in its hypnotic soundtrack.

Composers like Masato Nakamura, who had to fit their classical talents within an 8-bit frame, showed Bruner the possibilities of music composition. At least in part, they also inspired him to create his own songs, which continue to bring him back to their homeland. Playing here for the first time, he did notice one similarity between it and L.A.: Concertgoers don’t clap as much. Audiences in both places, he believes, are more reserved in their judgment of the music compared to those in cities like New York or London. This can be nerve wracking——the room was mostly silent during songs tonight until the final chord of his amber-toned Ibanez bass was plucked——but after years of playing reserved L.A. jazz clubs, Bruner appreciates it. By his account, the quietness isn’t a result of the art being lost in translation; it’s an intense investment in determining its message.

“When I come here, I experience the actual, ‘Well what are you really saying?’ He says. “So when somebody claps, it’s because they actually liked it.”

Things have changed quite a bit since his first tour of the Far East, however. For one, Bruner’s star has noticeably risen, with his recent acclaim stateside seemingly reflected over here tenfold (it took me three separate tour dates to actually get into one of his shows, being turned away in both Tokyo and Kyoto). His heavy involvement in Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 opus To Pimp A Butterfly was the catalyst, but it was his capitalization of the moment, a disgustingly funky, Isley Brothers-sampling earworm called “Them Changes,” that made him a staple on coffee shop playlists and earned him praise from tastemakers like Pharrell Williams (with whom he’d ultimately collaborate with).

Drunk came at the apex of his newfound buzz, acting as another statement of his low-end cosmicity, often spiraling quickly from humor to darkness, fart sounds to existential questions of death. Its noodling bass lines, falsetto purrs and weird librettos——one particularly goofy chorus goes, “Cool to be a cat (meow, meow, meow)”——capture the mushy, undefined corners of life and earned him even more praise from fans and critics alike. Though he bristles at the idea of crafting it with an eye toward mainstream acceptance, Bruner welcomes the accolades it’s brought him, even if the true identity of his art is still being pieced together.

“Whenever there’s this question of what I think things should be, I have no answer,” he admits. “It’s like, I’m just trying to figure this out, too…It’s just being excited——the idea is being excited.”

For Toru, it was the absence of his cat and wife that brought him to the abandoned well, but his purpose there was originally unclear. Bruner seems similarly perplexed by his role in the grand scheme of things, and an argument could be made that he’s also driven by a loss. The last time he played this Osaka venue, close friend and collaborator Austin Peralta, who died at the young age of 22 in 2012 due to complications related to viral pneumonia, was by his side on piano.

Since the event, Bruner has spoken candidly about how hard he took his passing, with Peralta’s death hanging over much of his 2013 album, Apocalypse. Even on Drunk, threads of grief still linger, like on the swirling “Lava Lamp,” when he sings, “Don’t want to live without you. Don’t leave me out here to die.” Tonight on stage, he took the time to acknowledge Peralta and his absence, which, like a lot of the show, was met with a strange but thoughtful quietness. He then played “A Message for Austin/Praise The Lord/Enter the Void,” his ode to Peralta off Apocalypse, which includes the lyrics, “I know I’ll see you again, in another life, thank you for sharing your love and light.”

“That one moment with Austin [here]…it just stuck with me, naturally,” he says, before reiterating, “My experience coming to Japan has always been pretty intense.”

With each return visit, Bruner’s stage has gotten emptier, an indicator of both growth——the evolution of a role player into a headline act——and increasing solitude. Thus Bruner finds himself simultaneously more alone and popular than ever, a fact illustrated by our surroundings. The concrete-walled green room has grown increasingly quiet as the post-show glow has dimmed. Bruner’s bandmates sit contently as they view their phones; the beautiful La Havas has grown bored with our conversation and left. The two Japanese women continue to wait patiently. Amidst it all, Bruner remains perplexed, trying to figure out if the well he’s sitting in is a vehicle for good or evil.

“I think more than anything what I was trying to convey with [Drunk] is what the fuck is going on right now?” He says, scratching the back of his head with a sigh. “You turn the news on and it’s World War III and then at the same time nothing’s happening. So it’s everything and nothing at once. It’s about your ability to vacillate between these moments that exist, you know?”

Going back and forth between these moments can be difficult, which is why Bruner sometimes leans on coping mechanisms, he admits. On this particular tour, alcohol has been the method of choice, mainly in the form of Japanese whiskey and scotch, smoother than their smoky Scottish counterparts. Personally, I’ve been sipping on one-dollar sake jars from the convenience stores that litter city corners here. Tonight we’ve used other means, too, including music and laughter, the latter mostly caused by a FaceTime call with comedian Zach Fox, who designed the blood-dunked artwork for Drunk and peers at us sleepily through the phone as we push farther into the night.

But before we head our separate ways, back into the neon to find our lodgings, I ask Bruner why he continues to create art if it all makes him feel so strange. When he responds, I imagine him melting into the couch and toward another plane, where he confronts his own faceless man.

“It always freaks you out. But at the same time, I push forward. I try to walk towards the fear. You only get better at those moments by doing them.”