Enka singer Jero on CNN

African American enka singer Jero has been profiled on CNN’s Talk Asia program. Watch the extended interview on their website (Part I is embedded below, the full show is about 30 minutes in length).

Jero speaks to CNN’s Kyung Lah about his childhood experiences with enka in America, how he came to Japan as an English teacher, and his expectations for the future.

CNN.com’s article accompanying the video characterizes Jero as someone who “is making old, new again in Japan:”

It seems an unlikely musical style for the Pittsburgh native to pursue. Enka’s fan based comes generally from an older generation and is practically unknown outside of Japan, with simple song themes about love and loss.

But Jero, real name Jerome White, with his youth, hip-hop look and fine singing voice has propelled enka into the 21st century and captured a new audience.

A somewhat different view of Jero can be found in an article about foreign celebrities in Japan by W. David Marx at NeoJaponisme:

The story so far has been the story itself: “foreign celebrities in Japan who speak Japanese and love Japan!” Content-wise their products are almost indistinguishable from their Japanese peers’. Jero is the most disappointing on this measure. He’s got the chops and the cultural angle to take the over-codified, increasingly-irrelevant enka style into the 21st globalized century. But instead of changing the content of his songs to reflect the real life-experiences of Jero, they just dress him up in near-parody hip-hop clothing and make him emote like a divorced Yokohama dock worker in 1963. Jero just lets the enka industry put a new label on an old bottle.

I hope that Jero sees greater success in Japan, but it’s hard to deny that his act still has a “new label on an old bottle” feeling. Perhaps fans will think of him as another gimmick and cause him to fade away, or perhaps he’ll develop an original style that has some life to it. I suppose we’ll have to wait a year and see.