MARTY FRIEDMAN Explains Why Japanese People 'Of All Types' Relate To Heavy Metal And Why 'That Doesn't Happen In America'

On Monday, November 25, former MEGADETH guitarist Marty Friedman came to Tokyo's Foreign Correspondents' Club Of Japan, one of the world's oldest and most prestigious press clubs, to talk about his music, his life and extraordinary cultural journey from America to Japan. Video of the question-and-answer session can be seen below.

Friedman, who has been living and recording music in Japan since 2003, was asked about the stereotype that the heavy metal genre draws individuals who feel they are outcasts from popular society. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Especially when I grew up, I guess it's the same as it is now, but people who listened to hard rock and loud music and all that stuff, it wasn't like the quarterback of the football team. It wasn't like the popular guys, not the smart guys, not the guys with great girlfriends, it wasn't the top-of-the-class, honor roll guys — it was the guys who would cut class and hang out with their friends and smoke cigarettes and maybe other things and not the popular guys. It was the outcasts. And that's just kind of where hard rock had its place in society. Popular people liked dance music and pop music, and they didn't really care so much about music. It wasn't important because they had good lives already. They didn't need to be medicated by getting deep into this music and being saved by the music. They were, like, 'Oh, there's music in the background. Great. Let's dance. Party. Cool.' But for those of us who didn't have a whole lot of friends, we were at home playing BLACK SABBATH at full volume and going, 'Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all right. This is so cool.' But popular people weren't like that. In Japan, however, it is so completely different. You look at people in bands, you look at people who've dedicated their life to playing rock, and they were popular in school, they're good looking, they had girlfriends, they were on the sports team, they had good grades, totally normal guys, but for some reason, they play rock music, and they're in these bands playing this loud, obnoxious music. You meet the guys and they're so completely polite and well spoken, and not like Kurt Cobain might possibly have been, but just normal good guys who had good jobs and just grew up nicely and have manners and they're playing rock. And so you live here long enough, you try to analyze why this is, to answer a question like that, and you can only give my own opinion."

Friedman continued: "I will stand on my opinion that hard rock and guitar-based or guitar-oriented music, heavy metal and guitar stuff, the reason why Japanese people, of all kinds, of all types of people, the reason why they relate to it is because — and I welcome any opposing views — I think that in Japanese traditional music, the sound of an aggressively played stringed instrument plucked loudly, the shamisen with the big pick, the bachi, distorted guitars played aggressively is something that people's grandparents and great grandparents are already used to and wired to listen to. They're used to it already. So if you listen to old people's music, like Anka or traditional music, lo and behold, there's distorted guitar solos in this music. It's like just right out of IRON MAIDEN or something. And it's, like, who's listening to it? Somebody who's, like, 95 years old. And I'm, like, that doesn't happen in America. So, why is it?"

Marty added: "The distorted sound of a shamisen — there's like a switch on the top of the guitar pegs, that if you switch it, it makes it sound dang dang dang dang, really rattly and distorted. So Japanese people, they're already used to this. So, to them, it's not a rebellious sound at all. In America, if you had a distorted guitar, it's, like, 'Oh my god, oh my god.' That's why Jimi Hendrix had such a big impact, 'cause at the time no one made noise with a guitar. It was the most hated thing in the world. Certainly your grandmother wasn't listening to it. Rock and heavy metal was a way to piss off people. In Japan, I don't think it pissed, really, anybody off. So it's a kind of a different approach to the same thing. And I just think it's fascinating.

"And that's my answer to it. Now, there probably is another better explanation, but just with my musical experience here in Japan, that's what I think it is. That's what I think the difference is."

Friedman's musical journey has taken him from the heaviest of heavy metal in the United States (CACOPHONY and MEGADETH) to the poppiest of pop music in Japan and he is now an iconic figure on Japanese TV. He is seen as a cultural ambassador for both his home country, America, and his adopted country of Japan, using his fluent Japanese to seamlessly cross the cultural divide.

In addition to selling millions of albums, he has worked in movies and TV and has recently published his autobiography, "Dreaming Japanese", a book, according to Amazon, that "follows the wildly entertaining, inspiring, and above all, unprecedented path of a rock and roll guitar player who took the biggest risk, leaving worldwide success to start over from scratch in a country, culture and society far from his own, ultimately becoming an official ambassador of Japan."