Now that Cornelius (Oyamada Keigo) is finally releasing his new album Sensuous after five years of quiet laboratory work and being the Japanese Music World’s Greatest Dad¹, everyone is suddenly interested in taking another look at Shibuya-kei as background to how Oyamada can release an album of aimless electro-acoustic tinkerings and automatically make the media world go into a frenzy.

Subsequently, I was invited to write a piece in today’s Japan Times about the movement to go along with their Cornelius interview (most likely because Momus turned it down.) If you have read my “Legacy of Shibuya-kei” pieces, the content of today’s article should be very familiar to you.

Recruit’s free-paper R25 had the same idea as the Times, and their new issue — which can be picked up off the floors of rush-hour subways starting today — has a “long interview” with Oyamada. Oddly, they spend the entire interview talking about his original activity with his first band Flipper’s Guitar rather than the new album. But since the magazine is about “stimulating” men in the business world, the article is most interested in Oyamada’s anomalous success as somebody who never cared about success. A very ’90s idea, indeed.

Things I learned from the R25 interview:

• Oyamada used to be in a Jesus and Mary Chain and Cramps cover band in high school, and none of his fellow students had any idea what was going on.
• Oyamada was in the hospital recovering from a traffic accident when he first heard about the success of the first Flipper’s album Three Cheers for Our Side.
• After FG broke up, the first thing Oyamada did was music for hair care product TV commercials (I knew he did print ads for Uno.)
• He never really took his business seriously until signing to Matador in the U.S. and going abroad.

The article also emphasizes the wide effect of Oyamada’s aesthetic sense (審美眼) on Japanese youth culture, and the context makes it clear that Flipper’s Guitar was one of the first popular musical acts in Japan to explicitly reference obscure Western bands that were not even big in their home countries. Oyamada gives the impression that he himself was very surprised that the music industry would care about what they as total music nerds were doing in their spare time:

I was influenced by really small English indie labels, and I was active in a tiny scene that probably didn’t even make up 100 listeners all across the country. So I never thought that the music I was doing could become a job. I was pretty sure we were all otaku and that itself was fun. So even if the record companies started to talk to us, I didn’t think more of it than “Oh, they have some weird people over there too.” We just thought about putting out one album for posterity’s sake. (記念に一枚)

This historical picture paints pre-Flipper’s Japan (circa 1988) as something completely different than what exists now. Did Flipper’s Guitar single-handedly bring the widespread love of obscure foreign indie and underground culture to the Japanese pop economy, or was it just the soundtrack for a coeval broad consumer movement? Seeing that Flipper’s did a large part in introducing so much to their legions of fans, I find it hard to remove them completely from the cause-and-effect. Surely the media environment was right for a diversification in aesthetic sense from the monolithic (and boring) Bubble tastes, but Oyamada was the guy who jump-started the whole phenomenon.

Yet there is something dangerous about using this narrative in a recruitment-related magazine in 2006. On one hand, the Oyamada story is great for illustrating that Japan’s true heroes are those who are more interested in pleasing their own fickle tastes than doing everything in the least-common-denominator mode to reach eventual business success. I hope, however, that the kid who plays bass in his Green Day-tribute band doesn’t get the wrong idea about employment being an natural extension of indie nerdism. Cornelius succeeded because Japan had the world’s most vibrant, wealthy consumer culture and was primed for someone with superior taste to lead them to the world standards for cool. But the country already completed that march to the extremes a decade ago, and now the powers-that-be are trying to shepherd everyone back to more easily-understandable local phenomena (which conveniently keep money and power in their hands). No one ever again will succeed like Cornelius — at least for a very long time.

I am pleased to see Shibuya-kei being treated as an important historical era. And as much as I do not think his latest album is as inspiring as his earlier output, I think Cornelius’ success in the ’90s gives him the legitimate right to live out the rest of his years as a venerable war hero.

¹ When I lived in Sangenjaya, I would frequently pass the King Ape playing with his son Milo.

Yoshi from OK Fred just sent me this news clip of a March 1995 NHK evening news report on “Shibuya-kei.” (Note the male newscaster’s hilariously outdated reference to shibukaji — a late ’80s clothing trend that had already been over for years at the time of the broadcast.)

The gist of the story is that HMV and Tower Records essentially created a new genre in the Japanese music market: Shibuya-kei was the first hougaku (邦楽, Japanese music) to sound like yougaku (洋楽, Western music). Until that point, most kids bought music strictly according to performances on network television programs, which are decided by organizational relations between the TV networks and artist management companies. Suddenly in Shibuya, buyers started recommending a host of unknown bands from tiny labels on the basis of subjective quality. Subjectivity on a mass scale breeds diffusion and chaos, but when centralized within two main stores in one area, this selection practice ended up creating large-scale, visible consumer patterns. For a short while, if Ohta Hiroshi liked you, you could suddenly sell 100K copies.

These days, Tower Records and HMV have taken on a supermarket mentality — almost anyone can “rent” floor space regardless of musical quality. These stores’ buyers still probably make good selections, but there’s too much clutter, too many options, too many branches, too much diffusion. In the end, this zaps away their taste-making authority. Pitchfork Media may be currently enjoying a similar level of power, but the level of their impact on the (fringe) music market depends upon their monopoly over authority. Too many Pitchforks means less mass commercial viability for bands.

A friend told me last night that the Shibuya record store Zest Records has closed up shop. A sign on the door states simply, “We have closed. Thank you,” and with no new address provided and the webpage non-responsive, I have to assume that they are permanently out of business. According to Japanese bloggers, they ceased operation in early July. No goodbye party or official announcement — Zest ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

Zest Records began its life as a noise/avant-garde shop, but a new owner named Wakabayashi Yukinori turned it into the central record store of the Shibuya-kei movement. They stocked old bossa nova, ’60s groove, mondo, European club-pop, plus all the records from domestic labels Escalator, Crue-L, Trattoria, and Readymade. Kaji Hideki, Naka Masashi (Escalator founder), and Matsuda Gakuji (Cubismo Grafico, Neil and Iraiza) worked there as store clerks. Zest primarily handled vinyl, which gave it a flavor unique from the CD super-warehouses down the street.

In the mid-’90s, the popular “alternative” girl’s magazine Olive featured the store in an issue, and suddenly, trendy teens started crowding the little space on the weekends, looking to buy into what they perceived to be the most fashionable sound on the planet. But vinyl sales peaked in ’99. In 2002, I asked Wakabayashi in an article for Tokion how the future of the Japanese analog record market was looking. He answered, “a dark shade of gray” at the time, but evidently, it’s finally gone all the way to black.

Shibuya-kei died a lot sooner than vinyl, however, and for the last few years, Zest had tried to reinvent themselves as a dance music store specializing in hipster club music (think Royksopp and Junior Senior instead of tech-house or hip hop.) DMR across the street already had the corner on that market, unfortunately, and a lot of longtime Zest fans felt that the store had sold them out.

When the indie record store Maximum Joy closed down last year, those with interest in international indie pop consoled themselves by saying, hey, at least there’s Zest! But now, there’s no Zest, and while Jetset and Cafe Escalator can pick up some of the slack, there is the fundamental issue that this entire unique field of independent music has lost its market. Shibuya-kei is dead and now buried — with the alumni going into left-field experimental music (Kahimi Karie, Cornelius), dance punk (Escalator), or just repeating themselves ad nauseum (Konishi Yasuharu). The Neo Shibuya-kei kids have Oricon chart aspirations, mostly because they saw the original musical stream as stylish domestic pop and not the anti-major label struggle it really was. Most importantly, there are fewer and fewer young consumers who are interested in taking a chance with relatively experimental or innovative musicians, and as Japan veers further towards neo-Nationalistic navel-gazing, that collective impulse to explore diverse historical sounds from abroad has faded.

I am surprised that Zest lasted as long as it did. The heart behind that one-time energetic community has withered away, and we can now only expect the castles to fall one by one.

Neo-Shibuya-kei

In the last two years, there has been a small-scale, nostalgic revival of early Shibuya-kei — two Flipper’s Guitar tribute albums in four months, the model Meg scoring a minor hit with a cover of “Groove Tube,” and magazines/stores anointing a new generation of bands “Neo-Shibuya-kei.” At this point in time, the groovy Continental sound itself is so ingrained within Japanese culture that it is hard to understand why anything would be a “new” version, but the “Neo” label makes more sense when we look at the three distinct groups carrying the Shibuya-kei torch into the 21st century.

The first group should be called “post-Shibuya-kei” because they were influenced as contemporaries (being only a few years younger than the original artists), but were outsiders to the central Shibuya-kei clique. This group includes Spank Happy, Akakage, Qypthone, Cymbals, Paris Match, and Stoned Soul Picnic.

There is also a stream of artists who have been handpicked by the original crew to be a part of the direct lineage — for example, Halfby (Readymade), Nomoto Karia (Readymade), and Harvard (Escalator).

The third group — Neo-Shibuya-kei — describes the younger acts who listened to Shibuya-kei as middle-school kids and are now creating new music based on the aesthetic principles of the original recordings. The P5-clones Capsule are the de facto leaders of this movement (although producer/songwriter wünderkind Nakata Yasutaka claims he’s never heard much of Konishi’s work). Other acts include Hazel Nuts Chocolate, Aprils, Dahlia, Petset, Spaghetti Vabune!, Pictogram Color, Kofta, Orangenoise Shortcut, and Tetrapletrap.

There are many neo-Shibuya-kei indie pop labels active in Japan at the moment — like abcdefg-record, Sucre, and Softly! — which do a very light, innocent cute pop thing. Marquee is the media guide to the movement, which editor-in-chief MMM calls “Future Pop” to include the parallel cohort of electronic-tinged artists like the avant garde-meets-Disney sample-pop maniacs Plus-Tech Squeeze Box and the electropop acts of the label Usagi-Chang Records (MacDonald Duck Eclair, Micro Mach Machine, YMCK, Sonic Coaster Pop, and Pine*AM.) While they are all students of the Shibuya-kei movement, these young musicians’ level of actual influence ranges from just sharing the “spirit” (Plus-Tech or MDDE) to certain melodic qualities (Aprils) to full out imitation (Tetrapletrap, who are a Flipper’s Guitar pakuri act.)

The interesting part of the story is that the original Shibuya-kei musicians generally have zero interest in this younger group and have tried to distance themselves accordingly. Comoestas and Mike Alway like Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, and that’s about the strongest link I can find between the two generations. There is particular internal tension within Marquee itself, since the magazine features the old timers and the upcoming young ‘ens. (There was an issue a couple of months ago where Naka Masashi from Escalator Records was clearly very upset by having his Yukari Rotten release be compared to Capsule.) The reason for the hostility seems to stem from the fact that the elders created this sound from scratch — they personally dug up the references and set the sound’s boundaries and rules. Konishi loved ’60s AM softpop before that was an acceptable thing to like. The new kids are just working within this old paradigm, which they inherited wholesale and updated only with greater technical skills and electronic gimmicks. The core of the new work, however, is essentially the same plastic aesthetic message.

I would also suspect that in a very Japanese way, there is something hostile about unknown major label-sponsored outsiders doing the same sound as you without being invited to the party. The neo-Shibuya-kei kids are part of the first generation of Japanese musicians who had mainstream access to hipster sounds without needing to gain physical admission to the hipster world. And these kids are clogging up the record bins with their bossa nova or ’60s-revival twee pop at the same time when Konishi is trying to launch his own young bossa nova dancepop producers and ’60s-retro pop idols.

This is also the first generation in a long time to grow up with a radio full of decent Japanese music. Who needs to protest against the mainstream Japanese industry and search for obscure European indie music when Cornelius is the mainstream Japanese music industry? The Shibuya-kei oeuvre was interesting enough to tie up the young listeners’ ears and wallets for a decade — a long span of time in which they could have been out crate-digging themselves. Those Japanese artists now provide the template for new music creation, and the Neo- imitation of the highly imitative Shibuya-kei is creating a “copy of a copy” clarity problem. Moreover, the whole “anti-major label” attitude that was at the heart of Flipper’s Guitar is gone. Many of the Neo kids have explained to me that the big difference between them and the indie spirit ten years ago was that they no longer have any animosity against the mainstream. In fact, their goal is to be accepted by the mainstream. They’ve got just as much Ozawa Kenji in them as Oyamada Keigo.

When all is said and done, these factors explain why the older generation isn’t lending a helping hand, but should not lead us to dismiss them on such broad charges. Admittedly, some of the neo-Shibuya-kei artists are complete knock-offs of their big brothers, but many of the young acts in the same peer group are highly original and listenable. Petset’s Sound Sphere does something emotional for me that no other Japanese indie record ever has. Plus-Tech Squeeze Box’s Hayashibe Tomonari is of genius caliber and has created a fiercely original and difficult version of pop music. Everything on Usagi-Chang is top notch. I like that Aprils sound like an amalgam of Flipper’s Guitar without directly imitating any of their songs. If you like guitar pop, Spaghetti Vabune! are your guys.

I am sure that most of these artists in particular would not liked to be called neo-Shibuya-kei, which was a title attached by Tower Records and Marquee as a way to sell this new peer group of bands as the “next big thing.” The title is convenient, however, as “indies” no longer connotes bands that sound like Western indie artists, but just all the bands who are not on major labels. “Indies” is selling great these days in Japan, but the Shibuya-kei thread is not — even the original artists are seeing their sales at 1/10th of the ’90s level. Five years ago, someone like Neil and Iraiza could easily break the 10K mark, but now the indie market is overwhelmingly pre-major label training league punk, ska, and “urban” sounds. After a huge financial push from Yamaha, Capsule have begun to sell reasonably well (in the x000 range, I would guess), but no one from the neo-Shibuya-kei group has done what made the Shibuya-kei group shine in the first place: score a substantial hit with their unique sound in the mainstream market.

The shadow of Shibuya-kei is long, and anyone engaging in creative pursuits here in Japan is either working under it or against it. The music revolutionized both Japan’s domestic consumer market and the nation’s international reputation. As the Japanese music charts return to being manufactured J-Pop idols, stale J-Rock, and imitative punk/hip hop, the memory of Shibuya-kei burns even brighter. I find it hard to imagine now, but indeed there was a time when you could turn on the radio and find something that you liked.

What did Shibuya-kei mean?

Like the Alternative revolution in America, Shibuya-kei brought more sophisticated musical tastes up from subcultural groups into the mainstream Japanese popular music market. Obscure music that was once only available to a specific underground clique was now available to everyone. Furthermore, Flipper’s Guitar, Pizzicato Five, and Kahimi Karie all sold so well that the entire industry had to take notice and start gearing their own mainstream acts — like Puffy and My Little Lover — to be as o-share as the those on the fringe.

The Bubble Economy produced great wealth for Japan, but Shibuya-kei was the nation’s initiative for good taste. America could be the leader for economic growth, but Shibuya-kei showed that Europe was the better model for style and aesthetic sense. This may be slight hyperbole, but I think that we can thank Shibuya-kei for the overwhelming scope of well-designed products that now litter Japan. Certainly, Japan looks more Shibuya-kei now than it did in the early ’90s — the products and stores based on the style appeared en masse after the music enjoyed commercial success. Even if these bands are not fully responsible for the changes to the consumer market, they surely acted as a visible and audible representation of the movement for a more cultured approach to culture.

The Shibuya-kei bands also created a product that was mukokuseki — nationality-less — and palatable to an international audience. Shibuya-kei does not sound particularly Oriental; it’s an amalgam of various regional music — French pop, UK indies and psych, Brazilian jazz, American dance music, German Krautrock, and Japanese synthpop — all thrown together under a rubric of ’60s retro-future Internationalism. If De Stijl was Internationalism through channeling the universal, Shibuya-kei was Internationalism through all-inclusive bricolage.

Even though this sound became known as distinctly “Japanese,” the accessibility and quality of the music itself helped the bands break into the American and European market like no other Japanese acts had done before. Pizzicato Five and Cornelius each sold more than 100,000 records on Matador in the U.S. and opened the floodgate of Japanese acts into America after a long dry spell. (Can you imagine a “Japan Nite” at SXSW without Shibuya-kei?) Combined with the rise in Japanese street fashion and animation, Shibuya-kei changed the worldwide image of Japan from being a nation of imitative consumers with delayed tastes to a high-tech, cutting-edge wonderland.

There is no doubt that Shibuya-kei was a style of music destined to be born in Japan, not the West. By the mid ’90s, Japan had the most diverse and active consumer market ever assembled, and the music itself was a logical aural extension of this consumer culture. Shibuya-kei did not just glorify shopping and products in the lyrics — the entire base of the music itself relied on sampling or pastiche of pre-existing media. Konishi Yasuharu of Pizzicato Five was a record collector first and a musician second. Like the DJ Shadow school of hip hop, Shibuya-kei was about finding and buying the most obscure (and therefore, best) records and reintroducing them to the world. Beikoku Ongaku‘s editor-in-chief Kawasaki Daisuke sees Shibuya-kei as just the ’90s progression of rich, urban youth consumer culture, and indeed all our innovators of the scene fit the Hosono Haruomi upper middle class model. Oyamada and Ozawa (who is part of the Ozawas) went to top-tier private high schools. Supposedly, Konishi was supported by his parents until he turned 30 and spent all of their hard earned money on records.

Accordingly, Shibuya-kei has no explicit political message other than delineating the creator and listener from mainstream culture through product choices and taste. I do not think that this should be held against the artists, but it explains why the movement was so easily subsumed into the mainstream. Shibuya-kei exclaimed, you are all consuming the wrong goods! And their fans, who were also upper middle class educated kids agreed. The market responded by providing those more sophisticated goods and incorporating them into the mainstream “middle class” lifestyle. In this way, Shibuya-kei was just fashion — but it was interesting fashion, and Japan was better off for it.

By 1991, Oyamada Keigo’s fame had made him a full out fashion and cultural authority, and he alone deserves credit for introducing the nation’s youth to a slew of interesting and challenging acts. (We are all indebted to him just for his patronage of Citrus). He did not use his new position of power to promote himself like the Last Orgy 3 crew in Ura-Harajuku (aka Fujiwara Hiroshi, Nigo, and Takahashi Jun), but worked to spread the gospel about overlooked music and culture. Japan’s magazine system needs personalities to legitimize products for insecure reader/consumers, and lately the country has suffered with no one as daring as Cornelius at the helm.

The Pakuri Problem

While I think that Shibuya-kei was overall an important influence on Japanese culture, I do have to point out its fatal creative flaw: the systematic embrace of pakuri as art. Pakuri comes from the Japanese verb “pakuru” (パクる) — to rip off or steal. Shibuya-kei artists like Pizzicato Five and Cornelius often walked the thin line between “influence” and outright thievery. Some find this charming, but the question must be asked: Does essentially rewriting someone else’s music count as creative endeavor?

Pastiche — the act of creating a new work using someone else’s idiosyncratic conventions — is a well-accepted art form, and certainly parody has been an effective creative tool throughout the years. However, I would gamble that few people find these kinds of artistic works as original as creating a new work out of whole cloth. If there was an axis of originality, pakuri seems to be one step below “tribute band” and “Weird” Al but nowhere near the other side.

There is plenty of pastiche in The Beatles’ work, but the Shibuya-kei folk took it one step further by stealing the melodies as well as the production techniques. Flipper’s Guitar’s “The Quizmaster” does not just have the same instrumentation and tempo as Primal Scream’s “Loaded” — it has the same melody. (For an example of classic Shibuya-kei pakuri, listen to Gary Lewis & the Playboys’s “Green Grass ” and Pizzicato Five’s “Baby Portable Rock” back to back. Both are good songs, no doubt, but one is highly indebted to the other.

Hip hop’s use of sampling gets the same flack for being “unoriginal,” and I do not want to dismiss the entire Shibuya-kei oeuvre as hack rewriting. Works should be judged by the cleverness and quality of the material’s reuse. Sometimes the new work is better than the original: I find Cornelius’ “The Microdisneycal World Tour” superior to actual songs by The High Llamas. (But I would also claim that this work is pastiche not pakuri.)

But lately there have been difficult ethical questions arising out of this semi-legal borrowing of styles and melodies. A recent Nissan commercial used Flipper’s Guitar’s “Young, Alive, in Love” as background music, but only the intro segment that Oyamada and Ozawa stole directly from an Italian film soundtrack. The Double Knockout Corporation owns the copyright to the song, even though they did not come up with that particular melody. George Harrison was sued for unintentionally ripping off the melody to “He’s So Fine.” Is it worse to steal intentionally or just more of a tribute?

(For more information on the amount of theft in Shibuya-kei works, check out one of the many Shibuya-kei reference guides on the market.)