A week-long, five part series celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cornelius’ landmark album Fantasma.

On September 10, 1997, indie rock godfather and ultimate music nerd Oyamada Keigo (小山田圭吾) released the third album for his solo project Cornelius — Fantasma. The album endeavored to be unlike any other in the history of music, taking dozens of genres, references, samples, instruments, and sounds from familiar and unfamiliar sources and fusing them into a completely new sonic world. He succeeded wildly. The album sold extremely well to Cornelius’ long-standing fan base in Japan, and Matador Records in New York released it in the U.S. and Europe to international critical acclaim. Fantasma elevated Oyamada from fashionable pop star to certified musical genius, from domestic icon to global symbol of Japanese creativity. If not for Fantasma, Cornelius would not have remixed global stars like Beck and Sting, become a de facto part of Y.M.O.’s touring band, gigged with Yoko Ono, or collaborated with greats like Arto Lindsay. Fantasma etched Oyamada Keigo’s name into music history and guaranteed that the quirky Shibuya-kei musical scene in Japan would be forever perceived as a legitimate artistic explosion.

In 2010, Warner Bros. Japan — Fantasma’s post-Polystar master rights holder — decided to celebrate Oyamada’s fin de siècle magnum opus with a shiny new mastering job and a box-set re-release (unboxing video). There is not much to say about the remaster itself. Shibuya-kei electronica icon and close Oyamada friend Sunahara Yoshinori gave the recording a thicker bass while keeping the overall volume levels nearly equal to the original. (And for some odd reason the track splits have been relocated for a few songs, at least compared to the Matador release.) This technical aspect is, however, the least important point. The remaster further canonized the album in a national music culture where it is often taboo to award some records historical legacy over others. But if there is a Japanese album to receive the implied veneration of ceremonial re-release, it is certainly Fantasma.

Now at the 15th anniversary of Fantasma’s wide release, we will spend the next few days examining where the album fits within the canon of indie music both in Japan and worldwide, and re-explore it in the context of the decade and a half since its release.

• Part One: The Age of Music Nerds
• Part Two: Oyamada Before Fantasma and Fantasma as an Album
• Part Three: Fantasma, Side One
• Part Four: Fantasma, Side Two
• Part Five: After Fantasma’s Japanese Release

Special thanks to Benny and Connor at Yikes, as well as Ryan Erik Williams and Suzannah Tartan for helping me dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

Part One: The Age of Music Nerds

Since at least the days of Bach and baroque, there have always been music fans and music experts, but not always “music nerds” — arguably a distinct product of late 20th century society. The music nerd is a specific yet now common type of pop music obsessive suffering equally from snobbery and consumerist zeal. They are different from “music aficionados,” who sat in velvet armchairs and enjoyed Beethoven on gramophones, or later, snuck underground to find the most outré forms of jazz in dark New York clubs. The music nerds started to pop up after the introduction of rock’n’roll, when music moved into a popular and explicitly commercial product form. While the old-school Schoenberg snob was an eccentric by his hobby alone, the music nerd was mostly eccentric inside the walls of popular genres and extremely crowded consumer markets. In other words, the nerd strived for personal uniqueness by discovering obscure objects within mass culture rather than beyond it.

The music nerd’s mission often boiled down to listening to what others did not, thus upsetting one of the art’s fundamental tenets. From ancient bone flutes to West African drum circles to jazz cafés to dancing the Charleston in front of blaring Big Bands, music had been a group activity for most of its existence. Music had always been social, yet the music nerd now mostly enjoyed it as a solitary pursuit. Hearing a song in the privacy of one’s own room was not even possible until the early 20th century, and not particularly common until the advent of the small transistor radio, the personal stereo, automobile speakers, and the Walkman. So between this technological change and a corresponding social one wherein pop music rolled over elite musical art forms like opera or ballet, the ingredients were there for the spontaneous genesis of thousands of music nerds. And as music fragmented to an unbelievable degree in the 1980s and 1990s, music nerds became even more intense and even less social.

The music nerd’s deep entrenchment into the collection of obscure albums transformed music from an innocent enjoyment of organized sound into competitive knowledge collection. Music became a form of proto-Pokemon. When two music nerds met, they did not dance together nor sit back and enjoy a mutual passion. Musical dialogue descended into the regurgitation of trivia and long strings of signifiers. Reference became the most valuable currency.

Yet much like the newspaper business and Penthouse magazine, the very 20th-century glass bead game of music nerdism has been ruined by the Internet. Music is now too overly available. The consumerist drive at heart of pop music has deteriorated. The Internet has made every single album of all time available — for free — to anyone who knows how to type the words Rapidshare or Mediafire. Meanwhile Wikipedia provides the Cliff Notes for faking the kind of deep musical knowledge once passed among music fans in strange cant. Nothing can really be “obscure” anymore. Information hyperinflation has wrought the music reference currency worthless.

In hindsight, this collapse of the music market means that the Nineties was the peak of music nerdism. At this time, globalization and technology had reached an ideal level of development for music and music criticism to ramp up the reference game. But there was not yet too much access to render the whole game obsolete. This was conveniently concurrent with the rise of hip hop in mainstream culture, and its backbone of sampling provided one of the greatest canvases known to man for exploring musical reference. By the mid-1990s and the end of primitivist Grunge, the obsession with reference also took over the mostly white “alternative” and indie music, a form most notably explored by Beck, the Beastie Boys, and Stereolab.

There was one other location, however, where it was even more natural for artists to boil down music to its atomic structure of signifiers: Japan. There may be traditional aspects of national philosophy and educational theory that influenced Japanese pop culture’s particularly obsessive mode of learning and understanding, but the artistic practice of detailed study and imitation of form certainly reached its peak with consumer society’s insatiable interest in the West after the War. Youth wanted to do completely alien things like dress like Americans and listen to American music, and magazines had to take up the key role of explaining detail by detail exactly how and why to do such a thing. Holistic sub-cultures like Hippies and Punks got analyzed down to their respective quarks so that Japanese teens could build them back up again from a bunch of imported scraps. These days the otaku nerd gets all the credit for originating Japanese information obsession but this was just a structural outcome of the Japanese model of cultural importation. In the act of bringing one culture over to another, bit by bit, every single possible cultural category becomes a series of consumable lists, and as a logical extension, mastery and memorization of those lists ends up as the most worthy test of true fans, believers, and adherents.

So in the 1990s, what is essentially “signifier music” was at its peak among the international elite, and with Japan’s natural predilection for understanding culture as units of signifiers, we could expect that the global genre’s most greatest creative expressions would come from Japan. And many years before Beck won over Americans with his folk-hop “Loser” anthem, an entire school of music revolving around pastiche, bricolage, sampling, and reference — Shibuya-kei — was already massively popular in its home country. Japan had an edge on this sample and signifier-based pop sound, and therefore it only made sense that the very best Shibuya-kei record would be primed to win the world championship of this wider genre. That record happened to be Fantasma.

Next time: Oyamada before Fantasma and Fantasma as an Album.

The End of Shibuya-kei

Identifying the exact moment when Shibuya-kei “ended” is a difficult task, but I tend to see the 2001 release of Cornelius‘s point as the beginning of a new era. If Fantasma was the Shibuya hipster-pastiche sound taken to its logical extreme, Point was that sound’s reduction into its most universal parts. There are faint traces of The Beach Boys and bossa nova and dance music, but the joy of reference is eschewed for electro-acoustic audiophile bliss. Oyamada Keigo quit being a historian and started being a scientist. Kahimi Karie‘s albums Trapeziste and Montage took her in a similar experimental direction. If this sound was “Nakame-kei” (from the hipster relocation to Nakameguro in the early Aughts), then the most influential work was 3-D studio’s house producer Tomoki Kanda‘s landscape of smallers music.

Escalator Records meanwhile moved towards NYC-Berlin Electropunk. Konishi and Co. at Readymade are doing the same thing they did five years ago, just in a more “adult” way. Fantastic Plastic Machine dropped the lounge shtick and became a full-out house DJ on Avex. Ozawa Kenji is secretly located somewhere in New York.

And sometime in the last two years, the Japanese public stopped wearing border shirts.

We Are Not Shibuya-Kei

Why the race to get away from the title “Shibuya-kei”? Lately, all of these musicians have hit their mid-30s and most likely want a change in direction, but there is a distinct distancing of the cultural elite away from the particular wording of that now unspeakable epithet. In the early 2000s, the ultra-hipster Bonjour Records in Daikanyama curated their selection with a S******-kei-esque discerning eye to international cool but specifically avoided all references to anything seeming too S******-kei (for example, they would not carry Beikoku Ongaku, even though the good people at BO are also trying to get away from being too S******-kei!)

The problem stems from the fact that the Shibuya-kei sound has been completely codified and categorized, and many an entrepreneur have sold manual-type reference guides and specialty books to help younger fans decode all the influences, inside jokes, and connections. In other words, the whole game of “I have this sample/reference and you will only know where it came from if you’re in-the-know” is over: All the crates have been dug into and the instructions for this brand of hipsterism are spelled out in a large font. Magazines like Relax sold this elite cultural mix of Shibuya-kei and Ura-Harajuku to a mainstream audience, and chain stores like Village Vanguard have become like Shibuya-kei-curated junk shops.

The recent café boom took its template less from Europe itself and more from the Shibuya-kei fantasy of Europe — bossa nova, Jane Birkin, and café au lait. Places like Café Apres Midi release their own CD collections of obscure bossa nova jazz, and even chain coffee stores like Excelsior Coffee use an all-Astrid Gilberto soundtrack. The culture that Konishi and Oyamada worked so hard to discover and present to the world has now become a standard set of accepted cool. No one has to actually search for anything themselves anymore — they can just get all the info from books and mainstream publications. Free information has been the death knell of rarity-based consumer subcultures around the world, and Shibuya-kei is no exception.

Some of the original Shibuya-kei folk are breaking new ground, some are cashing in on past success, some are finding safer niches to conquer, and some have completely given up making music. But it is safe to say that Shibuya-kei as a movement is over, and we can now start to think about what it meant in the next installment.

Continued in Part Five

The First Wave Consolidates

Although a strict interpretation of the Shibuya-kei scene would start and end with Flipper’s Guitar, the words “Shibuya-kei” came to connote the stream of Japanese indiepop following in the original bands’ footsteps. The First Wave had been pioneers in introducing a whole panoply of new sounds to Japanese popular music: UK indie/alternative scenes like anorak pop, neo-acoustic, and Madchester (Flipper’s Guitar), hip hop (Scha Dara Parr), and ’60s softpop and club jazz (Pizzicato Five).

From ’89-’91, these bands had minimal interaction, but once FG was officially disbanded, they began a long history of crossover appearances. Oyamada Keigo produced Pizzicato Five’s 1993 album BOSSA NOVA 2001, which would codify the “Shibuya style” for the next decade as nostalgic borrowing from past sounds mixed with au courant dance beats. Meanwhile, Ozawa Kenji collaborated with SDP to create the 1994 mega-hit “Konya ha bugii bakku“.

The Second Wave

After the breakup, Ozawa and Oyamada took two completely different routes with their solo careers.

Oyamada renamed himself Cornelius and in 1993 put out his debut The First Question Award. The album recalled a friendly, mid-period FG, but took its greatest influence (and hooks) from the hipster rediscovery of Roger Nichols and the Small Circle of Friends. More importantly, he started the sub-label Trattoria on Polystar to release unavailable Western titles in Japan (like Apples in Stereo and Free Design) and kick start the careers of young Japanese indie stars like Bridge (Kaji Hideki‘s original band), Citrus, Seagull Screaming, Kiss Her, Kiss Her, and many others. Oyamada also produced some of his then girlfriend Kahimi Karie‘s first work and repaid his debt to Salon Music by adding them to the Trattoria roster. Regardless of his plunge into the shallows of the underground, Oyamada was still a bone fide rockstar. In 1993, he could be seen in the inside cover of magazines doing ads for the Uno brand of hair mousse.

In stark contrast, Ozawa went straight-up J-Pop, scoring a string of big hits and even appearing on the ultra-conservative NHK New Years’ variety show Kouhaku Uta Gassen. Core Flipper’s fans followed Ozawa’s work devotionally, but he essentially left the indie world and no longer influenced the Japanese underground music scene. If FG was the Beatles, Ozawa was Wings.

A host of new bands also joined the informal movement in the mid-early ’90s: Venus Peter (discovered by Oyamada and produced by Salon Music’s Yoshida), Love Tambourines (on Takemi Kenji’s influential Crue-l label) , the rap-pop act Tokyo No. 1 Soulset (discovered by Oyamada), and Original Love (ex-Pizzicato Five vocalist Tajima Takao). Dee-lite’s Towa Tei came back to Japan from New York in the mid-’90s, and although he was regarded as a pioneer and antecedent to Shibuya-kei, the sound of his solo releases resembled the movement’s signature style enough to imply a loose membership. Denki Groove were more of a dance-humor-pop act, but there was great crossover between fans of Shibuya-kei and their work.

Cornelius’ second album — the heavy metal/hip hop-influenced 69/96 — was released in 1995 and is still his best selling record to date. Kahimi Karie scored some big hits on the Oricon charts like “Good Morning World” with the Scottish producer/songwriter Momus on board.

Shibuya-kei fashion had been strictly Continental dandy, but starting around 1995, Oyamada’s close relation to the fashion director Nigo and his brand A Bathing Ape brought the indie-fashion world of Ura-Harajuku into the indie music world of Shibuya-kei. Both men had supposedly stumbled upon an obsession with Planet of the Apes at the same exact moment in 1993 — collaboration was inevitable. Soon after meeting, Bape was making tour T-shirts for Cornelius, and until around 2002, Oyamada always dressed head-to-toe in the brand for official appearances.

The Third Wave

By the late ’90s, the Shibuya-kei bands had become so ubiquitous that the term no longer implied any sort of rebellious alternative to the mainstream. Their influence had permeated society, and massive big budget projects like the Puffy and My Little Lover were obviously taking notes from the indiepop playbook.

However, the term “Shibuya-kei” still served as a convenient way to describe the new acts working in a similar style. The German label Bungalow Records‘ massively well-received Japanese “clubpop” compilation Sushi 4004 directly codified the featured bands as “Shibuya-kei.”

New additions to the scene were Naka Masashi’s Escalator Records group: Yukari Fresh, Cubismo Grafico, Neil and Iraiza, and later, Naka’s own Losfeld. Also, Oh! Penelope — the reincarnation of ex-J-Rockers Shijin no Chi — put out one album of dead-on Shibuya-sound ’60s tributes (Milk&Cookies) and earned a tenuous place on the stage. Ex-Fancy Face Groovy Name and Ozawa girlfriend Minekawa Takako came aboard with her bedroom analog synth concoctions. Psych-out turntabling krautrockers Buffalo Daugher also were lumped in. Ex-Denki Groove’s Sunahara Yoshinori (aka Marin)’s amazing concept album Take Off and Landing took the Shibuya-kei sound into the air with an electronic tribute to Pan Am jetset culture.

Pizzicato Five’s Konishi Yasuharu meanwhile started his own label Readymade and released works by the lounge/dance DJs Tanaka Tomoyuki (Fantastic Plastic Machine), Ikeda Masanori (Mansfield), and latin beat fanatic Comoestas Yaegashi. The label even tried to construct a revisionist “Shibuya-kei” past through their Good Night Tokyo and Midnight Tokyo collections of groovy tracks from the ’60s.

Cornelius’s masterpiece Fantasma came out in 1997 and can be said to be the culmination of the scene’s sound. The album is a seamless trip through a well-curated collection of music-nerd influences — hip hop, turntabling, High Llamas, My Bloody Valentine, ’70s punk, the Music Machine, cartoon soundtracks, drum’n’bass, Primal Scream, the Beach Boys, sampling, Apples in Stereo, retro-futurism, Bach, Disneyland, the Jesus and Mary Chain, drugs, theremin, and Cornelius self-references.

By the end of the decade, the term “Shibuya-kei” had snowballed and snowballed to a point where it almost included any and all anti-mainstream sounds that fit a specific mukokuseki internationalist aesthetic. It was no longer a canonized musical style, but an attitude — a devotion to sophistication, a penchant for reference and pastiche, an anti-Jpop stance, and an unwavering attention to design and detail. However, as we’ll see in the next chapter, the rest of Japan also scooped up these trends, and the mainstream use of the Shibuya-kei ingredients softened the impact and meaning of the indie rebellion.

Continued in Part Four

On February 20, 2004, I found myself at tiny club Bar Drop in Kichijoji with dozens of other twee kids in border shirts, celebrating the release of a tribute album to the band Flipper’s Guitar — the second album in four months. The first tribute had been a B-list major label effort (TRIBUTE TO FLIPPER’S GUITAR~FRIENDS AGAIN), and the more dedicated indie-pop kids were so incensed by this hack revisionism that they went out and made their own two-disc collection of covers (The Sound Of SOFTLY! ~tribute to Flipper’s Guitar~ Vol. 1 and Vol. 2). In theory, 2004 was the 15th anniversary of FG’s first release three cheers for our side, but this was a pretty weak rationale for the sudden onslaught of tribute albums. At the time, however, a certain nostalgia for the band had inhabited the zeitgeist. And this particular young crop of new musical acts had been particularly indebted to Flipper’s Guitar and the wider “Shibuya-kei” movement for their entire understanding of what it meant to “make music.”

In years prior everyone was mostly pre-occupied with the post-breakup solo careers of FG members Oyamada Keigo (aka Cornelius) and Ozawa Kenji. But once Ozawa disappeared to New York and Oyamada went into leftfield acousto-electronics with his album Point, the Japanese indie pop world became like the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin — a political battle between the disciples for securing the crown of legitimacy in a time with no designated successor. A myriad of young partisans appeared on the scene, ready to steal away the banner of Shibuya-kei for their own side. Who would be the proper youngsters to “fire the tricot” into the 21st century?

But before we can understand the Shibuya-kei nostalgia in the early 21st century, we have to ask, what exactly was Shibuya-kei and why was it so important? Sonically, the artists included in the genre did not share a specific style, but more of a guiding philosophy. They took sonic cues from California ’60s soft rock and psych pop, French Ye-Ye, Chicago house, East Coast hip-hop sampling, krautrock, Scottish anorak pop, Madchester club beats, Brazilian bossa nova, Italian film soundtracks and any other internationalist, retro-futurist genres. The central idea was to not sound like an imitation of Billboard-charting pop nor be rebelliously “underground” in its classic confrontational mode — but to occupy a chic space in the wider consumer culture similar to their favorite tastemakers overseas. Shibuya-kei was often called “Japanese yogaku” — Western music created by Japanese artists. The music itself, however, was often less important than the total aesthetic impact.

Shibuya-kei was ultimately an attempt to create a Japanese analog to the indie music cultures that had developed in the U.S. and U.K., but the Japanese artists ended up succeeding far beyond their international peers in impacting the entire Japanese music market. Shibuya-kei was not just the emergence of a new genre. The appearance of Flipper’s Guitar in 1989 was a pivotal event in the surfacing of “independent” culture into the Japanese mainstream consumer market during the 1990s, setting the stage for a wider cultural movement in media, fashion, art, and interior/graphic design.

With this historical change in mind, this six-part series traces the particular musical history of the movement and its evolution from the prehistory of the 1960s to the death and burial of Shibuya-kei in the mid-2000s.

Shibuya-kei Pre-History

Shibuya-kei officially started in the early 1990s, but the artists’ musical praxis and style philosophy has roots in the wider development of the pop music market during the late 1960s.

When The Beatles in 1966 managed to avoid assassination by outraged rightists and play their Budokan gig, the entire Japanese youth music scene moved away from the briefly-popular instrumental surf guitar “eleki” boom and started up their own beat bands. The resulting “Group Sounds” (GS) acts, however, did not leave much of a lasting mark upon Japanese pop history. Most of the GS repertoire copied the instrumentation of Western bands but still clung to minor-key Oriental melodies. Furthermore, the popular bands in the were essentially Monkees-type creations who didn’t write their own music, and those with a tinge of authenticity, like The Dynamites, The Spiders, or The Mops scored nary a huge hit. But even the most tame GS bands like The Tigers were too much for the Japanese authorities, who promptly enforced a nationwide crackdown on the the entire movement and banned many from TV.

Meanwhile, the era’s vibrant Japanese counterculture had an ambiguous relationship with Western music. The large-scale, culture-engrossing Leftist student rebellion chose an earthy and very Japanized folk for their rallying tunes. The Folk Crusaders became a national hit act thanks to novelty song “Kaette kita yopparai,” but melancholy enka-paced songs like “Eichan no Ballad” became the standard “folk guerilla” sound. There were intersections between international rock styles and the student left, however: The bassist of legendarily-mysterious psychedelic noise band Les Rallizes Dénudés was one of the Japan Red Army hijackers. But the band was so obscure as to have little relation to the wider consumer market. The underground, at this point, was truly underground.

In the early ’70s, however, the idea of widely-marketed youth music became more socially-acceptable. The era’s most enduring act — and the first direct ancestor to Shibuya-kei — was Happy End, a folk-rock band with pop instincts but a focus on musical credibility and independence. From there on out, Happy End’s bassist Hosono Haruomi became the Japanese patron saint of “obscure Japanese music with one foot stationed firmly in the pop market.” He released albums throughout the 1970s that strayed further and further into exotica and genre-denying international sounds, under his own name and then bands Tin Pan Alley, and of course, Yellow Magic Orchestra aka YMO. Hosono’s playful and open-minded approach would be an inspiration for Shibuya-kei, as well as the idea of making music that even Westerners would find interesting and new.

Throughout the 1970s there had been a strong “underground rock” scene, but in the early 1980s, a Tokyo-based “alternative” music scene emerged that was both closely aligned with the city’s fashion/design community and the international New Wave movement. This was mostly a small clique centered around the long-running London Nite party at Tsubaki House. This was the it party of all Japanese club parties, where people in Hokkaido would fly down to Tokyo for the weekend just to attend. This scene eventually spawned the The Plastics, Ookawa Hitomi of the punk fashion brand Milk, and much later, street-wear entrepreneur Fujiwara Hiroshi.

After the initial New Wave wave, Japanese non-mainstream music splintered into different sonic directions. Yet most of the bands still inhabited the same scene and had direct connections to the Hosono lineage. YMO’s personal patronage launched the careers of many younger artists waiting in the wings. The later core Shibuya-kei act Pizzicato Five debuted on Hosono’s own Nonstandard label. YMO drummer Takahashi Yukihiro produced the second album from Salon Music. And YMO’s keyboard master Ryuichi Sakamoto produced the first album for minimal post-punk band Friction.

In particular, the now slightly-obscure band Salon Music was particularly important for the story of Shibuya-kei. The two-person act is often considered to be “proto-Shibuya-kei.” Opposed to Friction, they had no interest in the aggression of punk rock. Unlike the other New Wave bands — P-Model, Hikashu, Juicy Fruits — they were not interested in being robotic “techno poppers.” They aimed for a chic vaguely-European music without much ironic self-Orientalization like YMO or The Plastics. Their excellent debut single “Hunting on Paris” came out in 1982 on British label Phonogram. Although the Japanese major label Pony Canyon put out their first album My Girl Friday and they scored some television CM ads, Salon Music never peaked above cult status.

They inadvertently made history, however, by discovering a young Japanese “neo-acoustic” band called Lollipop Sonic. Salon Music’s Yoshida Zin helped Lollipop Sonic get a record deal, with one condition: They had to change their name. The five-piece were thus rechristened as Flipper’s Guitar and prepared for a debut album.

Continued in Part Two

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