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.

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