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.)

Continued in Part Six, the final installment

Last time, we left our protagonists Oyamada Keigo and Ozawa Kenji of Flipper’s Guitar on the verge of their first record release.

The Primordial Flipper

On August 25, 1989, the five-piece Flipper’s Guitar released their first album Three Cheers for Our Side 海へ行くつもりじゃなかった (named after the Orange Juice song of the same name) on major-indie label Polystar. Ozawa — a student at top-ranking Tokyo University and nephew of world-famous conductor Ozawa Seiji — wrote the band’s English lyrics. The initial sound was straight-up “neo-acoustic” with not-so-subtle nods to anorak pop and UK schoolboy culture. While the subject matter generally ranged from adolescent concerns like wearing red shoes and drinking café au lait, the penultimate track “The Chime Will Ring” presented a grown-up realization that they were approaching the “end of youth.” The lyrics to the similarly-themed “Goodbye, our Pastels Badges” — about hanging up the accouterments of youth but never forgetting the feeling of being young — contain a laundry-list of references to influential bands: Boy Hairdressers, Aztec Camera, Haircut 100, The Monochrome Set, etc, etc. (Complete lyrics here.)

The album was a commercial flop.

And then Flipper’s Guitar went from five to two.

The story goes that Flipper’s manager at Polystar realized that the two charming boys fronting the band were a marketable power team and the other three members were just dead-weight. They were promptly kicked out of the band. (The alternate theory is that Ozawa was so difficult to work with, the other three quit.) Now a duo, Flipper’s became a vehicle for the Double Knockout Corporation songwriting team (a reference to the KO initials of the two lead members). They got their first big break when their English-language single “Friends Again” was used as part of the Shibuya chiimaa-idolizing film Octopus Army ~ Shibuya de aitai! in early 1990.

Polystar continued their repackage of the boys as pop idols, part of which was their sudden switch to Japanese lyrics. In May 1990, Flipper’s mania reached fevered pace when their new Italian film soundtrack-flavored single “Young Alive in Love (恋とマシンガン)” became the main theme song to the popular drama Youbikou Bugi (Cram-school Boogie).

Ozawa and Oyamada released album number two Camera Talk in June 1990. Their sound broadened out to include more sophisticated reference points beyond obscure UK indie bands: bossa nova/latin (“Summer Beauty 1990”), vocal jazz (“Southbound Excursion”), house music (“Big Bad Bingo”), and spy thriller instrumentals (“Cool Spy on a Hot Car”). References to British bands still made the cut (songs titled “Colour Field” and “Haircut 100”). Flipper’s also won the award for the most clumsy sampling ever for the intro to “Wild Wild Summer.”

Defined

Sometime before or after this period, the media discovered that Flipper’s Guitar, the rap group Scha Dara Parr, more senior lounge-rockers Pizzicato Five, Love Tambourines and a few other bands were making it on the Oricon charts simply by selling well at Shibuya’s mega-music stores HMV Shibuya, Tower Records, and Wave. The media thus christened the group of performers as “Shibuya-kei.” The musicians themselves never formally associated themselves as a movement nor even shared a common sound, but the label stuck. They had much in common though in terms of attitude, however — especially compared to the super-masculine “Band Boom” that had been entrancing Japan since 1988.

Contrary to myth, the term “Shibuya-kei” never had anything to do with Shibuya being a particularly stylish part of town. If anything, the rich Setagaya kids running around and reeking havoc on the neighborhood in their chiimaa turf wars had abandoned European-minded Harajuku designer fashion for a sloppy, casual “shibu-kaji” look.

If “Shibuya-kei” had a defining clothing style, it was vaguely French coastal — Saint James border shirts and berets. Hardcore “Shibuya-kei” fans were essentially upper middle-class high-school kids who were “anchi-meijaa” — anti-major label — and embraced Flipper’s sophisticated tastes as a sign of distinction from the masses.

This distinction was definitely clear on Flipper’s part. They did switch to singing Japanese and appear on musical variety shows, but they kept an incredibly hostile attitude towards the mainstream entertainment complex. They openly made fun of rival bands in interviews and made sarcastic inside jokes on radio and TV. In 1990, when they won the “Saiyushu New Artist Award,” they openly mocked the hosts’ blundering of their band name, Oyamada announced himself as “the drummer,” and then said “of course we won” when congratulated. (And lots of dialogue like this: “I can’t wait to tell my mother in the countryside.” / “Oh where are you from?” / “Tokyo.”) This may not seem particularly subversive in a global perspective, but even now, you are not likely to see this kind of banter in the world of over-managed J-Pop talent.

Flipper’s kept busy with a string of big singles, a widely-heard radio show called “Martians Go Home“, and a monthly column in the counterculture mag Takarajima. Much like Fujiwara Hiroshi, their mainstream popularity introduced the average Japanese person to a highly-obscure, well-curated world of “alternative” bands, movies, and brands.

A year after their hit album Camera Talk, Flipper’s changed directions again and put out the sample-crazy, psychedelic/Madchester-influenced Doctor Head’s World Tower 『ヘッド博士の世界塔』. The title is a reference to The Monkees 1968 film Head and samples from the movie’s dialogue are sprinkled throughout. The film’s theme — studio-created pop stars becoming self-aware and busting out of their shells into more “groovy” territory — obviously resonated with the two young stars. “Dolphin Song” is a direct reference to Head‘s opening “Porpoise Song” and a pastiche of The Beach Boys’ “Heroes and Villains”-type pop symphonies. “Aquamarine” is a knock-off of My Bloody Valentine’s “Lose My Breath.” Primal Scream’s Screamadelica was the other blueprint: “The Quizmaster” is just “Loaded” with Japanese lyrics and “Groove Tube” takes its verse melody from “Come Together.”

Goodbye, our Flipper’s Badges

Three months later, on October 29th, the media announced that Flipper’s Guitar had unexpectedly broken up. Tickets for the album tour had gone on sale, so the shows had to be canceled. Apparently, Ozawa and Oyamada were no longer talking during their their last publicity appearances. The “rumor” to emerge was that the two were fighting over the same girl — ex-Onyanko Club member Watanabe Marina. (Her love of the band had introduced the young music-geeks the J-Pop idol world of Myojo magazine). Imai Kentaro from neo-electro-pop band The Aprils — a Flipper’s expert — told me that this rumor was possibly just a cover story for the actual reason for their break-up: Playing the new sample-based material live was not sounding good at the rehearsals and these problems snowballed into ill-will between Ozawa and Oyamada.

By late 1991, Flipper’s Guitar was over, but the Shibuya-kei sound explosion had hardly begun. While never as big as Nirvana became in the U.S., Flipper’s were certainly the cultural equivalent: They opened the floodgates and indie culture poured into the mainstream.

Continued in Part Three