Hosono Haruomi, Takahashi Yukihiro, and Sakamoto Ryuichi’s Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) have been one of the few Japanese bands to receive superstar status both in Japan and abroad. Their self-titled debut offered the world a self-Orientalizing synth paradise, something like a high-tech disco upgrade on Chinese restaurant muzak. By 1980’s X∞Multiplies, however, YMO were creating a unique propulsive techno-rock that augured the bright promises of ’80s culture and set the template for every Konami game soundtrack.

Be warned: the Japanese version of X∞Multiplies is not your standard LP: the songs are broken up with long skits from Japanese alternative comedy legends Snakeman Show. Snakeman Show featured three comedians Masato Eve (伊武雅刀), Katsuya Kobayashi (小林克也), and Moichi Kuwahara (桑原茂一), with Kobayashi being “Snakeman” in a name inspired by famed American DJ Wolfman Jack. They hosted a popular radio show in Osaka, but their appearance on X∞Multiplies would transform them into national comedy heroes. (More English information here.)

Although some of the skits on X∞Multiplies are nominally in English (including the wicked “I love Japan”), the American release of the album wisely banished the comedy, bringing in the musical highlights from YMO’s previous album Solid State Survivor to fill the gaps. Thanks to modern technology, however, the original Japanese version of X∞Multiplies is now available to millions as free illegal download on Rapidshare and Megaupload — oh, and of course, Amazon Japan import. Many non-Japanese YMO fans now have a greater chance to finally hear these “lost” Snakeman Show skits. (Purists, I know you collected these long ago.)

As I listened to X∞Multiplies recently, one skit struck me as particularly illuminating in regards to Japanese attitudes towards popular culture during the 1980s. So I translated the entire transcript of Track 11, simply entitled “Snakeman Show.” The skit involves a mock radio talk show with three young music critics “arguing” about the state of rock music in the 1980s. The argument is between Critic 1 and Critic 2 , with Critic 3 only droning on about YMO and being ignored. A few notes follow.

For reference, an MP3 of the track in question.

(Classical music plays)

Radio Announcer: Good evening, everyone. It’s now time for the program “Young Echo.” Tonight we are joined by young music critics, who will give us their opinion on the topic of discussion: the rock scene of the 1980s. Everyone, welcome to the show.

Critics: (all) Hello. Thank you for having us.

Critic 1: (takes a drag on his cigarette) We’ll start from me. See, for me, I order a lot of records from overseas. So with rock right now — what would you say? — there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: I’m a bit different from you on that. I have a lot of musician friends in New York and L.A. who always send me records. And when I listen to those, there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: I think Y.M.O. is the best —

Critic 1: No, but listen, I have a lot of opportunities to go abroad and see concerts. I just got back from going around London and New York. The thing I felt most when I was there is that there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Announcer: I see.

Critic 2: I have a different view on this than you! I understand English. I am always being asked to be on shows overseas, but I have to turn them down. The more I listen the more I see that there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: But Y.M.O. —

Critic 1: Wait, no, there’s something strange about what you are saying. It’s not like that. You have to understand that I live my life listening to rock eight hours a day. If you did that, you would understand there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: No, no. This is not about the amount of time spent listening to music. I own 50,000 records. I own 50,000. My LPs are all rock records. You listen to those and you’ll realize there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: But really, Y.M.O. is —

Critic 1: You are totally wrong! If we are talking number of records, I own 80,000. All rock. If you listen to all of those, clearly, there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: I feel a bit different from you on this. I do interviews over international long distance, and we really talk about rock. If you listen to that you’ll know that there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: Can I say something? I absolutely think that Y.M.O. is —

Critic 1: You are so wrong. What you are saying is so off. Can I explain? In order to understand rock, you can’t remove the fashion. Are you listening? I am wearing silver London boots, right? Look. It’s not a big deal. I own ten pairs of London boots. If you think about rock while living this rock lifestyle, you would say that there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: Wait a second there. When foreign artists come over to Japan, I hang out with them. I take them to tempura, shabu shabu. I have to take care of them. And we get a chance to communicate. So with rock, there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: If we are talking about fashion, it’s all about the Mao suit.

Critic 1: Are you crazy? You are contradicting yourself. You are totally contradicting yourself. I host ten radio shows. I am going to host a rock show on UHF soon. Since I live in that kind of world, I can state clearly that I am the first person to really understand rock. So when you say it like that, I think there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: No, no. I see this a bit different than you. I am about to produce a record! What’s more, a New Wave record! If you actually tried to make rock yourself, you would realize that there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

(awkward pause)

Critic 1: (angrily) Listen, buddy! I don’t know anything about New Wave or whatever. But I am here right now as a guy who is trying to figure out whether to take Y.M.O. up on their invitation to play with them at the Budokan. There will be 10,000 people there….

(descends into argument) Continued »

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

This original comments to this piece have been disabled as they mostly refer to an older edit of this post and make sense only in the broader context of the early Neomarxisme blog.