The final installment in a week-long, five part series celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cornelius’ musical masterpiece Fantasma. Read Parts One, Two, Three, and Four.

Part Five: After Fantasma’s Japanese Release

How Matador Came to Put Out Fantasma in the U.S. and Europe

From the Matador website (complete with timeless Monica Lewinsky reference):

February 5, 1998
Some thrilling new signings to report, the first of which being Japanese pop mastermind CORNELIUS. His U.S./European debut, Fantasma will be released on March 24. For background purposes, the biography prepared by Mr. Amory will be online shortly. For now, an appreviated [sic] version is on our upcoming releases page. I could add something like “prepare to be blown away,” but I don’t know how you prepare yourself for that (not without running for office first)

Personal recollection from Isaac Bess, Matador employee in the mid-1990s:

My family lived in Tokyo for a year in 1986, and my parents went back to Tokyo again in 1996 for their second research trip. I was working at Matador at the time, having started in 1994 after college and doing mostly domestic and international distribution. I went over to Japan for Christmas and did my regular routine of listening to anything that looked interesting in the listening stations of Tower and HMV.

I remember seeing Cornelius’ first single “The Sun is My Enemy,” which I thought was a super cool song title, and all the other Cornelius releases had this amazing aesthetic. They were the kind of records that jumped out visually. I bought some Cornelius records and an amazing EP from Fishmans Long Season that I still dream of someday releasing on vinyl.

I brought these CDs back to New York and played them in the office. I don’t know what it’s like at the Matador office now, but at the time there were frequent battles over control of the office stereo. At some some point after us listening to Cornelius, it was determined that we’d reach out to Trattoria, the label on the back of the CD. I had zero Japanese label connections myself — we’d put out Pizzicato Five records but that was about it. I sent a fax to the number on the back of the CD, and as I recall, my fax letter was written in the worst Japanese of all time.

We traded some faxes back and forth, then some phone calls, and then a crazy, crazy care package of Japanese records arrived on our door. The packaging on those Trattoria records at the time was absolutely insane. I remember the whole office being totally blown away by those huge elaborate compilations. I don’t know how they might have made money on those things

We got an advance of Fantasma’s lead single “Star Fruits Surf Rider,” and I put it through the office ringer. I still think it is not nearly the strongest track on the record, but I liked all that frantic drum programming stuff, which was just starting to percolate into the non-DJ world. The response was good but not insane.

But when we got the full length, we reached out. Matador started a deal process (that I was not involved in), and we were off to the races. I quit a bit afterwards, but I got to spend time with Keigo and Hiroko (from Polystar) and the band in NY. Then I moved to Tokyo and saw more of them then.

Even now, it feels like Japanese labels aspire to have international success stories, largely to no avail. And at the time in Matador, we had, at least in relative terms, three — Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, and Guitar Wolf (depending on how you define success story, I suppose). I think the key was really in the marketing angle Matador took, which played little or none on “Japan = crazy!” It was more about “This record sounds absolutely genius.”

Fantasma is still a super dense record. I remember all the reviews citing the studio wizardry, the attention to detail around the recording process. From that point, I had little hand in the trajectory of the record, in the US or elsewhere, but it was extremely gratifying to see such critical acceptance.

How I Discovered Fantasma

If I recall correctly, I was at a real-deal “cocktail party” in the Spring of 1998, talking to Matt Murray and Dan O. Williams about my interest in Japanese pop. Dano asked if I had heard Minekawa Takako, which I had not, and he asked if knew about Momus, which I did not. He then mentioned if I had heard of Kahimi Karie, produced by Momus. I had not. He then said, oh so what do you think of Cornelius — he’s this important DJ / producer. Although I had become a Buffalo Daughter fan by this time, I clearly knew nothing about anything. I promptly went to Newbury Comics the next week after class and saw the Matador release of Fantasma sitting in the “New” bins — at $10.99 loss-leader pricing. I picked it up and headed home.

Upon returning to my door room, I popped Fantasma into the communal stereo and thought something was wrong with said stereo for the first minute as nothing came out but mostly inaudible sound effects. The rest of the album was equally mysterious and incomprehensible, although I distinctly remember liking the part in “Free Fall” where they say “Slow down” and then the song slows down. For the first three or four or five listens, I still prefered Buffalo Daughter, but went around believing that this was an epic, important record even if I didn’t particularly enjoy it or understand why. So I tried to convince myself that I loved it by convincing everyone else that it was amazing. During some study session, I let my classical music aficionado girlfriend hear “2010” which she saluted but then played her “Magoo Opening” which she did not. The fundamental problem was that mind just did not possess the capabilities to understand the musical sounds contained within — I didn’t get the references and did not even know what half the musical instruments were.

Upon visiting Tokyo in 1998, I took the album with me, listened to it in my lonely days walking the streets, and then started collecting used copies of Cornelius’ other CDs at the lowest prices I could find. I first picked up the remix album 96/69, which is not a good place to start. I do distinctly remember, however, finally getting my head around Fantasma the 15th or so listen, and I soon found myself in Ochanomizu, haggling over prices for a SP-202 phrase sampler and DR-202 drum machine.

Through convoluted circumstances of my internship at Kodansha, I ended up at a photo studio at the end of the summer where Oyamada Keigo was a model for a A Bathing Ape shoot, destined for the next issue of Hot Dog Press. I sat near Oyamada but did not talk to him until he was leaving, where I got him to sign my copy of Fantasma (coming directly out of my CD player) and the cover/CD of 69/96. He signed in an oddly bombastic backwards graffiti — SUILENROC. As I slinked away, Nigo came over and handed Oyamada a copy of the UNKLE album, which I then ran out and bought as well.

Cornelius toured the U.S. later that November with Natural Calamity, coming to Boston and playing to a room full of Japanese exchange students. I faithfully wore my A Bathing Ape T-shirt like the rest of the crowd, and Cornelius showed up in Ape uniforms. (Read Alex Pappademas’ early brilliance in this Phoenix review: “Amid thunderous applause, he laughingly accepted a “You da man!” high five off a dude in the front row.”) By this point, the Cornelius touring band was a tight unit, transforming his complicated Fantasma tracks into high-energy crowd pleasers. He also added a few particularly good live tracks “E” and the soccer themed “Ball in Kick Off,” with Horie (of Neil & Iraiza) in charge of blowing the referee whistle. (I spent too much money later on some weird German compilation that had “Ball in Kick Off” as the opening track.) He also passed around the SP-202 phrase sampler for the crowd to “play,” and since I had one at home and knew how it worked, I grabbed it confident that I could jam along with Oyamada. Unfortunately he had put something to block you from touching any of the controls so the best you could do was wildly press the buttons to make random noise.

What truly made the show though was the video visuals accompanying every song in perfect timing — cut-ups of lost children’s shows, retro 1960s groovy movie footage, and early visual effects. It appeared that the backing tracks were played off the videotapes, and drummer Migu faithfully listened to a click as she played. After the show ended, I said hi to Cornelius’ manager Takahashi, who vaguely remembered me from earlier in the summer. My roommate Chess and I walked home down Lansdowne street singing the a cappella opening to 69/96. That had been the best concert I had ever seen, only topped by Cornelius’ Point tour in 2002.

Cornelius After Fantasma

With Matador releasing Fantasma in both the U.S. and Europe, Cornelius transformed into a globally-recognized musical genius, which of course, made him an even bigger deal back in his home country of Japan. Cornelius spent the first few years after Fantasma in constant tour with his increasingly tight live band. This was documented in the video EUS, where Help! Films and long-time Oyamada visual partner Tsujikawa Koichiro’s Harvard Design turn cheap miniDV footage of the tour into an endless pageant of Pokemon seizure beauty (a few fragments are included on the Fantasma re-master boxset.).

Cornelius also began to remix every musician on the planet — a list that extended from fellow Tokyo bands like Buffalo Daughter (“Great Five Lakes”), Towa Tei (“Butterfly”), and Salon Music (“Galaxie Express 69 Mix”) to like-minded international stars Beck (“Mixed Business”), The Pastels (“Windy Hill”), and Coldcut (“Atomic Moog 2000”). In many cases, Cornelius improved on the original (Money Mark’s “Maybe I’m Dead,” in particular), but many of the tracks were mostly rebuilt with the Fantasma sound library to sound like Cornelius’ outtakes with guest vocals. The process of remixing, however, represented Cornelius’ entry into the global pantheon of producers. The kid who wrote “Goodbye, Our Pastels Badges” was suddenly remixing the actual Pastels. (It’s also telling that remixes of Cornelius have never been particularly good, as there is no much core “song” under the production to re-construct.)

Perhaps this over-use of Fantasma space noises and guitar riffs from 1997 to 2000 is what made Cornelius move so far away for his 2001 follow-up Point. Where Fantasma was additive — building soundscapes by piling on sounds on sounds, references on references, genres on genres — Point was completely subtractive. Oyamada essentially worked to free himself from the DJ cut-and-paste aesthetic, and instead, tried to deconstruct his own tastes to a building blocks of “pure” but original sounds. Cornelius told Suzannah Tartan in Japan Times, “This time I drew my ideas more from myself, my own biorhythms and environment. With ‘Point,’ I wanted to enable the listeners to immerse themselves in the music to have more blank space or open margins around the music. Because, by doing so, the listener will be able to include more of their own influences, of their own personal memory, or environment.” Essentially, Cornelius understood his own references to be too idiosyncratic — crowding out fans building better personal relationships with his music.

So Point contains almost no explicit references to other music, other than a relatively tame robot-vocaled cover of the classic “Brazil.” Instrumentation revolves almost exclusively around acoustic guitars, digital tones, and clipped live drum samples. If Fantasma was always on the brink of disaster, with loud noises and drones bleeding from one song to another, Point is in perfect control, with sounds muted and ended precisely after they serve their purpose. The song titles of Point even moved away from band names (the one exception “Tone Twilight Zone” is a joke on the outré pop label Tone Twilight founded by friend Emori Takeaki). We move from the nearly fourth-dimensional “Microdisneycal World Tour” to the one-dimensional “Drop,” the formless “Smoke,” and the zero-dimensional “Nowhere.”

Oyamada may have grown tired of Shibuya-kei’s melodic plunderphonics after doing it for almost a decade, but his peers were also moving to a similar direction. Point’s most direct influence is Kanda Tomoki’s landscape of smallers music from January 2001 — an atmospheric sound safari where Rhodes plucks sound like raindrops and Minimoog oscillators imitate buzzing insects on an African veldt. Between Point, Kanda’s record, Emori’s Tone Twilight catalog, Takemura Nobukazu’s “Sign,” Sunahara Yoshinori’s ice cold Lovebeat, and Kahimi Karie’s increasingly slow and abstract whisper pop, we suddenly had a new mini-genre “Nakame-kei,” named after the retreat of 30-year old Tokyo hipsters from the Shibuya commercial district to the slow-life of the cafe-heavy Nakameguro neighborhood where Oyamada’s 3D studio is located. Maybe too many people were doing the sample pop thing and the originators needed some distance, but Cornelius certainly chose a reverse course — away from music that contained explicit cultural signifiers to one completely intended to be sculpting of acoustic space.

Few were thrilled with this new direction. Oyamada’s friend Momus publicly referred to the album as “Disappoint,” and most of the foreign fans, who had only heard of this Oyamada character in the last two years, did not understand why he needed to change up the classic Fantasma formula. There certainly were ways to push the Fantasma methodology even further; I would argue that unofficial disciples Plus-Tech Squeeze Box used a massive base of samples to hyper-extended a Fantasma view of the music into an even more intense frenzy (listen to “Fiddle Dee Dee”). Oyamada instead decided he would rather make the kind of “original” sounds that get copied and referenced rather than try to recreate others’ iconic recordings.

The question is whether Cornelius gained something in moving away from eclecticism and diversity. Everything on Point essentially sounds the same. It is holistic, but it is one ride at Epcot — not the entire Magic Kingdom. While the opening track “Point of View Point” may be one of the most clever and rewarding songs of Oyamada’s career, the rest of the album is essentially re-thinkings of the same idea. The metal interlude “I Hate Hate” even feels rote.

Despite the tepid response to Point, Cornelius did successfully turn the material into one of the greatest live music spectacles of all time. Far from the DIY days of the Fantasma tour, Oyamada no longer cut up from silly video tape footage of the past, but created high-quality productions that perfectly embodied every single song. The songs suddenly became incredibly good soundtracks to interesting short films rather than “songs.” These videos, combined with clever lighting and projection effects, brought the Point songs to life on tour, and the resulting DVD Five Point One of the video work was a legitimate standalone audio-visual journey rather than a “DVD of the videos for an album.” Oyamada moved from musician to multimedia artist. Most importantly, he moved far from “curator” to an un-ambiguous original creator.

After Point, however, Cornelius went further down the rabbit hole, into a music based increasingly on abstract expressionist sound detached from the history of music. The first sign of this was the Eno-esque cherry blossom tone poem of “From Nakameguro to Everywhere.” Then Cornelius really doubled-down by choosing an entire album of young “Logic glitch-squirt bedroom cases” like dj codomo and DRITT DRITTEL for his “remix Point samples” contest. (As well as “MC Cat Genius’ BomBassTic Re-bomb / Animal Family featuring MC Cat Genius,” one of the strangest works ever committed to a major label release.) When Tokyo Fun Party organized a session at Uplink for all the Point remixers in 2004, Oyamada showed up to play a secret spot at the end and treated the crowd to strange guitar-manipulated digital delay jams much like Sensuous’ “Wataridori.” Gone were the cartoon clips or videos, replaced with dynamically generated computer visuals that reacted in time with the sounds.

This was even a step from Point, and when Sensuous hit in 2006 — five years after his previous album — Cornelius had made a full transformation into painter of the soundscape (my full review here). Besides the clever “Toner” duet with a inkjet printer, Sensuous is almost completely humorless, beginning with a four minute exploration into wind chimes and acoustic guitar strums. The Cornelius palette has recently contracted to a very small set of digital synth sounds that reverb into nothingness. The original quest for complete control over sound fragments in Point has transformed into a kind of digital mania. Oyamada may be the only person in the entire world who prefers fake digital piano samples to the majesty of the real thing.

To his credit, Oyamada is at least not repeating himself, and he has moved miles from the questionably derivative parts of his musical output. For a while though, everyone secretly wanted him to go back and make another Fantasma. Viewed in the lens of Simon Reynolds’ exhaustive indictment of modern culture’s Retromania, our enjoyment of Fantasma clearly stems from it being so directly referential — rewarding us for our obscure musical trivia, borrowing from the hallowed aura of Brian Wilson, and regurgitating retro timbres thought lost to the detritus of society but that still existed in the deepest trenches of our brain. It felt good. But after Fantasma had delivered this drug, he decided to instead become a true techno-optimist. He has attempted to make sounds that are fiercely new, that push digital technology far beyond the comfort zone. Noise bands cannot shock anymore with noise alone, but there is something deeply disconcerting about intentionally making songs with fake piano samples. This may have often felt boring and anondyne on Sensuous, but these production techniques worked wonderfully for singer Salyu on her breakthrough 2011 record s(o)un(d)beams (listen to the machine funk of “Mirror Neurotic”).

The great lament around Cornelius is not really related to Oyamada — we no longer live in an era where an album like Fantasma is joined with 3-4 other concurrent releases that proclaim and prove a brand new wave of creativity. Something like s(o)un(d) beams stands in isolation, a strange quirk of the music industry that Salyu’s industry drones would tap an avant-garde talent to produce her record. In the 15 years since Fantasma, the Japanese music scene can no longer muster the power to create albums that make the world wake up and even think their own domestic bands in a new context. Cornelius was able to achieve that and much more, but the album also came out during the penultimate year of sales for Japanese music — a time when there was tons of money to burn on eccentricism, and more importantly, there was something important at stake. Japan’s top musicians were possessed with a burning desire to make big, meaningful, genre-changing albums, because they knew that if they succeeded, there would be an equally meaningful response. If Fantasma appeared in 2012, no one in Japan would know what to do with it.

So our nostalgia and respect for Cornelius’ masterpiece will remain tied with with nostalgia and respect for the era when music rained as the king of popular arts. And what better record to symbolize this than a long musical tribute to music itself. There may be albums that inspire more nostalgic longing and more succinctly prick up the painful melancholy of teenage longing, but the sheer depth and innovation of Fantasma make it an album that can be enjoyed over the long run. The album is now historical — it stands for a certain age in the 1990s — but at the same time, it is an important textbook for an alternative musical history, where Bach, Bacharach, and the Beach Boys stand as the great triumvirate. We students have spent years decoding and translating the work, but more importantly, we have listened over and over and over again. Thank you for the music.

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.

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