Part Two in a week-long, five part series celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cornelius’ musical masterpiece Fantasma. Read Part One — the introduction to the series as well as “The Age of Music Nerds.”

Part Two: Oyamada Keigo before Fantasma / Fantasma as an Album

Oyamada Keigo before Fantasma

Fantasma looms large in Oyamada Keigo’s legend. Before the album hit, he had already earned a place in Japanese musical history as a young prodigy and respected tastemaker. Through his first band Flipper’s Guitar, he became a god to Japan’s emerging class of indie kids from good families who wanted to indulge in culture that was distinct from society’s increasingly wealthy middle mass. He was not exactly an “underground” icon, however — he did ads for hair mousse brand Uno and thousands of girls in agnès b border shirts would faint at his presence. Upon exiting Flipper’s, he was rewarded with his own sub-label on Polystar called Trattoria that put out his friends’ bands and re-released forgotten Bill Wyman albums no one would be expected to buy (people investing into your certainly-money losing ideas is a true mark of cachet.) Despite achieving this charmed life by his mid-20s, Oyamada still had not established any sort of timeless musical reputation. If Oyamada was a building, he was closer to an immaculately trendy café than a museum.

Flipper’s Guitar — Oyamada’s teenage band, formed with fellow indie prince Ozawa Kenji — had revolutionized the Japanese pop music scene in the very late 1980s by bringing obsessive referencing of unknown British indie bands into the heart of the mainstream market (titles such as “Goodbye, Our Pastels Badges”, “Colour Field,” ad nauseum). Never had Japanese pop music been exposed to such fringe Western influences. And once critics lumped Flipper’s Guitar together with like-minded bands Scha Dara Parr and Pizzicato Five under the crude rubric “Shibuya-kei,” Oyamada and Ozawa became gatekeepers themselves, able to open the door to dozens of more interesting bands who cribbed extensively from Western records known only to 5,000 people worldwide.

Over in Osaka and Western Japan, a truly underground culture had given birth to experimental bands like The Boredoms. Tokyo’s Shibuya-kei revolution, however, developed mostly as an offshoot of consumer culture, revolving around the previously mentioned hipster cachet of reference collection. The Flipper’s Guitar opus thus suffered the natural consequences of this approach: Oyamada and Ozawa were often more interested in rewriting their favorite old songs rather than creating anything that could stand on its own. On their final record Doctor Head’s World Tower — the title celebrating expertise on the Monkees’ 1968 psych-pop film Head — Flipper’s just flat out rerecorded Primal Scream’s “Loaded” as a lyric-heavy pop song called “The Quizmaster.” The vocal melody of Scream’s “Come Together” acted as the verse hook of “Groove Tube.” Track “Aquamarine” is a languid pastiche of My Bloody Valentine’s “Lose My Breath” that drags into the musical equivalent of an Unisom. Sure these timbres and winks were landmark for 1991 Japan (and it’s overall a great record), but Oyamada and Ozawa seemed to be gunning for the title “Kings of Record Store Snobbery” rather than wanting to be recognized as songwriters who pushed melodies into new trajectories and painted brand new sonic landscapes.

After Flipper’s Guitar break up in 1991, Oyamada Keigo spent time producing singles for belle Kahimi Karie and Pizzicato Five’s album Bossa Nova (see Oyamada dance in a fake moustache in their video). Around 1993, he finally rechristened himself “Cornelius,” inspired by a Planet of the Apes TV filmathon. (The same one that apparently inspired Nigo to call his brand A Bathing Ape.) Oyamada’s first album under this moniker, The First Question Award, took nearly three years after Flipper’s dissolved to hit shelves, and despite that distance, it generally felt like a relapse into his old band’s Camera Talk-era pop songs. That’s to say, Oyamada confused himself as a singer-songwriter despite not much track record for original songwriting nor a particularly dynamic voice. He also continued to believe that his “style” of songwriting meant rewriting his favorite songs. The final track “The Love Parade,” for example, is a wholesale and unabashed redo of Roger Nichols and Small Circle of Friends’ “Don’t Take Your Time.” Whether he was determined to sell lots of records to fashionable teens or he fell in way too close to Pizzicato Five’s Konishi Yasuharu, the first Cornelius album has not aged particularly well. The liner notes to the Fantasma remaster suggest that more people remember the T-shirts that came out to promote First Question Award than the music itself. And in hindsight, nothing on the album really foreshadows what would make up Cornelius’ peak output, except perhaps the Charlton Heston-inspired, spacey lounge house of “Back Door to Heaven.”

Cornelius’ next album 69/96 came out in 1995, with a marketing hype that suggested the Ape had a true epic on his hands. But despite moving to a tougher, rock-based sound, the album suffered again from Oyamada’s confusion of himself as a singer and songwriter. Strongly reacting against his previous incarnation as a beret-wearing, overly-pleasant, moussed-up soft rocker, Cornelius made the choice to photograph himself for the album wearing devil horns.

As an angry simian, Cornelius built 69/96 on giant rock riffs, distorted vocals, and sluggish songs (single “Moon Walk”). The overall effect is not particularly pleasant on the ears, but in the process, Oyamada stumbled upon a big idea: his diversity of musical knowledge could work to push his albums beyond a commercial necessity and into a rumination on the history of pop. In the course of 72-minutes, Cornelius hits doowop, AC/DC-esque FM radio rock, giant Sabbath-y heavy metal, Hawaiian ukelele, ‘60s sitar clichés, G. Love and Special Sauce-like blues harp over breakbeats, classical music, and the sound of waves crashing for a good ten minutes. He is, however, not able to bring these disparate elements into a tight narrative, and the album feels almost infinite in time. The references themselves are also generally mainstream and accessible, making the album feel like a “sell out” by someone who is too lost within the labyrinth of indie music obsession to truly sell out.

69/96 is an interesting mess, but comes off ultimately as an indulgent moment from a label boss who hasn’t found his raison d’être. There are two stand out tracks, however: the mellow bossa nova of “Brand New Season,” which was one of the few pre-Fantasma tracks to end up in the permanent Cornelius live repertoire, and the extra-terrestrial porn grooves of “Rock / 96,” somewhat hidden as second side filler. But he just couldn’t leave the album though without ripping off a classic track — leading to a rewrite of The Beach Boys’ “Little Pad” as the triumphant exit “World’s End Humming (Reprise in Hawaii).”

Both records did not necessarily live up to the cultural impact of Flipper’s Guitar, but neither damaged Cornelius’ god-like aura. 69/69 was near the top hundred of best selling albums in 1995, and his embrace of like-minded T-shirt brand A Bathing Ape helped propel the Ura-Harajuku label into fashion stardom. Oyamada commanded a massive fanbase and a roster of talented junior bands under his direction on Trattoria. He had everything a musician could ever want — other than a killer, moment-defining album.

Fantasma as an Album

The early edition of Cornelius’ third album Fantasma dropped on August 6, 1997, sporting a retro-psych orange-and-white cover and the cryptic titling, “performed by CORNELIUS produced by KEIGO OYAMADA” — splitting the self and alter ego into distinct labor units. Oyamada was 28 years old at the time, a bit older than the Beatles during Sgt. Pepper but generally a good age for churning out one’s best pop music. Trattoria and Polystar staged the album’s release as a pop cultural event complete with radio ads and a TV spot (both included in the remaster boxset DVD).

Just as with Sgt. Pepper, nothing better signals an “incredibly important musical moment” like a meta-concept album. Fantasma is not just a loose collection of songs, but an immaculately-sequenced set of tracks that bleed into, complement, and reference each other. The contrasts between tracks are as meaningful as the similarities. And unlike sonically holistic masterpieces like Radiohead’s Kid A or My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, Cornelius maxes out the possible number of sounds, instruments, genres, and musical conventions that could be held in a single silicon disc. Yet a very tight internal logic brings these particular aural expressions together. Despite its extreme diversity, Fantasma is never random. Even the odd sound bursts and feedback drones are perfectly on theme. And like any good concept album, the intention is for a straight listen from the first song to the last, in order, no skipping. Oyamada told Tokion (#6, May/June 1998), “Fantasma is a kind of album that only has one entrance and one exit. That is, you can’t listen to if from the middle. It’s important for Fantasma to be listened to as a whole from start to end.”

If Fantasma is a concept album, then what exactly is the concept? Simply-put, Fantasma is an album about music itself — a tribute to how the very process of hardcore music nerd fandom and collection reference lead to creation and production. Almost every song title references the name of a band (Microdisney, The Music Machine, Clash, Count Five) or a previously-existing song (Primal Scream’s “Star Fruit Surf Rider”, The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”). And lyrics discuss Oyamada’s favorite tunes like The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey.” On Fantasma, Oyamada does not just enact his normal musical protocol but makes a statement about his own artistic philosophy. Even the fancy production tricks appear to be about the act of using fancy production tricks than just employing them to produce a seamless or professional sound.

The emphasis on production and soundscape is further amplified by the general lack of meaningful lyrics throughout the work. Six of the 13 tracks have no lyrics or just rhythmically repetitive wordings. For the other half, Cornelius completely abandons standard pop music lyrical clichés, never touching upon love, heartbreak, etc. There is a palpable lack of human emotion and social relation. We get the story of a “New Music Machine” launched into space by NASA in 2010 that ends up falling apart. “Clash” is vaguely about seeing a band at a club, perhaps The Clash. “Star Fruit Surf Rider”’s lyrical world is somewhere between pot-induced daze and a Murakami Haruki-esque life of lonely wandering, where the only person Oyamada meets on the streets is a cat. In fact, all of the text presents a narrative of solitude — listening to music by yourself, walking around by yourself, humming “Just Like Honey” to yourself. “God Only Knows” contains a solipsistic paradox where Oyamada can believe “I was the only one in the world / who caught a cold.” This all comes together to re-emphasize the overarching, and slightly melancholy, theme of solitary musical collection and study. But more importantly, Cornelius’ de-emphasis of vocals and lyrics — which had historically been perhaps the weakest of his many musical talents — is what allows Fantasma to go far beyond his previous records.

In fact, Oyamada’s vocals feel completely absent for the first burst of the album. The froggy-voiced “Mic Check” itself is oddly credited to Fujiwara Kazumichi rather than the Ape, but even if it is Oyamada who uttered those words, you never hear the former singer-songwriter “sing” anything until the song’s final loops of the word “start” harmonized into a tense chord which resolves into the luscious harp that will become the next track “The Micro Disneycal World Tour.” Oyamada never really takes the lead vocalist helm until the third track “New Music Machine.” Compared with his own oeuvre and that of his closest peers, this was a radical move for Cornelius. With Fantasma, he moved the entire Shibuya-kei needle closer towards experimental peers Buffalo Daughter and future wife Minekawa Takako, and away from the lyrical pop of Love Tambourines and Pizzicato Five. And moreover this was a public burial for any lingering vestiges of Flipper’s Guitar.

In keeping with the idea of music as a lonely pursuit, the album is also meant to be enjoyed in headphones rather than on speakers (or DJ’d at a club). This is explicitly explained on the “Fantasma spot” radio ad as well as hinted to with the special release of the album that included earbuds and came with a sticker that read “Album of the Ear.” Despite this directive for close listening, the album does not indulge in “micro-sounds” per se. Fantasma is wholly dynamic and ear-piercing throughout — with a healthy smattering of giant synth twinkles as if we are to exclaim “my god it’s full of stars” every five minutes. The emphasis on headphones, however, allows Cornelius to express his vision in the emphasis of individual instrumental parts, fragments, and production decisions rather than a general “blend” of sound coming out of speakers to complement and bolster an underlying song. The liner notes to the remaster (written up by Citrus’ Emori Takeaki) mention several times the idea of Fantasma as a “Rube Goldberg machine” — with many moving parts and always on the possible brink of disaster. The headphones give the listener a chance therefore to enjoy the tension between the individual modules performing and the successful race to the end of the track.

Since Cornelius is often referred to as the “Japanese Beck,” we should note here that Beck’s landmark Odelay came out almost exactly a year before, on June 16, 1996. Both Fantasma and Odelay can easily be seen as the two of the greatest late ‘90s records and harbingers for where the rest of the decade would take indie music in its flee from the earnestness of grunge and lo-fi. Sure there is a “Lord Only Knows” on Odelay and a “God Only Knows” on Fantasma, but both are just throwaway Beach Boys references rather than Cornelius’ contemporary borrowing of Beck. (Oyamada had already sampled “God Only Knows” back in 1991 quite prominently on the Flipper’s Guitar track “Dolphin Song.”) The albums otherwise have almost nothing to do with each other. Odelay is a classic American pop record built from loopy breaks and samples but ultimately lyrical and melodic. There is pastiche of ‘60s soft rock, old-school hip-hop, and Exile-era Rolling Stones, but always appropriated with irony.

As we will see below, Fantasma is a much deeper step into the abyss, almost totally abandoning the notion of songs and pushing pastiche so hard that it becomes completely denatured. And as I stated before, Oyamada had established his reference-heavy pop style long before Beck had committed his early weirdo folk grumblings to cassette. Clearly the two men found a kinship once Cornelius went international, but saying that Cornelius “was inspired by Beck” does not adhere to the actual timeline. The closest thing to what Cornelius’ Beck rip-off would sound like is the scratches, synth bass, funk horns, and break-beats of Fantasma outtake “Taylor,” which notably did not make it on the album. And Fantasma, despite its use of tools from electronic and hip-hop music, almost never makes explicit reference to African-American music like Mr. Campbell/Hansen. Cornelius’ drum ’n’ bass is chaotic Futurist noise rather than rasta-inflected jungle.

Next time: Fantasma, Track by Track

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

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

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.