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.