Momoiro Clover Z: What we talk about when we talk about idols

If this is AKB48′s world and we’re just living in it, Momoiro Clover Z has an even greater task on their hands: tweaking the standard just enough to keep it different, without ever abandoning true blue idol pop. I should confess that AKB48 is my least favorite thing to happen to Japanese pop music in the past decade. This includes, by the way, teen boy bands, Funky Monkey Babys, and Ayumi Hamasaki’s last single. Because we have yet to crown a new diva, one who hasn’t been born before 1990, the Oricon charts and pop culture conversation revolves around girl groups and subgroups. Unfortunately, AKB48′s success may have unleashed an ever larger number of idiosyncratic idol groups, but it’s become difficult to mess with the formula in any substantial way. Take Perfume, an idol group by any definition, who have never truly fit the mold: their best feature — music that doesn’t succumb to traditional idol pop — has also been their commercial downfall. It’s easy to think of Perfume as wildly successful because of their vociferous niche community, but their last number one single was 2009′s “ONE ROOM DISCO.” And more than chart status, looking at a group’s ripple effect is a better indicator of the kind of popularity we’re dealing with. When Perfume hit it big, a spat of similar artists mopping the classic Yasutaka Nakata electro-pop sound debuted, hoping to get their foot in the door it took Perfume almost six years to pry open. In recent years, these groups and solo artists are almost all but forgotten.

In their place are groups like PASSPO☆, whose shtick is travel in general and flight attendants in particular. In addition to the costumes and lyrical content, the group has also invented a dubious vocabulary to make them stand out from groups with other, less classy angles. From their generasia profile: “Their live events are called “flights” while those who are attendance [sic] are usually called “the passengers” who can earn points, called “frequent flier miles.” [...] The group releases three versions of their singles, each name [sic] Business Class, First Class, and Economy Class, with different material inserted in each version.” Lest thou be fooled by the group’s aggressive marketing tactic, rest assured that this is your garden variety idol group, bubbly rock-pop and requisite graduations (may I suggest “that great gig in the sky”?) included.

Of course, groups rocking a large number of members is nothing new. AKB48 had a predecessor in similar idol groups like Onyanko Club and Bishoujo Club 31. Momoiro Clover Z owe a debt to a rarer kind of ancestor like SAINT FOUR. That short-lived idol group churned out spunky synth-rock numbers in colored costumes while performing acrobatic dance routines to rival professional gymnasts. Unlike other groups that emphasized a coy vulnerability, they met the stage head on, bouncing around like loose springs in spandex costumes that evoked superheroes, or Super Sentai knock-offs. These girls didn’t whimper, they roared.

Momoiro Clover Z might be known for trolling the same geek circuit, but they also challenge the AKB legacy and its current spokeswoman Minegishi Minami. Both groups pander to an audience: in Z’s world, it’s what Patrick Macias explains are “bonkura.” To distinguish it from your run of the mill otaku, he says, “Bonkura guys are not anti-social. They will seek out and immediately bond with others who share the same wild enthusiasm for junk culture as they do. [..] All they want out of life is raw stimulation and to satisfy the unsophisticated desires of their eternal teenage boy within.” We’ll get back to that last thought in a second, but to sum up: Junk culture. Raw stimulation.

One of Momoiro Clover Z’s best known singles has the girls carousing around like drunk salarymen for “Rodou Sanka,” singing about the everyman giving it his best at work. Others have them traveling through outer space on bikes dressed as space pirates as a barrage of color hits the screen. When they’re not dressed up in color-coordinated boxing costumes, they’re endorsing anime like the newest reincarnation of Sailor Moon. Wacky and weird videos aside, before you start thinking they’re pushing the envelope with Edo period mythology, here’s another sample lyric: “Looky looky here, I want you to look here / When you look at me my heart pounds and I’m happy.” There’s that (teenage) male gaze again. These are idols, after all.

The newest videos to promote the album 5th DIMENSION are a little different. At some point, in a crescendo mix of orchestra and dubstep, the members’ faces are covered completely by masks. In fact, the only way you could tell them apart (if you didn’t already know each girl by her distinctive height or movements) is by the signature color on their clothes. It’s hard to decide if this is a commentary on the bland, easily replaceable idol industry, or if the girls are just being eccentric again. Yet this isn’t the ridiculous fun of “Push” or “D’no Junjou“; they’re just wearing sparkly costumes with the equivalent of paper bags on their heads.

The real disappointment is the album itself. After the amazing teaser PV of “Neo STARGATE,” it’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking there’s genuine novelty about to happen in an idol group. 5th DIMENSION seemed like it would at least continue the trend of the group’s quirks, even if those quirks are just deliberately standing out from their peers. But the album is a collection of a lot of the same idol treacle with a few catchier stand-outs. It’s especially disappointing if you’re unable to reconcile the idea that Japanese idols created by a male-dominated industry for male-dominated audiences can’t be idols and also women and also positive role models in image and creativity.

One thing they do differently from other idols is put on children-only and women-only lives, perhaps to let minority fan communities get in on the fun without having to constantly rub shoulders with some of the seedier male fans, otaku and bonkura included. Don’t worry, guys get their own lives too, which is to say, Momoiro Clover Z wants you to have a good, safe time in a comfortable environment. But in essence, this also opens up the dreaded conversation about the extreme, less savory fans of idol groups, the ones that crop up the most in the media and make you just a little ashamed because you bought AKB48′s latest single for the song, not the election ballot.

I’ve spoken about the difference between Japanese and Korean idols before, but in an interview with Robert Michael Poole, the CEO of Something Drastic International Music Promotion, he finds it worth noting that “the majority of the audiences [for K-pop shows] are young girls, not boys. [ ...] The Japanese pop market has typically been all about cuteness, presenting boys with the ideal submissive girl to treat like a doll rather than lust over.” And later: “The J-pop industry couldn’t create a K-pop style group, because Japanese girls being that edgy would be seen as wholly un-Japanese. [... ] It seems girl groups in Japan have actually become increasingly cuter, younger and presented as servants (maids being the ultimate example), with the likes of AKB48 and their many copycats.” While the general tone of the interview highlights J-pop’s innovative inertia, keeping a pop sound that wouldn’t be out of place two decades ago, the two short years since the interview has seen what is perhaps the Hallyu wave’s last crash. Worth noting is the difference in marketing tactic K-pop groups have taken, attempting to deliberately cater their image to reach that coveted male Japanese fan and his spending money at the expense of strong, independent, and mature role models girls might want to see (note T-Ara’s original video for “Bo Peep Bo Peep” compared to the Japanese version).

This is not to argue how much more noble the K-pop industry is — for one thing, the process of training idols has fallen under extreme scrutiny — but rather to examine the function of idols, the freedom of expression and options girls are encouraged to pursue, and what it says about a particular culture’s notions of what boys and young men should come to expect from the girls and women they are presented with, from entertainment, to the boring, mundane interactions of real life.

Are Momoiro Clover Z the same as their idol peers, or are they actually forcing us to question the predominant image of female idols? Are they presenting different choices for talented girls, or delivering the same message through a different medium? When Tomohisa Yamashita goes solo from NEWS and takes risks working with producers like Yasutaka Nakata to make atypical music, or we see the girls of Fairies performing in outfits rather than costumes encouraging listeners to “Flow like a hero” instead of waiting for one, are we seeing a future of optical and musical variety, or will it simply satisfy a tiny niche so the industry can stay busy catering to the male psyches that offer an unyielding mix of loyalty and money?

For now, it seems all idol groups and solo artists with their eyes on the charts can do is avoid releasing singles and albums the same week the AKBs do. Maybe Momoiro Clover Z, with their aggressive sound and daft intersection of idol and junk culture, will continue to provide alternatives to what has become a fetid industry. Idols as they are now want to relieve us of the burden of examination, from the responsibility of honoring the opposite sex with dignity, from looking at the presentation of young women, and men, in the media and what they say about our own attitudes and responses to the easy glamour of pop culture, and from the courage it takes to confront what doesn’t feel quite right.

Ayumi Hamasaki’s “LOVE again”

Ayumi Hamasaki / LOVE again / February 08, 2013

The consequence is one seeks love with a new person, with a new stranger. Again, the stranger is transformed into an “intimate” person, again the experience of falling in love is exhilarating and intense, and ends in the wish for a new conquest, a new love — always with the illusion that the new love will be different from the earlier ones. (Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving)

It’s no secret that Hamasaki’s 14th full-length album is love’s victory lap, a straight-up, no-frills rebound to 2010′s Love songs, that strangely earnest chapter in Ayumi’s memoir that makes follow-up Party Queen seem twice as fragile and practically toxic. Plummeting sales aside, LOVE again makes no qualms about reconciling the past with the present: Hamasaki’s lyrics have always been extremely vulnerable to interpretation. Her cover art more so — take a look at the color palette when love is involved: both Love songs and LOVE again employ hazy back light, pastel pinks and peaches, a warm, white fuzziness, cozily disheveled hair. We’re so close to tipping into Glamour Shots’ diffused glow territory it’s almost a tragedy there’s no sign of Aquanet. It’s like the break-up album never happened.

Unless you’re a new fan, reviews of LOVE again are mostly apologetic, or else a begrudging acceptance of the album’s marked difference to Party Queen. Says LoKi of podcast Gaijin Kanpai: “I feel that she’s not relevant anymore, and she’s trying really hard to be relevant.” Replies Jaylee, “You got her trying to be relevant off this album?” It’s not difficult to see Hamasaki’s work in the past few years as insignificant, unless you’re Ayumi Hamasaki herself. Most of what the reigning Empress of Pop does is akin to public scrap-booking: if you don’t know who she’s dating, check out her latest promotional video. If you want to know who she’s been hanging out with, check out her latest promotional video. If you want to know what designers she’s been into lately, you get the idea. Her tweeting habit alone is enough to make her seem practically furious: is there a word for relevance that only exists because you’re so legendary, no one is allowed to say “no”? Or the sadness one feels at the spectacle of it all? There’s got to be one in German.

Then there’s the music itself. “Wake me up” is sort of a perfect album opener: like (miss)understood‘s “Bold & Delicious,” it doesn’t tread lightly. Unfortunately, we’re rolling back into the deep of Hamasaki’s psyche for much of the rest of LOVE again. There are standard piano ballads, peppy rock numbers, and edgier songs like “snowy kiss,” a newbie’s “evolution” with its crazy poly-drums. These are nothing more than brief deviations. “Bye-bye darling” seems lost, kind of like “Love song” on Love songs — from whence did this come, and where can one findeth more? When the song titles aren’t limp (“petal,” “glasses,” “snowy kiss,”), we get vague references to Ayu-specific events (“untitled for her… story 2″), that we feel we’re supposed to know something about, but really know nothing about. Does someone as famous as Hamasaki get to choose what is made public and what is kept private? Have we ever figured out why there’s so much mutual violence in the “You&Me” and “snowy kiss” videos, or is this Ayumi’s new normal? Increasingly, we have to resolve that we’re all kind of trapped in Hamasaki’s dream/reality, the type of thing that happens when you’re so famous you can’t leave the house, but you have a big budget to create fantastical music videos with your future husband that may or may not be allusions to real-life events or fabricated nonsense. They’re usually both.

People fall in love many times in one lifetime: with friends, strangers, trends, music, films, themselves. It’s just as easy to fall out, maybe easier when you fall too fast and feel too much. It’s a therapeutic process to put those emotions into your work or art, as long as you don’t dramatically milk the concept more than once. And so unlike Love song‘s first-time sincerity, LOVE again is simply exhausting without any of the reward. It’s not as easy the second time: we fear the inevitable doom, the end, the fresh ink on divorce papers. It’s never easy to make poor choices in front of 866,283 followers and live your life through ViVi diary entries, but it’s difficult to applaud sheer effort after 15 years of pop stardom, or to love simply as a consolation, because it’s familiar. As Hamasaki is learning, rather than loving, the primary struggle is being loved. Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules to overcoming loneliness. Erich Fromm recommends discipline, concentration, and patience. Ayumi would also like to suggest a helmet.

R.I.P. Trance Around the World

Here is how powerful the EDM marketing strategy is: After hosting 450 weekly broadcasts of their popular radio show Trance Around the World, Above & Beyond are ending the show with their final Bangalore soiree and starting Group Theray Radio. While this brand change would seem to effectively erase the association with trance in particular, to electronic dance styles in general, the group states there won’t be any major changes:

[T]he music policy will remain the same. Above & Beyond will continue to present 90 minutes of the best in trance and progressive, with a 30 minute guest mix from some of their favourite artists each week.

But eerily enough, it’s already somewhat difficult to define modern trance as the EDM boom waters down the essence of most styles: nothing new for big industries attempting to amass larger revenue by providing audiences with a more all-encompassing, streamlining label of the myriad subgenres of music. As usual, this seems to have created a whole new genre in the process. Quotes Sami Yenigun in NPR’s two cents:

“Everything that’s being presented as EDM falls so much within one particular corner of the scene, which is generally a more commercialized corner, a corner with more marketing muscle behind it,” says Philip Sherburne, who writes for SPIN and has covered dance music for more than a decade. “[The term has] been adopted mainly by an American audience to apply to big tent electro-house, American dubstep and things like this.” These things don’t all sound the same. [...] In reporting this article I spoke to more than a dozen DJs, industry insiders and dance music journalists (and many, many more in clubs and at festivals), but nobody I spoke to could draw a clear sonic line between EDM and other subgenres of dance music that they don’t consider EDM, like deep house or techno. [...] But as the ever-shifting vernacular around dance music has started to congeal, some sort of consensus has formed around its definition: EDM is a pop-driven, mostly high-energy, commercial strain of dance music.

Lest one begins to rank the positive and negative outcomes, it’s important to recognize that anything seeking to emulate a “commercial” value will itself create a highly competitive market for its own best music. While it may not be the most interesting or even challenging sound, EDM encourages a music-making pool similar to the greatest pop: making music for large numbers of people without sacrificing the care and attention it takes to craft a genuinely catchy or meaningful song.

Above & Beyond’s own shift falls under the same ethos. While Trance Around the World confined the group within a certain niche, the change opens the show to possibilities it may discover it wants to pursue. Without relishing its own status as something of a trance legacy, Above & Beyond is choosing to move forward rather than rest on the group’s veteran reputation by making a risky decision that could ensure the group’s survival past EDM’s inevitable rise and fall (which may actually have occurred this summer). Group Therapy is already a phrase I’ve evoked as a kind of otherworldly term for trance, specifically the kind that Above & Beyond are known for: it’s an all-inclusive term that acknowledges how people themselves are an integral experience of the music. Where there’s genuine appreciation, sometimes the more, the better.

Don’t call it a comeback: Japanese City Pop

Although its exact origins are still up for debate, the term “J-pop” didn’t make its debut until 1988, right around the time the bubble economy burst, ushering in a different kind of decade highly relative to the open consumerism that defined much of the 80s. Before then, various labels were thrown around to capture the anomalies between traditional Japanese music and its more Western-influenced chart-pop, including New Music and a little later, City Pop. While New Music was a mix of Japanese popular forms with an “urban contemporary” mix, City Pop erased much of the Japanese influence and highlighted synths with all matter of popular “urban” styles, such as jazz, adult contemporary, R&B, and even big band.

City Pop is making something of a revival in the past couple years (emphasis on something), marked by albums like Greeen Linez’s Things That Fade and domestic artists like Hitomitoi and YYSHID. In a recent profile of the style, The Japan Times says City Pop “blends soul music, fusion and adult-oriented rock (AOR) with lyrics that center on city life as it often was experienced during the country’s bubble economy,” a point Michael Bourdaghs takes further in Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon to describe the vibe of the 80s in big cities like Tokyo: “The Japanese economy is surging to unprecedented heights, driven by a speculative bubble that brought with it conspicuous consumption on a world historical scale… Media culture reacts as well: the new consumerism can be seen in the cheerful hit songs of the Southern All Stars celebrating summer vacation and life at the beach” (198). City Pop artists in the 80s included vocalists like Miki Imai and Momoko Kikuchi, whose album ADVENTURE released in 1986 defines the genre by checking off all of the stylistic boxes without neglecting the importance of ambient jacket art featuring an extravagant private jet.

While the number of artists who dabbled in City Pop during the decade are too numerous to consider individually, it’s still peculiar to witness the genre crop up in contemporary artists: while nostalgia might be an apt explanation for any revival, City Pop hasn’t yet accrued enough of a following to count as a proper revival. And though City Pop eventually petered out when the bubble burst, it was almost instantly picked up by Shibuya-kei, which took the same themes of leisure and excess spending to new heights by incorporating 60′s Continental jetset culture with playboy romanticism. In a sense, while the genre itself became unidentifiable, the sentiment still loomed in a different form. City Pop also captures something of a fascinating paradox in values, at once espousing an urban lifestyle while longing for beach side resorts and tropical climates, the kind of conventions taken for granted by those that can afford to get away from the city for a while and long for simpler things for which they are willing to spend top dollar. If there were such a thing as yuppies in Japan, you’d find them jamming to Piper’s “RIDE ON SEASIDE.”

As such, Hitomitoi’s new album City Dive doesn’t deliver anything novel, rather it indulges in these tropes with a gentle pinch of irony, with perhaps its most charming characteristic being the ability to appear sincere despite its acknowledged label as a “concept album” — its dead giveaway is the (purposefully?) awful Photoshopped cover art. As far as covering the bases, the album is no stranger to excess: there are two song titles alone that reference summer and two others that hint at bodies of water. Maybe problematically, City Dive only recognizes its vapidity enough to render the album smart rather than simple musical indulgence, though bereft of its historical context, it accomplishes what the best radio-pop does: toes the line between sonic wallpaper and genuine significance.

After all, despite City Pop’s place in music history, it wasn’t the only genre popular in Japan during the 80s: punk rock was gaining notoriety thanks to bands like The Blue Hearts, metal was never far from the public eye, and idol pop was still the biggest cash cow most likely to appear on music programs and the front displays of record shops. But where there are kids with too much spending money, there will always be a music culture that reflects their discriminating tastes.

The Avex Apex: A Brief History of Trance-pop in Japan

Before the term “EDM” entered the mainstream, dance music has been an omnipresent fixture on the pop music panorama, ranging from Perfume precursors Candies and Triangle, to Yu Hayami’s transformation into an italo disco darling and up into the late 90s and early 00s, where house culture made its heavy crawl outside the club and onto the radio, becoming a Top 40 standard. But pop music is no stranger to the accusations of appropriation and it doesn’t take a Deadmau5-fueled rant on the cover of a mainstream magazine to complain about the mainstreaming of dance music to wonder what will happen when the fad cashes enough checks to move onto the next curiosity.

Japan had its own EDM mainstreaming in the late 90s and early 00s, when the import of trance music reached its eventual zenith, leaving behind a number of co-ed pop groups scrambling for relevance. In the 1990s, the mix-and-match of Shibuya-kei, a type of sound that embraced Continental retro-futurist styles, gained traction at the same time rising-star record label Avex Trax took one look at club culture and saw massive yen signs. While pushing their pop stars towards the then-popular freestyle genre, itself a kind of heir to italo disco, sub-label Rhythm Republic was established in 1994 to focus exclusively on dance music, beginning with the “SUPER EUROBEAT” series (that same year, they opened the nightclub Velfarre, one of the many hotspots Ayumi Hamasaki used to fritter away her teen years before being signed to the record label — to set the scene, she mentions German eurodancers Real McCoy receiving huge play).

While the name itself implies origins outside of Asia — and indeed, the sound itself was imported from Britian — the genre itself is mostly unique to Japan. Best described as a combination of house, happy hardcore, and Hi-NRG, the sound features lightening-fast BPM, electric guitars, and dizzying synths played on fast-forward. While the genre enjoyed its own unique labels and artists (a few J-pop groups included Two-Mix, Folder 5 and HINOI TEAM), the mass following of the series eventually found its way onto the reportoire of the label’s pop artists like Namie Amuro and her former backup dancers MAX. In the late 90s, it reached an even wider audience when artists received special remix compilations done in the style. By the time Ayumi Hamasaki was on the label, she received the deluxe “SUPER EUROBEAT” treatment herself.

One of the figures behind these developments was Tetsuya Komuro, who was then a music producer at Avex. If Yasutaka Nakata is credited as the modern-day genius who bridged the gap between Shibuya-kei and electro house, essentially bringing it to a Japanese audience, Tetsuya Komuro was the 90s equivalent to a much higher degree. In the mid-90s, Komuro abandoned his band TM Network to focus on producing a handful of other artists under the Avex Trax label, including Ami Suzuki (whose carer was later resurrected after collaborating with a roster of the most famous Japanese house producers, including RAM RIDER, STUDIO APARTMENT, and the aforementioned Yasutaka Nakata, who produced her album Supreme Show in its entirety). Instead of the pop music that constituted his new project globe, he was keen on exploring conventional dance narratives for the label. But globe (much like Nakata’s capsule) soon became Komuro’s creative and experimental outlet, eventually changing its style to reflect his newest obsession: trance.

Trance music originated in the 90s as a jumbled mess of house, techno, and classical music before its German roots took hold in Scandinavian countries and received the ultimate makeover. While the original style sounds very little like its modern day evolution, by the time godfathers Armin van Buuren and Ferry Corsten got their hands on it, trance music was ripe for entering the consciousness of an above-ground audience. While the sound still remained firmly underground for several years, Komuro was determined to be the face of Japan’s trance chapter. At the genre’s stylistic peak at the onset of the new millennium, van Buuren, Corsten, and groups like Above & Beyond, Marc et Claude, and Svenson & Gielen were commissioned to remix Avex artists like Ayumi Hamasaki and Every Little Thing under “SUPER EUROBEATS”‘s sister series “Cyber TRANCE.”

With globe, Komuro began releasing epically winding trance-inspired pop singles culminating in outernet, the group’s first true dance album and first spectacular bomb on the charts. Instead of taking a different approach, Komuro pressed forward, releasing fearless trance-pop songs like “try this shoot” that utilized the genre’s predilection for airy female vocals. However, unlike the traditional breakdowns of a trance song, Komuro fit the music into conventional pop structures and maintained his resident MC. He was also big on taking advantage of the maxi-single format to feature his own extended trance mixes that spanned 13+ minutes. In fact, the single’s move from the then-popular 3″ format allowed more space for karaoke versions and remixes, a trend that artists everywhere began taking advantage of. Before long it became impossible for even visual-kei bands like Dir en grey to forgo a remixed track of some blood-curdling song about death and dying — or else release whole remix albums (a couple era-defining remix albums at this time that employed the forgotten practice of wacky remix names like “Free Food Free Drink Mix” and “You’re Damm Touchable K-Mix” before DJ self-promotion became the norm: Tomoe Shinohara’s DEEP SOUND CHANNEL and T.M.Revolution’s DISCORdanza).

Of course, no one took as much advantage of the maxi-single format as Ayumi Hamasaki: from 1999′s Boys & Girls to 2002′s Daybreak, Hamasaki’s singles contained anywhere up to nine remixes from both domestic and foreign DJs, including Fantastic Plastic Machine, Izumi”D•M•X”Miyazaki, Junior Vasquez, and Hex Hector. While Hamasaki eventually dropped the maxi-single format, the “ayu-mi-x” series lives on to the present day, often including many of the same music producers alongside veterans. Nonetheless, it was her collaboration with trance artists like Above & Beyond (for single “M”) and Ferry Corsten (for “WHATEVER” and later on album I am… for “connected“) that eventually opened the doorway to recognition in Europe.

While Hamasaki represented a broad range of dance styles including trance, from minimal house to drum n’ bass, other artists took the globe route and attempted crafting their own trance makeovers. Label mates move, also featuring a co-ed group of two men and a lead female vocal, ditched their more eurodance sound to find a more trance-inspired influence on singles like 2001′s “FLY ME SO HIGH” and “come together“, resulting in album SYNERGY, which managed to chart at #10 on the Oricon. In addition, they also lent their songs to DJs like D-Z and 83key for their own numerous remix compilations in trance and eurobeat styles. In fact, the first few years of the 00s were turning out to be Japanese trance-pop’s most commodifying year, reaching an absurd peak in 2002 when former X Japan drummer and metal enthusiast Yoshiki joined globe, released a compilation of self-gratifying X Japan trance remixes (Trance X), and a charity compilation album for the 9/11 attacks entitled song+nation received a sprawling 2-disc trance makeover (song+nation 2 trance), peppered with Komuro’s own original material.

Then, in an astoundingly short period of time, globe’s albums dropped rapidly in sales until they ceased releasing altogether, move lost a member and began recording under the name m.o.v.e., Ayumi Hamasaki made a brief appearance at a Japanese Above & Beyond show before deciding she would no longer sing flighty, easily remixed pop songs, and Yasutaka Nakata’s group capsule made the softer sound of trance seem quaint next to his compressed, chunky electro-house sound.

While trance has continued to evolve and flourish in other countries, its brief moment in the Japanese pop forefront has diminished, save for a remix on a AAA single here and a compilation there. Today, trance maintains a steady fan base, growing both in sound and popularity in the West, particularly North America, where artists like Armin van Buuren, Ferry Corsten, and Above & Beyond still record and draw large crowds. Whether or not trance in its pure form will ever be as popular as some of the other genres now falling under the brilliant marketing term “EDM,” its rise and fall atop Japan’s pop scene in the early 00s and its unceasing ability to move forward predicts a healthy future, even after its one-shot DJs and bandwagon enthusiasts leave it for newer horizons.

33 1/3 draft introduction for Ayumi’s I am…

The 33 1/3 books, a series based around seminal albums, accepted proposals until the end of April this year, and although I only had two weeks to put one together by the time I heard about it, I thought it would be a fun experience to submit one. I considered Pizzicato Five’s the international playboy & playgirl record, which I thought might stand a better chance, as the band gained a cult following in America during the 90s, and of course, Ayumi Hamasaki, because I can’t stop talking about her. Since I figured neither would be chosen — the books are heavily bent towards the classic Western white rock canon — I took a chance and wrote about Ayumi Hamasaki’s  I am…, the album I think sums up everything Japanese pop was and wasn’t at the turn of the century.

I will not include the chapter summaries, only the first draft for the basic introduction, but I planned the book around each single in chronological order and focused on the one year that made Ayumi Hamasaki one of the most popular female musicians in Japanese pop history. Every piece of that year and those songs reflected a multitude of ideas: the Japanese idol factory, J-pop’s inability to reach a Western audience, musical authenticity, fashion and design, major record companies and artistic control, vocal techniques and musicianship, Japanese advertisements/celebrity endorsements, the global impact of 9/11, fame and its repercussions, and one of my favorite and often-returned to fascinations with the domestic and foreign DJs featured on all of those crazy, wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime maxi-singles and the merging of house, trance, and other electronic styles into the Japanese mainstream. All of that and more from a high school dropout.

This introduction wasn’t meant to be exhaustive or even beyond the basics: in many ways, I wrote it for an audience I was assuming had never heard of Ayumi Hamasaki and was unfamiliar with Japanese pop and pop culture. And once you take all of that into account, it leaves you with little else to do than place footholds that you want to come back to later. Most of you probably won’t learn anything new here, especially if you’ve read the Time interview and explored masa’s translations (where most of the quotes are taken from), but it’s honestly a legend I rarely tire of sharing. I had a lot of fun revisiting and re-contextualizing I am… with everything I have learned and experienced about music since I bought the album when it was released and knew it would be a grower, rather than an instant attraction. I think the introduction, for all its clumsiness, simplicity, and cliches (starting the intro with Hamasaki’s over-quoted “product” speech in Time? That two week deadline never seems more obvious) sums up the rest.

DRAFT INTRODUCTION/OPENING CHAPTER
Ayumi Hamasaki’s I am…

A note on capitalization and grammar: The Japanese have a particular and not arbitrary system for using lower-case and capital roman letters in song and album titles. In promotional material or in the liner notes themselves, they are always spelled a particular way: I have chosen to keep the artistic integrity of this practice and stay true to capitalization as it is written on the CD sleeves.

When Ayumi Hamasaki called herself a product in an interview with Time magazine in 2002, that in fact, it was necessary she be viewed as a product, she was summing up not only the state of Japanese idol worship, but her own already fruitful career spanning all of three years. By the age of 23, Hamasaki had already released twenty-six singles, four original studio albums (all Oricon chart number ones), twelve full-length remix albums, and a career-defining greatest hits collection. Though she would later come to regret the declaration, at this peak in her career, Hamasaki was selling out concerts, setting her sights on the rest of the Asian market, and taking unprecedented control of her music, image, and merchandising empire by selling herself as nothing short of a unit to be moved.

Hamasaki was certainly not the first female Japanese superstar: idol Seiko Matsuda, for example, held the record for the most consecutive #1 singles for a female artist for eighteen years, when Hamasaki broke it in 2006. But no other female idol managed to wring as much momentum out of her time at the top until Hamasaki began releasing singles at a bimonthly rate, in addition to limited runs of copies, multiple versions with alternative covers, and special remix albums — in both CD and vinyl format. Even her pop contemporaries, Hikaru Utada and Mai Kuraki, were unable to achieve five entries in the top twenty singles of that year in sheer sales.

Before Ayumi Hamasaki was a household name, she was a high school dropout and struggling model cum actress pounding the pavement of Tokyo, shilling for banking companies and starring in low-budget films before trying her luck at the idol market — presumably, something to fund all those shopping trips to 109. Culminating in a failed recording contract with Nippon Columbia, the project has never been considered a part of the official Ayumi Hamasaki canon. The single, “NOTHING FROM NOTHING,” is an uber-nasal experiment in hip-hop that failed to illustrate any personality, its mere existence the base her label used to drop her. Where Nippon Columbia failed to put the time and effort into creating potential out of deeply concealed promise, Avex Trax producer Max Matsuura discovered her at a night of karaoke and proceeded to pursue her until she began taking vocal lessons. When she began cutting class, Matsuura sent her on a field trip to New York, where he finally succeeded in capturing her attention, as well as convincing her to write her own lyrics. Inspired by the challenge, Hamasaki released her first single with Avex, “poker face,” debuting in 1998 at #20 on the charts.

By the following year she was beginning her streak of #1s and amassing a teenage legion of imitators. While still not possessing the penchant for reinvention or the commanding stage presence that would take years to hone, her first two albums, A Song for XX and LOVEppears, nonetheless were quintessential pop success stories, notable for capturing the late 90s, early 00s Japanese pop zeitgeist with harmless 4/4 structures and riffs right out of the Johnny’s playbook. Unlike other idols, Hamasaki had neither dance ability, nor a predilection for vocal gymnastics: in this, she was both unlike and very much a clone of her Japanese contemporaries, where musical authenticity still meant so little as to be entirely inconsequential. In 1999, the most remarkable thing about Hamasaki’s persona was her changing hair color, but her most triumphant was her lyrics.

During an early All Night Nippon radio program hosted by the budding icon in 1998, Hamasaki related her fairytale without a hint of shyness: her earliest memory was of her father packing up and leaving in the guise of a business trip from which he never returned, and she credits her independence and acknowledged selfishness with her own mother’s subsequent inability to be very maternal. Notably, Hamasaki insists this was not something she noticed or even concerned herself with: “I’ve always accepted it as quite ordinary and not particular that I have no father and my parents were divorced.” However, her neighbors didn’t take so kindly: childishly referring to herself in the third person, Hamasaki reveals that she was often avoided by children her age. Her intimation of her first real friend at the age of 20 is somewhat sad, but only because there is nothing about Hamasaki that sounds out of the ordinary; though dropping out of school in a such an education-oriented society could make her somewhat of a social pariah, she did find enough kids to spend her nights clubbing and frittering away cash with at trendy nightclubs.

After her father, the one man who seems to have made the biggest and most lasting impression on her life was Avex Trax producer and now-CEO Max Matsuura. After catching her at karaoke and noting what a terrible singer she was, he sent her to vocal lessons and refused to give up until she finally succeeded in New York: fate would suggest he saw something Nippon Columbia bitterly regrets in their once-over. Again, in the third person, “Ayumi had always been told “Hamasaki can’t do anything” [...] But then the man, Max Matsuura, said to Ayu, “You can.” [...] It was the first time for Ayu to meet such a person. I was never told such a thing even by my parent. I met a person who expected [something of] Ayu for the first time and I was shocked very much. And I thought I would do my best.” It is worth noting that though these two stories are told in succession, it is related without a hint of allusion to the father-figure role he might have fulfilled for Hamasaki. He also prompted her to begin composing lyrics, what has since become Hamasaki’s trademark.

“Ayu doesn’t write on a paper basically. I’m always thinking in my mind. I feel scents of a city, people’s movements, the air, for example, in my own way.” Confessional and deeply sympathetic, Hamasaki’s lyrics often explore concrete experiences, straying far from ambiguity: in the specific, there was universality. Her most autobiographical song, “A Song for XX” sums up the quintessential qualities of Hamasaki’s lyrics, a sort of thought-process-in-song, not without its immaturities and sometimes-clichés. Though they are often simple enough to be taught at an elementary level, her lyrics are the place most go to argue and make claims of the personal and private variety, sometimes involving elaborately projected fantasies and absurd speculation. But as a self-proclaimed product, Hamasaki herself claimed both her words and her voice: “[M]y songs are my own. No one can take my songs away from me.” Rarely problematic, they do, however, require an open mind and the possibility of misinterpretation. Regardless, they are what fans most often point to as testament to her honesty and capability.

While most idols had very little involvement with the songs that would eventually come to define their avatars, Hamasaki began writing lyrics at the outset of her career, an area where she excelled among fans and critics alike, and a sort of escalating trajectory through immaturity, understanding, enlightenment, and the responsibilities of craft that go beyond mere self-reflection. To wit, by I am… she was already reaping the benefits of working through issues that plagued her first three albums: loneliness, broken promises, roads not taken. As her music warped from sugar rushed adrenaline kicks and melancholy R&B ballads into hard rock with screeching guitars and rapid-fire drum machines, so, too, did her vocals lose their polished sheen of do-re-mi vocal lessons to become strained, broken, and full of vibrato. I am…, her first true rock album and composed almost entirely under the pseudonym CREA (named after one of her beloved pet dogs), was probably the closest representation of the sound Hamasaki was truly looking for all along, and with album sales in the millions, she was finally given the freedom to pursue her new found artistic impulses. Her trademark openings that crawled like lullabies would make way for an onslaught of noise and wailing guitars, crashing so resolutely they threatened to physically erupt from speakers.

For someone with the knowledge of the limited shelf-life of an idol, Hamasaki was already putting a lot of effort into a long-term sustainable career, most likely boosted by her record company Avex’s insistence of releasing a greatest hits collection: a signal Hamasaki took as the end of her career. While she openly grappled with her anger and vulnerability at the hands of Avex, expressed in songs like “Endless sorrow” and her decision to appear in tears on said collection, she also began understanding the true meaning of a timeless superstar.

After the September 11 attacks, Hamasaki changed the entire concept of her album, beginning with the cover art: “I had a completely different idea for the cover at first. We’d already reserved the space, decided the hair and makeup and everything. But after the incident, as is typical of me, I suddenly changed my mind. I knew it wasn’t the time for gaudiness, for elaborate sets and costumes.” Thanks to a last minute change of heart, we now have the iconic image of Ayumi Hamasaki, boldly confronting the world head-on as a symbol of peace and innocence, a statement of the strength in vulnerability, made all the more verbose by the perching of a white dove on her left shoulder. Despite her collaboration with singer keiko of pop group globe on a song meant to be dedicated to relief efforts and this seemingly new found dedication to social issues, the irony of the album’s title never belies how self-involved the album remains. As a summing up of an era, it is even better than Duty as accepting the totality of a life of servitude to fame and fans, and as a memoir, better than MY STORY, the ellipses separating it from a declaration, to an ongoing debate.

Despite such an initial nuanced grasp of her own evanescence, Hamasaki clearly began exacting more and more precise control over her image and business. Rejecting the flighty, mawkish pop songs of her peers, she began composing her own songs with what the West would arguably call a more “authentic” rock sound, even while treating her singles like commodities to be packaged and sold at highest volume. The maxi-single format of her singles beginning with Boys & Girls marketed her directly to the house and club scene, while also giving her a unique edge against other artists who would never dream of including so many cuts for the same price of what had up until then been the popular 3″ format. Her ties with both domestic and foreign DJs gave her the opportunity to work with dozens of producers, some of whom like trance act Above & Beyond would be given their first gigs or launch ever-more successful careers given the privilege of remixing her vocals. Her involvement in the club scene culminated in a collaboration with Ferry Corsten, the godfather of trance, on “connected,” an I am… cut that would eventually boost her popularity in the dance-heavy European market.

This proved that Hamasaki could be all things to all people, or at least most things to most people: whether it was a hard rock ballad, a rhythmic punk manifesto, a techno-ethnic drum n’ bass dirge, or a standard pop jingle tailor-made for selling cosmetics and flavored beverages, Hamasaki reflected exactly what the Japanese wanted from a pop star: not only a bag of options, but total and complete devotion to satisfying their need for more. Even after ten more studio albums and another twenty-five singles, after taking in 42.6% of Avex’s total revenues at her peak, after a failed Hollywood-like marriage to an Austrian model, and the loss of hearing in her left ear, I am… is perhaps not the greatest Japanese pop album of all time, but it is certainly the era’s greatest Japanese pop star’s greatest album: its most definitive, and its most revealing.

mini’s “ELECTRO HAKO BANBAN PICASSO”

mini / ELECTRO HAKO BANBAN PICASSO / May 09, 2012
Are U Ready? / CANDY GIRL 2011 / GiRLS SPiRiT

The proliferation of dubstep in pop music can be overwhelming: when it’s not making puerile appearances in bridges or breakdowns, it’s really just masquerading as its older and more experienced brother, electro house. It’s easy to mix the two up because they have a lot of the same elements; this doesn’t make it interchangeable, just harder to decide if it’s worth caring about. mini’s debut album, ELECTRO HAKO BANBAN PICASSO, which was a long time coming, also comes off as a long time process, with one half offering standard electro-pop and the other half scouting the urban landmine of rough synths and drops, with only one brief interlude that might suffer references to Skrillex. It’s also really easy to make comparisons to Mizca or Yasutaka Nakata’s work, especially since mini’s debut single was remixed by the electro titan, but it’s simply too easy to sum up staccato and cracked wordplay as a capsule song.

“HAKO Princess,” the album’s highlight, illustrates the album’s use of unconventional structures and vocals as synths. In some instances, mini’s voice is so autotuned, it’s hard to tell where she ends and the moog begins. When it feels overwhelming, the album falls back on catchy choruses and a Malibu Convertible approach to melodies (Malibu Convertible being the producer of Tommy february6′s seminal homages to the 80s, whose also long-awaited seven-years-in-the-making comeback just sounds like successfully remixed Tommy heavenly6 songs), like in “Take A Feel,” one of the albums best approaches to crafting a Yuu Hayami-original, down to the escalating drum patterns.

The album lags in the middle, less Strawberry Switchblade, more JUJU. There’s also a bit more room for other influences, like the Latin freestyle in “S,GN” or the slightly super eurobeat of “Lad Style.” The album lovingly embraces a rich palette of electronic styles from at least four decades: like the album title’s eccentric coupling of abstract words that only hint at the album’s general essence rather than any concrete summation, it’s a vibrant array of the wide world of dance styles available at a musician’s fingertips without coming off as disjointed. Almost halfway through the year, and there’s finally a Japanese full-length contender for a best-of list.

Marty Friedman’s “What is J-POP?”: A response

Preface: I think it’s great that Marty Friedman is so enthusiastic about Japanese pop music. However, for someone who has apparently been living or traveling to Japan for so long and speaks fluent Japanese, it is astonishing how little he understands the full scope of it. And as a musician (former member of Megadeth, current guitar virtuoso), writer, and speaker, it’s even more astonishing how his lecture “What is J-POP? ~Exposing the Myth of Japanese Music Phenomenon” is partly a failure of articulation. Friedman has ideas, they just get tangled and sprout half-formed. His tone borders on less-then-conversational, barely scratching the surface of popular Japanese music, while exposing his biases and the kind of thinking that makes one believe everything off one’s radar doesn’t exist at all. So basically, it might sound like I’m tearing this to pieces, and I guess I am, but since Friedman takes the time to apologize for his tastes several times during the lecture, I guess I can take the time to do it at least once: this lecture just wasn’t my thing. Sorry.

“And the main reason why I want to do this is because now is the time that Japan and its music scene is going to begin to be well-known outside of Japan. I think it’s really beginning now and [...] I believe Japan’s music is the future.”

Japanese popular music has pretty much been around as long as its American counterpart, as Friedman himself takes pains to discuss. However, why Friedman thinks that now is the time that Japanese pop will “explode” is unclear. If any country can be predicted to hold the future of the world’s music right now (and I hate that I keep returning here, but it’s inevitable), that would be South Korea. Besides the fact that South Korea is motivated by economic factors (Japanese musicians don’t necessarily need foreign sales to thrive — plus, as mentioned in the lecture, kids will buy three or four copies of a single to collect all the singles or get the trading cards, while the South Korean music market pales in comparison), it also has a brilliant PR campaign the likes of which Japan has yet to utilize. While Japan patrols YouTube like a nark, pulling uploads and refusing to post full-length PVs, South Korea has successfully exploited social media to create viral videos and establish a brand. Many artists are already mingling or collaborating with foreign musicians, itself an easy transition when K-pop sounds like the smartest, hippest pop music upgraded to 11. And unlike Friedman’s lumping of J-pop into one large genre as if AKB48, X Japan (though he does use the term “visual-kei” here — more on that later), and Perfume all have the same sound, K-pop does have the luxury of that label: contemporary Korean pop music and groups are certainly easier to lump together than Japanese pop will ever be.

Later in the lecture, Friedman takes this further by positing that the future is a lot closer than we might anticipate: “all the stuff I introduced to you from Japan is going to make it outside of Japan, and soon. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. I’m talking this year, or next year something is going to explode because this stuff is too good.” It takes a lot more than a few punk rock secretaries to make a movement, and even with South Korea’s expert marketing campaign, it’s already taken several years of very determined, very aggressive action to gain the sliver of media attention that K-pop has gotten. Japan is already set for failure as there aren’t many record labels and entertainment agencies that care that much about making a name outside Japan. Furthermore, to expect groups like, say, a Johnny & Associates group or the AKB/NMB etc. trend to gain traction in the West without a grasp of context and culture, is unlikely. Where it’s already associated with anime tie-ins and appearances at comic cons, it has already failed miserably by equating music culture with otaku culture, as if the two are never one without the other. It will take much longer to reverse what has already become the mainstream idea of what “Japan” and “Japanese culture” denotes to the average American citizen because of a reluctance to change it and refusal to be militant in doing so. When Friedman says things like “not only because it’s so whacked and so freaking crazy but also so cool, so colorful and so happy,” he’s really not doing Japan any favors, and certainly not changing anyone’s mind regarding stereotypes. Furthermore, in reference to his later championing of visual-kei…it’s been around for decades. Which is a long time. Again, I’m happy he’s so enthusiastic about this, but it’s not going to “explode” in 2012. It’s had the chance to explode for many, many years. And it hasn’t.

After playing Ikimonogakari’s “Arigatou,” Friedman says, “It’s just a gorgeous melody and it’s kind of sad in a different way than “sad” music is in Western music. When I think of sad music in Western music I would think of something like Adele or something like that.” I think the word he’s looking for is “nostalgia” (and possibly the overall theory of musical authenticity). Why the concept of nostalgia would not come to somebody who has apparently been listening to Japanese pop music for so long is strange, as it is an integral part of what constitutes Japanese pop culture. When he says this sound evolved from kayoukyoku music from “maybe 20-30-40 years ago” — well, which is it? Because that’s a huge chunk of time to be playing with, and Japanese pop music from the 80s, 70s, and 60s, all sounds extremely different and could be as easily lumped together as the contemporary styles are today: for Friedman, Japanese pop is no more dynamic than someone’s idea of Japanese culture consisting of geishas, rock gardens, and kabuki masks.

His giant theory of a unified J-pop extends into technical arenas as well, for example when he talks about Perfume’s “POLYRHYTHM.” “This is another thing about Japanese music is they can accept deep technical concepts within the context of ultra pop music.” “POLYRHYTHM” does indeed have some crazy-awesome time signatures going on, and it is arguably one of my favorite pop songs of all time, but using this song as an example of Perfume’s overall musical style is naive, as is calling Perfume’s music “the music of the future.” Technically, this is already the music of the past, as “POLYRHYTHM” was released five years ago. Furthermore, the group is still best known for their single “CHOCOLATE DISCO” which was released in 2007. Producer Yasutaka Nakata has since gone on to write and produce hundreds of songs with several artists, all with a similar, signature sound. That doesn’t diminish how great the music is, but it certainly no longer makes it worthy of being “the music of the future.” Sure, he’s spot on when he says “the main thing about this unit [Perfume] is the producer is a genius.” It’s probably the only 100% accurate statement in this piece. Unfortunately, he then goes on to call the founder of AKB48 a genius, which kind of takes away some of Nakata’s glory, and then basically calls the entire Japanese pop enterprise a genius, so the word loses its meaning and makes J-pop seem infallible, which is the least kind of logical argument someone can make for anything. Nothing is perfect and calling J-pop flawless takes away part of what it makes it so fun to listen to and discuss.

Friedman goes on to make an inadvertent testament to how Japanese pop really works when he moves on to Mr. Children, confirming that it’s “not going to sound like anything new, they’ve been around for at least 10-15 years. But every album is consistently a huge hit due to the quality of their song writing and performance.” Rather, I think Mr. Children’s popularity is due largely to the idea of loyalty that fans have to bands and artists that allow groups like Mr. Children and B’z to continue releasing music simply because there is a ready made audience that will buy the new single and the sort of respect legendary artists accumulate with time. But in the grand scheme of Japanese music, popular or otherwise, I would argue that Mr. Children and B’z have hit their stride years ago and remain faintly relevant, a perennial fixture on the landscape of Japanese pop.

“People in France might know X-Japan, because X-Japan is successful here and they toured outside of Japan, just like Dir en Grey did. But in Japan X-Japan are the ancestors, they brought it to the mainstream first. [...] They are the Godfathers. They started it, they set the pattern of it. And now its 2012 and finally its making its way out of Japan.”

Is it though? And if X Japan are the ancestors, why are we still talking about them? Has visual-kei evolved so little that X Japan, who were popular twenty years ago, are still the most relevant example Friedman can offer? He then continues to namedrop more relics and claims visual kei is going through a “big boom” right now. But visual-kei never really went away; it’s not really experiencing a big boom, so much as it’s riding a pretty stable wave. Second of all, if it’s going through a big boom, where are all the great bands that haven’t been around for a decade? MUCC, Dir en grey, L’arc~en~Ciel…these are all bands I remember from when I was getting into Japanese rock fourteen years ago who had already been around for a while. Instead of trying to show how Japanese pop music is a flourishing, diverse enterprise, he’s really just showing how stagnant it’s gotten.

It’s a shame that the questions he received during panel were so thorough, because I don’t think Friedman takes the time to really consider them. For example, the first question asks how the Japanese can avoid falling into the traps of prejudice when trying to export their sound to the West. After talking around the issue, Friedman says, “I think a lot of it has to do with luck, a lot of it has to do with timing, the right person and the right song, I don’t think it’s something you can plan” (this probably coincides with his constant equating of “magic” with Japanese pop music, as if it sprouts from a land of mythical creatures). This doesn’t make any sense: it sounds exactly like the sort of approach that has already been taken and has failed miserably for it. He might as well claim he’s definitely going to win the lottery next year without having to buy a ticket. How much of South Korean pop music’s relative success has been due to “luck” and being in the “right place at the right time”? None of it. South Korean entertainment companies have used smart, consistent advertising techniques, employed expert use of social networks, and have probably had hundreds of meetings where strategies and goals have been calculated and re-calculated. This is not an endeavor that takes luck. It does not take the defeated strategy that you “can’t plan for something outside of your country.” His example is Yuki Saori, a young woman whose song was stumbled upon in a record store and led to her being invited to sing in London. That’s definitely a great way to get noticed outside Japan: hope your record is found in a 50 cent used bin somewhere and hope for the best!

Without offering any practical advice for how Japanese pop music will “explode” in the next year or two, Freidman comes off as a very enthusiastic, very sincere, fan whose obsession has blocked his ability to think rationally. Regarding the language barrier, he says Adele is difficult for Japanese listeners to get into because “they would have to really study the lyrics and have personal relationships that are similar to hers and that is hard because it’s in a different culture.” So how he thinks Japanese pop music can make that incredible leap is uncertain, especially when he later claims that the Japanese do not need to sing songs in English and should stick to their native language. Apparently, the Japanese can’t “get” us, but Americans will be able to “get” them right away.

And also: There is a (possibly unintended, but nonetheless, noteworthy for being so) fixation on female musicians, if not a simply patronizing tone toward females that escalates throughout the duration, none of which has a male counterpart anywhere in the lecture.

• The fans of visual-kei are “about 90% females. Go figure, females listening to this kind of music.” Women can like metal, too. Go figure! Sometimes they even use the Internet. Go figure! (By the way, he concludes that girls just like the visual aspect, it’s guys who like the music.)
• American music is “very kind of dull, it’s like subdued. It’s kind of like girls with candles in their room and incense and pillows and it’s not insane.”
• SCANDAL, a four-member rock group whose schtick is wearing school uniforms would be huge in America because “you never think of cute girls playing rock.”
• Nirvana was able to see the brilliance of Shonen Knife because “these were three tiny Japanese secretaries playing punk rock.”

Friedman likes cute girls, we get it. That’s not a bad thing. But the fixation on quiet girls with stereotypical quiet professions or lifestyles stops being quirky and starts becoming really condescending. During the panel, he answers a question saying that “in America the image of Japanese or Asian person is smart or brainy. They’re doing the best in school and they have a very good image.” This remark is made as if the image is inevitable and is the reason he “can’t see any Asian girl singer being like Beyonce or something like that, I just don’t see it happening.” Friedman has clearly never met Namie Amuro or Koda Kumi, two of the most popular female singers in Japan, whose attitude and image are nothing like AKB48, and, while probably not too much like Beyonce either, are certainly not what Friedman considers the ideal J-pop spokesgirl, the kind in SCANDAL or Perfume that he believes should be perpetuated in the West without necessarily introducing their dynamic, diverse equals.

By distilling Japanese pop music to the lowest common denominator in every single way, be it in genre, style, technique, or gender, Friedman actually perpetuates the real myth of Japanese pop music — that it is as stereotypical, static, and wacky as an average American might imagine. What he is “exposing” in this lecture is unclear and the myth actually takes on epic proportions as it continues (although I think his “myth” is that Japan doesn’t have it’s own music, let alone in such abundance, but I don’t think the existence of Japanese pop music is a myth anymore, so much as a fact people choose to ignore). Again, I love his enthusiasm for Japanese pop music and his vision of seeing it get more global attention, but these are exactly the type of incomplete ideas you don’t want presented in front of a large group of people meant to build a foundation for their ideas of Japanese pop music. I don’t know what Friedman’s actual knowledge of the history of Japanese pop music is, nor what his knowledge of its contemporary pop music is, but from this lecture, he comes off as the type of guy who recently discovered an AKB48 song, did a little bit of research on Wikipedia or the Oricon charts, casually browsed a major record store for something similar, and tried to find everything in the world that supported his theory that it’s the only type of music Japan does (or should do). Of course, this involves ignoring the multitude of Japanese pop artists and groups, the array of styles and techniques, the dissatisfaction many Japanese have with their own popular music, the very large indie scene, and the struggle many Japanese and Asians face regarding their ethnicity and/or gender. And that is a big deal.

Sexy Zone: This isn’t it

Japanese pop culture is all about cute, and their teams of double digit group members are as old as Onyanko Club. If you’re at all familiar with idols, you’re probably used to seeing girls act like they’re nine years old, even when they’re closer to nineteen. Unfortunately, sometimes less attention is paid to their equally problematic male counterparts, the stuff you’ll usually find coming out of the Johnny’s factory.

One of the talent agency’s newest idol groups, Sexy Zone, consists of five underage male members: you might have skipped over their newest single on a torrent or rar blog, blinded by the awful photoshopped cover. A quick look at their Wikipedia page provides the most terrifying information you will ever find in a bullet point: 100-year old Johnny & Associates founder Johnny Kitagawa says, “The group name came from Michael Jackson’s sexiness.” Which…so. The same article speaks of the group being one of the youngest at Johnny’s since Hey! Say! JUMP (the youngest member is eleven and the oldest seventeen), as well as the use of “sexy roses” at their debut, making you wonder if Kitagawa doesn’t know the definition of “sexy” or if he’s just trolling hard.

What it seems Kitagawa does is create commercially successful scenarios that require the viewer to acknowledge a twelve year old’s relationship to sex, a necessity brought on by nothing more than the group’s name. He did the same thing in ’97 with KinKi Kids, a pun on the Honshu area the group members come from. It’s easy to disassociate the two on the surface because Sexy Zone’s promotional videos are unusually typical, a space to explore Japan’s relationship with cute in the same way a Berryz Kobou video does. For example, in Sexy Zone’s newest video for “Lady DIAMOND,” the boys are dressed in pink sequin blazers and striped trousers from Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” era on a stage made of diamonds, glitter, and stars (hopes and dreams implied). Without a hint of anything that made Jackson’s stage persona legendary, it’s much more conceivable to argue that the video is just an amalgamation of bad taste, rather than anywhere near sexy.

As Never Ending Music Power points out: “I think I have come to the point where I am just ignoring the whole “sexy” theme for this group as I just cannot see something that is so adorable as sexy in anyway [sic]. Sure Nakaken and Fuma can pull off the sexy part but the other three are cute-zoned for me until they start closing in on 18 years old at least.” Even fans are ignoring the failed “sexy” concept and clinging to the kawaii. Furthermore, unlike an abundant number of other groups, it can be argued that Sexy Zone is largely a failure of semantics. While South Koreans are learning perfect English at an astonishing rate, the Japanese are still falling behind due to a number of factors including the tendency to use English decoratively or more as punctuation marks, often at the expense of correct grammar. Where the Engrish phenomenon was born, we get band names like w-inds., Kiss-My-Ft2, Hey! Say! JUMP, and, well, Sexy Zone. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the entertainment company is pushing an agenda, but more that “sexy” here seems to be striving for “cool,” “glamorous,” and “appealing” (none of which it nails).

Even so, it’s difficult when you have a seventeen year old lumped in with a twelve year old as if the ages are inclusive. A seventeen year old dancing among much younger children in the same vein as 2011′s runaway hit “Maru Maru Mori Mori!” doesn’t exactly exempt the group from fetishizing adolescence. While certainly not all Japanese groups are like Sexy Zone, it does help explain some of the appeal of K-pop, where groups like 2NE1 are allowed to have dynamic and evolving personalities while acting like the young women that they are. The Hallyu wave has given Japan something of a difficult task in embracing this new attitude while trying to keep what makes the country’s popular music culture so unique. The emergence of groups like Fairies, that try to keep the flavor of Watarirouka Hashiritai 7 by sending conflicting messages about girlhood while combining the blunt mannerisms of a K-pop dance routine, illustrate the country’s attempt to cash-in on a trend without compromising the number of thirteen and fifteen year old talents. But whether this is a sign of old school agencies like Johnny’s dying out, or simply one shot fads, will remain a defining question for Japan as the country adjusts to the reality of musical inertia.

Welcome back appears

The state of East Asian pop music can now be summed up in three words: South Korean. Dubstep. What once seemed a sort of hip novelty has quickly become the most irritating trend that refuses to die softly. It’s greatest example, Hyuna’s “Bubble Pop!” is a prime example of what can make it so difficult to care about: unlike miss A’s expert weave of electro house in album Touch, “Bubble Pop!” strives for at least three different genres without providing any glue. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve missed a lot. And I’m going to make up for it by talking about three or four of my favorite, least favorite, and most interesting musical moments of 2011, April onwards; blink and you’ll miss the Cut Copy reference.

Yasutaka Nakata, etc.

There are a couple of different ways to approach some of the best music that was released in 2011, and Yasutaka Nakata’s work is as good a place as any to start. Yes, Perfume’s JPN was annoying in all the ways it was the best: as long as you didn’t think too much about how it was mostly a singles collection with very little original material (and everyone did), it’s really a generous serving of everything Nakata does so well, without all the annoying self-involved navel-gazing that can happen on albums like STEREO WORXXX.

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu also happened this year, in case you didn’t know. And though it’s a shame one of her songs ended up on JPN, she still brings something quintessentially Japanese to the mix. I guess I’d like to believe that everything she does is tongue-in-cheek, which makes what she has to say about being Harajuku’s fun house mirror that much more worthwhile. But even if it wasn’t, there is nothing ambiguous about what she, or Perfume are doing. The titles of the albums (JPN and Moshi Moshi Harajuku) are homages in themselves, proud labels that no Korean pop star wants to stick on themselves. Yes, Perfume is on a major label now and Kyary seems to have made some kind of inconsequential mark on Scandinavia, but these aren’t artists trying to do or be anything different than they already are. This is Japan. This is our pop music. Irrashaimase.

South Korean Pop Music

K-pop is everywhere: it’s on The Singles Jukebox, it’s being championed by rock critic Frank Kogan, it’s on David Letterman, it’s being analyzed and dissected in really awesome, really smart ways all around the web. And that 2NE1 video! Best pop song of the year? You don’t say! It’s amazing how much effort has been put into making K-pop a thing and how quickly it’s caught on when compared to the months and years and decades that Japanese pop/rock has tried to crawl into the market (J-pop could take a note here and there). Then again, it’s also amazing how long Korean pop music has actually been around, and how little anyone seems to think it existed pre-2NE1.

Yet I love how exuberant and free of burden all of the songs seem to be: they are unfettered by turmoil or angst or the general day to day shitstorm of life. In some ways, this creates quintessential pop narratives, even when it’s bizarre and sometimes tasteless. It’s the type of sound that practically begs you to feel guilty, and if I believed in guilty pleasures, I might feel somewhat paranoid about my enthusiasm for stuff that still kind of makes me cringe sometimes.

Still, for every Big Bang and 2NE1 and “Hot Summer” and “Oh! Honey,” we get “Bubble Pop!” and “FACE” and a neverending series of Japanese language crossovers. I like Korean pop, and as anything I really like, I want to see it grow and evolve and stop resorting to dubstep breakdowns or cliche representations of gender. I want to see it go beyond crafting brilliant dance singles to craft one, just one, slow song that doesn’t sound like it was written for Toni Braxton in 1994. One of my top ten albums of the year was a Korean pop album, but it wasn’t one you’ve probably heard much about: it’s Neon Bunny’s Seoulight and it was not performed on Inkigayo or accompanied by a career-defining music video. It has no trademark single easily recognizable by a syllable or phrase: it’s just a great album, made up of more than mostly filler. There’s a lot of debate about K-pop’s longevity, it’s ability to really go anywhere, but whether or not it continues to crop up on Pitchfork or simply recede into its own home field niche market, is irrelevant: we’ll always have 2011.

Group Therapy

2011 was also pretty great for EDM of any kind: if at some point you considered yourself a music fan this year, you probably heard it somewhere, even if what you heard was just pop music’s appropriation. My favorite song of the year was probably Above & Beyond’s “Sun & Moon.” But the most disappointing album of the year (besides Cut Copy’s Zonoscope) was Group Therapy, the album on which it was released. When you coin a defining phrase for a genre, practically renaming that genre in the process, there’s a type of pressure so immense it threatens to collapse on itself. Group Therapy wasn’t a terrible album, it just wasn’t as epic as it should have been. Or rather, it wasn’t as therapeutic as its live component was meant to be — enough that speaking about seeing the group live on the North American leg of their “Group Therapy Tour” makes me a bit uncomfortable.

There were a lot of albums this year that seemed to be just a little less ambitious than advertised: Shonen Knife’s Osaka Ramones was supposed to be a fun covers album, instead it was just another useless, mediocre version of songs that don’t need any improving, remixing, or alternate versions. Ayumi Hamasaki’s FIVE, “BRILLANTE” aside, is now that mini-album sandwiched between what are now two really interesting albums (whether they are conventionally bad or good is irrelevant). I liked Hunx and His Punx’s Too Young to Be in Love and Mind Spiders’ self-titled debut, but these are not albums I have given much thought to since the year ended. Yet I still think about Hamasaki’s impromptu marriage and her sincere belief in its grit, this album, Love songs, that is so clearly written for and about it, and then, last month, Party queen, and how quickly we are able to change our minds, and not bother to suffer over it.

In a way, trance music is the best place to tread this territory, as it’s probably some of the saddest music you’ll hear. There’s a lot of crossover between electro and prog right now, a lot of stuff like BT & Adam K’s “Tomahawk” that illuminates whole new corners that EDM has forgotten to scavenge, but there is still the “Never Let Me Go“s next to the “Let Go“s and the “Never Go Back“s with the “Start Again“s. It’s in this frame where it becomes visible that sometimes Group Therapy tries so hard to make a statement that it forgets to say anything. It also forgets its own purpose in the process: trance music is meant to be played to massive crowds and a sea of bodies so dense, one’s life is threatened by an enthusiastic groover’s elbow. For an album summing up what makes the genre so unique, so all-encompassing, there’s a lot of shuffling self-reflection, a lot of time spent alone among the aural equivalent, with minimal instrumentation and lyrics that sometimes border on the nonsensical. Though it succeeds in avoiding the sometimes too-literal weakness of vocal trance, it fails to capture what the lead singles so simply summed up in a few lines: I’m sorry. I’ll never get over you. I won’t forget about the people I love. This song is going to help me. That’s what music does.

Speaking of the Power of Music

Ayumi Hamasaki’s concerts haven’t exactly been the stuff of legend lately. They’ve just been a lot like what everyone else is doing with more useless dance interludes (really, it doesn’t take that long to change an outfit). But after the earthquake in March, she decided to nix the “~HOTEL Love songs~” thing (a full-blown concept based around the idea of her and at-the-time husband Manny, I’m guessing) and bring it back to the one thing she seems to be forgetting about lately: her music. The “POWER of MUSIC” live is Hamasaki at some of her finest diva moments (even though her vocals aren’t always up to the challenge). There’s a simple stage set up in what alternately resembles a roulette wheel and a giant record player with some moving pieces here and there, but that’s about it. Songs get whole new arrangements or take their cues from classical versions we’ve heard from previous remixes. There’s minimal monologuing, which is always appreciated. The song choice is a little dubious, but it’s more a chance to show off how lasting and epic Hamasaki’s back catalog is: it’s a huge pay-off for long-time fans who have context and experience to witness how thrilling it still is to hear “Boys & Girls” live or how huge “A Song is born”‘s leap can be from one continent’s tragedy to another. There were rumors a while back that this might be turned into a live album, and for Hamasaki’s first and only live album, I don’t think Avex could go with a better choice. It’s pretty seminal in its own way, complete without being overwhelming, stripped down without losing its lushness. And also, she looks like a goddess, so there’s that.

It’s the opposite from my other favorite concert released in 2011, Tomohisa Yamasahita’s “Asia Tour 2011 SUPER GOOD, SUPER BAD.” Where Hamasaki brings herself and the crowd to tears, choking up lyrics like they’re repressed memories, I’m fairly certain there is not a single song Yamashita actually sings live. It’s two hours of really incredible Japanese pop music, bereft of audience banter and any kind of actual emotion. I don’t know why this concert happens to work, but Yamashita is actually a fairly superb performer. No, not exactly the type of guy who will happily run through all the concert gimmicks while refusing a paycheck for the encore, but certainly a professional entertainer. The outfits are a bit Justin Timberlake circa N’Sync, yet I am still all about feeling this man in his jewelry or whatever the hell that line in that amazing song that has yet to have a studio release is (seriously, help me out): but he had an incredible dual album of the same name, a duet with Namie Amuro, and hasn’t been around for two decades, so he’s someone to look out for.

Finally, “Perfume Live @ Tokyo Dome” was more a victory lap, but it was still super fun. There’s some cool lasers and minimal fireworks at the end during “POLYRHYTHM” (which, if this doesn’t provoke some sort of welling up of emotions, either because you are a huge fan and seeing Perfume play the Dome is a sort of triumph you can share in, or because they hit those ‘works at just the right moment, when you’re exhausted from just watching all three of them sweat it out in dance routine after dance routine, and you’re forgetting how many songs there are in their discography but damn, “POLYRYTHM” is still one of the greatest pop songs ever put to sound system and it’s just so lovely), but it’s Perfume, and it’s still pretty amazing how far they have come and how far they can still go.

Oh and one more thing

“Born This Way” is a great album. Even after all that squawking about herself during endless concert monologues, and that annoying title track, there is something fundamentally wonderful about Lady Gaga’s album. There are open roads, confessional bar stools, heavy metal lovers, and a sheisse on top of it. Juggling Christian metaphors, big Broadway numbers, and teenage punks running around with their parents’ hard-earned money is almost more than one album can take, but Born This Way‘s single failure of trying on too many things at once is like saying that human beings are failures for doing the same. This is Gaga’s statement album, and beneath the ode to an ex-boyfriend that seems to choke every song, there is also some pretty fallible, ugly, and beautiful music.

Without further ado, here are my “best of” lists for 2011.

Top Ten Albums of 2011

01. Perfume: JPN
02. Lady Gaga: Born This Way
03. Neon Bunny: Seoulight
04. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu: Moshi Moshi Harajuku
05. Yelle: Safari Disco Club
06. Tomohisa Yamashita: SUPERGOOD, SUPERBAD
07. Cults: Cults
08. Escort: Escort
09. Kaskade: Fire & Ice
10. Hunx and His Punx: Too Young to Be in Love