JRock News

1998.7.16
MTV Video Music Award

In Japan they are having the MTV Video Music Award.  It's viewers choice  so the people are the judges.
The NOMINEES are:

-Blanket Jet City
-hide with Spread Beaver
-Luna Sea
-Puffy
-Suga Shikao

To vote you must send a fax.  Send your choice to: 

[MTV JAPAN] Viewers choice contest
fax: (03)5448-9131

The dead line to vote is on 1998.8.20

I'm pretty sure there's more, but these are what I recieved so far, on who the nominees are.
Let's hope that Luna Sea or hide wins^^

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1998.7.13
I recently was told about an article on JRock. But enlightment on authorconfused the JPop/JRock scene 
as to be the same.

Here is the article. It came from the New York Times. Tell me what you think of it. 
What are your comments, opinions about this article.

July 12, 1998, 
Sunday Section: Arts and Leisure Desk

POP/JAZZ; A Burst of Rock, Bright as the Rising Sun

By NEIL STRAUSS

IT is a decrepit and smoky basement club, but the place is jammed with girls screaming for the
Outsiders, a band led by a charismatic long-haired guitarist who shakes his mane as he puts one foot
on a stage monitor and lets rip a thunderous solo that shakes the room. Terri MacMillan, a music
manager, watches with a banana grin, convinced that she has found a future superstar. She can
picture him headlining arenas to mobs of guys playing air guitar and teen-aged girls screaming his
name. She is literally jumping up and down in rapture. Only we are not in New York, Seattle or
Omaha. We are in Tokyo. And Ms. MacMillan is the only other American in the club.

''I'm convinced that this is happening,'' she says excitedly, ''but the problem is convincing everybody
else. It's just like Britain all over again, only everyone is afraid.''

 

Ms. MacMillan is referring to the explosion of Japanese pop and rock music. For the past two
decades, Japan has been home to the world's second largest music industry behind America's, but
only recently, in the face of economic crisis and sweeping social change, has it reached the diversity
and originality necessary to find an audience in the West.

''We've been trying to break Japanese bands overseas for 10 years -- 10 long years,'' says Tom
Toeda, Ms. MacMillan's partner in a music management company here, Chibiya. ''Now, finally, we
feel we're in the right time and at the right place.''

Japan today is in some ways like England circa 1960, when Americans thought of British music as
just a substandard imitation of American pop. But then came the Beatles, proving that the British
weren't just copying American rock and rhythm-and-blues but coming up with their own
interpretations, starting a British invasion that has continued, ebbing and surging, to this day. The
situation is similar in Japan: pieces of American, British and even French, German and Swedish
popular music are being fused into something Japanese.

''With cars and stereos, those things are invented somewhere else,'' Mr. Toeda says. ''Then they
come to Japan; we redo it our own way and make it a little better and then put it out. So maybe
that's what's happening in the music scene.''

Though the Western music audience is too fragmented for another pop juggernaut on the order of
the Beatles to emerge, in nearly each splinter of rock and pop there are Japanese bands good
enough to rank among the upper echelons. Ms. MacMillan and Mr. Toeda, who have already taken
two Japanese bands, Pizzicato Five and Buffalo Daughter, from obscurity to college-rock favorites
in America, believe that all it would take is for Japan to export a handful of slightly more successful
bands to bring the country closer to ranking alongside America and England as a pop and rock
capital -- especially in this time of creative stagnation in popular music in America and increasing
openness to Asian pop culture. Their business plan is to find unknown bands in Japan and make
them stars in America before anybody has heard of them at home and then bring them back to Japan
as conquering heroes. This scenario may be possible within 5 to 10 years. But is the American pop
public ready?

Many American music executives are doubtful. ''It will never happen,'' barks one label president,
speaking on the condition of anonymity. ''They look different than we do. They speak different than
we do.''

OTHERS, however, have no doubt. Besides Ms. McMillan, there are people like Steve Pross, the
obsessive, excitable 42-year-old head of Emperor Norton Records, an independent label based in
Los Angeles that is owned by Peter Getty, the grandson of J. Paul Getty. Three days after the
Outsiders show, Mr. Pross is at a much larger club in Tokyo, proudly watching the newest addition
to his label's roster, the Zoobombs, thrash on stage before a sold-out house. A great garage, punk
and blues-rock band, the Zoobombs play funky grooves that explode into guitar-bashing choruses
made up of single catch phrases. As the singer and guitarist Don Matsuo -- equal parts Elvis Presley,
James Brown and Beck -- spits out lines like ''You need to get mo' funky,'' some 1,000 fans pogo
up and down in response.

''I think the next Beck or the next Paul McCartney is going to come from Japan,'' Mr. Pross says as
he observes the scene from the club balcony. ''And I want to be the one to find him.''

Mr. Pross is in Tokyo preparing to release three albums by Japanese bands -- the Zoobombs,
Takako Minekawa and Fantastic Plastic Machine -- in America as well as to find more Japanese
bands to license. For Mr. Pross, one of the few American music executives actively looking for
Japanese bands, running around to record stores and labels in Tokyo feels like striking oil. And he is
rushing to stake a claim on as much as he can before the big corporations move in.

''After talking to you,'' he tells the head of one Japanese record label during a meeting, ''I think my
record company is going to do better licensing Japanese bands and selling them in America than
licensing American bands and selling them to Japan.''

So what does Japanese pop music sound like?

Going to Japan to write about its music scene is not like going to France to write about the electronic
music boom there or to China to write about its rebel rockers, because there isn't a scene in Japan;
there are hundreds of scenes. For those who like the testosterone-happy American rock bands Rage
Against the Machine, 311 and Everclear, there are the Japanese counterparts Mad Capsule
Markets, Backdrop Bomb and Thee Michelle Gun Elephant. If your tastes run to Alanis Morissette,
Tori Amos and Tracy Chapman, there are Cocco, Bonnie Pink and Ua. And most of them aren't
mere knockoffs. Singing in Japanese, English and ''Japlish,'' these acts have come up with a fusion of
their own, albeit one influenced by American and European bands. What's surprising is that it's not
excellence in recent American music that has inspired this flowering of Japanese bands; rather, many
Japanese musicians say it's the staleness of new imported rock that has given them confidence in
their own music. In fact, Western music has slipped from a majority market share in Japan to less
than 25 percent as Japanese bands have matured.

There are three types of Japanese musicians attracting small audiences in America. One is made up
of obscure, uncompromising Japanese avant-garde bands -- psychedelic rockers like Ghost,
improvisational guitarists like Keiji Haino and noise bands like Merzbow -- who have been heroes in
the American underground for years. The second consists of bands that fit into niche genres -- punk,
ska and especially electronic dance music, which doesn't depend on lyrics and language -- in which
fans feel part of an international community of music-makers. Some of the top acts in these genres,
like the punk band Hi-Standard and the techno musician Ken Ishii, already have American record
deals and have sold tens of thousands of albums overseas.

The third type of Japanese band emerging in America is the most interesting because it doesn't fit into
an existing style. These bands are evidence of an emerging Japanese sound and esthetic. Like reggae
in Jamaica -- an attempt to replicate American rhythm-and-blues that turned into its own genre when
the musicians got the beat wrong -- the Japanese sound has roots in a failed imitation. Sometimes
referred to as Shibuya kei, after Tokyo's busy youth shopping district and home to foreign record
chains, the Japanese style is a pop tsunami swamping everything in its path and washing it ashore in a
jumble. Think of the music as an aural equivalent of Japanese commercial slogans like ''Calcium
loading. Get! In! Hold!'' (for the drink Kirin Cadi). Its cultural appropriations bend logic, break rules
and inadvertently come up with new and likable turns of phrase.

''Even the artists themselves will admit that so much of the style is built on a misinterpretation of
American culture,'' says Bryan Burton-Lewis, who plays the music as a host on the Osaka radio
station FM802 and the cable channel Space Shower TV and who also helps write lyrics for
Yoshinori Sunahara, Kahimi Karie, Chara, Bridge and Cornelius. ''They'll build an entire world
around a few albums, TV programs and movies -- and then they finally get to America and England
and find out that it's completely different than they imagined. But in the end they've created something
original, a world of their own, which therefore they like better.''

In a youth culture in which keeping up with trends insures popularity, coolness is a function of
obsession, a trait that has helped make Japanese record stores the most extensive and impressive in
the world. Some of the best Japanese bands making inroads in America -- acts like Pizzicato Five
and Cornelius on Matador Records in New York, Buffalo Daughter on the Beastie Boys' label,
Grand Royal, and Fantastic Plastic Machine on Emperor Norton -- are indefatigable record
shoppers who mix and match every genre that interests them in their music. They worship at the altar
of classic pop groups like the Beach Boys, soft-pop acts like Burt Bacharach, film composers like
Ennio Morricone, rappers like Public Enemy, psychedelic rockers like Pink Floyd and French
singers like Serge Gainsbourg. (Mr. Gainsbourg's use of American pop-culture phrases in his songs
could be seen as evidence of a very Japanese esthetic, as could the quotation-filled music of Beck
and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.)

I ALWAYS thought I was just making Western music,'' says Cornelius. ''But now that people all
over the world are listening to it and I'm able to get their reactions, they're telling me that they see my
music as Japanese sounding. The way the information is overloaded -- even the copycat imagery --
people say is very Tokyo, very Japan. When I was told that, I realized that was true.''

But there is more to the current flowering of Japanese pop and rock than simply the sound of one
collector collecting. Shingo Sugiyama, an independent producer who is working with a musician
whom Ms. McMillan wants to take to America -- a young, raw singer named Kayoko -- believes
that Japan may be on the verge of a period analogous to the late 60's in America, when a young
generation began to question the wisdom of its elders. As Japan is learning the economic lesson that
the summit is the point closest to the precipice, a drop-out culture of people who don't want to join
companies after graduation is growing.

''These kids making music now were born in Japan's richest time,'' Mr. Sugiyama says. ''They were
spoiled. If they wanted a guitar or a sampler, their parents would buy them one. But as they began to
reach the age when it was time for them to enter the workforce, the bubble burst, and they began to
feel helpless. The companies their parents worked so hard for were dropping; they started asking
questions like: 'What are we working for? Where are we heading?' ''

Whether the music will begin to matter in America depends on a number of variables. In the music's
favor is the fact that over the last few years American culture has slowly begun opening up to Asian
culture. There's the popularity of Hong Kong film stars like Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh and Chow
Yun-Fat; Hollywood Asian-derived blockbusters like ''Mulan'' and ''Godzilla''; Japanese video
games like Parappa the Rapper and Street Fighter and Japanese animation. One American record
executive, Karyn Rachtman at Interscope, says she has an 8-year-old son who reads only Japanese
comic books and whose ambition is to make a movie in Japanese when he grows up.

Since American popular music was introduced to Japan after World War II, pop has occasionally
leaked out of Japan and into the Western consciousness. There were, for example, ''Sukiyaki'' (the
first and only Japanese song to hit No. 1 in America) in the 60's; the pioneering electronic music
group Yellow Magic Orchestra; the novelty duo Pink Lady in the 70's, and the heavy-metal group
Loudness in the 80's. But these success stories were aberrations.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle that Japanese music has to overcome is one of credibility. Since the
1970's, the music that has dominated the Japanese charts has been made by cheesy, over-produced
musicians more talented at personal grooming than singing. These manufactured acts -- pin-ups like
B'z, Glay, Speed, Smap and, the most fun of the lot, the classic-rock quoting duo Puffy -- are
known as idols. Though the public taste for idols is beginning to wane in Japan, as the music industry
is struggling with flat sales and losing touch with its audience, the Japanese bands that have put the
most effort into making it in America have been the idols. And yet despite the tons of money that
have been poured into marketing campaigns for stars like Seiko Matsuda and Toshi Kubota on
Columbia Records, they have failed miserably in America, doing more to tarnish the reputation of
Japanese music than to help it. As a result, many record labels in Japan are cynical about breaking
acts in America.

''It's no good for business when a band goes to America, because when they come back their
Japanese audience is gone,'' says Osamu Sato, chairman of BMG Records Japan. ''So it's nice to
have a dream, but a dream and business are not always the same.''

What befuddles Japanese record executives the most is that despite their efforts to market popular
Japanese artists in America, the Japanese bands that end up building a fan base there are obscure
ones like the cutesy female rock trio Shonen Knife. ''We all want to know why bands like B'z and
Glay don't do good internationally, but bands like Pizzicato Five and Cornelius do,'' says Tomonori
Satoh, the head of artists and repertory at Nippon Columbia's Triad label.

Keith Cahoon, the head of Tower Records Asia, believes that he has the answer. ''Foreigners like
Japanese bands that smell Japanese,'' he says. ''The reason Toshi Kubota is not interesting to most
people in America is because they can see a guy doing covers of black music at a corner bar.
Kubota does a good imitation of soul music, but it's still an imitation. But if you see Shonen Knife,
they sing about Japanese things like crowded trains, obsessively buying Louis Vuitton luggage and
eating ice cream after a bath. Ryuichi Sakamoto and Kitaro use distinctively Japanese melodies. The
many Japanese noise bands reflect the intense lives and pent-up anger of Japanese culture.''

THOUGH Virgin Records in America is gearing up for a campaign for an English-language record
by the Japanese pop band Dreams Come True, most labels are beginning to catch on. Sony recently
hired a representative from Japan, Archie Meguro, to figure out how best to bring Japanese bands
into the American market. His plan, he says, is to work with small underground acts -- like Ken Ishii,
the hip-hop musician DJ Honda, the trip-hop artist DJ Krush and a Japanese equivalent of the
Chemical Brothers called the Boom Boom Satellites. What is interesting about DJ Krush and DJ
Honda as well as other dance-oriented Japanese acts like Natural Calamity and Silent Poets is that
they sidestep language differences by working with American and European singers and rappers.

Perhaps one day the sound of Japanese vocalists singing in English and mispronouncing their r's will
begin to sound as cool in America as a British accent, and Japanese-language songs will seem as
romantic and beguiling as a French chanson. For this dream to come true, however, it is not
Japanese music that will have to change. It is American myopia.

''In England and Japan, people have been listening to American music since the 60s,'' says Daisuke
Kawasaki, who runs an indie-rock magazine, Beikoku-Ongaku, and record label. ''But in America
they're just starting to catch up to all the Japanese and European music we've been listening to. So
maybe it is the American mind that is different now.''

 

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