Make Believe Mailer 01: Flocking Together
Looking for a gateway into J-pop in 2020? Kenshi Yonezu has the blockbuster for you.
Artist photo courtesy of Gramophone Media
Like pretty much every other major music market on the planet, Japan has embraced the digital. It wasn’t long ago that the go-to measure of success in the country was landing a top spot on a chart only counting physical sales, a phenomenon regularly providing English-language observers content. In 2020, though, this once outdated approach has given way to mass fragmentation — Oricon and Billboard’s Hot 100 now account for online metrics, but they also compete for attention against subscription streaming and YouTube rankings. TV remains vital, while TikTok resembles a Mariana Trench of trendiness over the past year, wherein cheesy 2016 EDM can emerge from to become a dance prompt.
Dozens of songs and artists can be hits depending on where you look, but the biggest ones loom large over all of them. By any metric, Kenshi Yonezu is the top artist in Japan by a wide margin, and he didn’t need new album STRAY SHEEP to drive that point home. Yet drive it did, with every song from his fifth full-length release crashing into streaming rankings and YouTube uploads easily pulling in millions of views. He shined in places nobody else does — he became the first Japanese performer (well, at least a CGI version of him) to hold a live show in Fortnite and he released a line of clothes in partnership with Uniqlo. Ultimately though, looking towards the old ways lays it out most clearly. STRAY SHEEP sold more than 879 thousand physical copies alone according to Oricon, an absurd number of units moved in 2020 and passing BTS for best first week sales this year.
Fitting, considering STRAY SHEEP serves as a coronation of sorts not just for Yonezu, but for a whole new generation of J-pop artists altering how the country’s pop music sounds.
Yonezu presents STRAY SHEEP as a COVID-19 album. In an interview with Tomonori Shiba for Eyescream, he says he originally wanted to record it alongside a planned nationwide spring tour, but as the pandemic shut down the live music industry, he cancelled all shows and bunkered at home writing songs for what would eventually be this collection. There’s plenty of moments fitting for our stay-at-home reality — the attention-distracting details drizzled throughout “Kanden” (above), the longing for someone you can’t see on the potentially-Night-On-The-Galactic-Railroad referencing “Campanella,” the left-field horniness of “Placebo” (which not only finds Yonezu going full funk sexy, but manages to rise above the one contemporary detail working against him — the presence of RADWIMPS’ Yojiro Noda, who a couple weeks back tweeted out something that could be read as a bad joke or a call for eugenics — to deliver the best song here).
STRAY SHEEP, though, is just as much a document of a slower-burning shift in J-pop that came to fruition this year. The album contains all of Yonezu’s huge hits from the recent past, including the most-viewed Japanese music video in YouTube history and his self-cover of a children’s number he penned that echoed out of every school yard and drug store I walked by in 2019. It’s the definitive collection of how the country’s tastes shifted in five years from peppy idol pop and upbeat viral surprises like Kyary Pamyu Pamyu or Babymetal, to artists doing everything themselves — songwriting, artwork, even videos at times — while reflecting what a buzzkill the 21st century can be.
A week before STRAY SHEEP dropped, duo Yorushika released their album Tousaku. The same day as Yonezu’s latest, the project Zutto Mayonaka de Iinoni. (Zutomayo for short, much to my fingers' relief) shared a mini-album (song above). That all comes after six months where the breakout song of the year came courtesy of another pair called YOASOBI, delivering a surprise hit all about throwing yourself off the top of a building. They aren’t islands — Shiba wrote a thoughtful essay in Billboard Japan looking at how they connect, from sharing similar sonic qualities to handling almost every element of the music and presentation themselves, to how they have created intricate stories and worlds within their work, inviting fans to get lost in them while still offering commentary on what it’s like to be young in Japan.
Most importantly, each outfit features at least one contributor who came up in the Vocaloid community, referring to a mostly online music scene that blossomed up in 2007 around the singing-synthesizer software of the same name most famous for the character Hatsune Miku. Yet as time has gone on, the real legacy of Vocaloid has been the creative spirit — and the Creative Commons License embraced by parent company Crypton Future Media — fostered by this technology, showing a generation of digital natives they could create the art they want without having to compromise if they didn’t want to. That’s about as utopian an idea that has been pushed forward by any internet music community I can think of, and that ethos seems central to the music of these burgeoning new groups.
Oricon Album Combined Rankings For This Week: #1 Kenshi Yonezu #2 Zutomayo #3 Yorushika
Yonezu is the ultimate avatar for it. He started off just like them, crafting nervy numbers topped off by digi-sing, before taking the plunge to put himself out there. His Vocaloid background is central to who he is — to the point when he resurrected his Miku-centric project in 2017, he made a song about how the online video site responsible for the community’s rise had turned into a wasteland, dude cares about sites! — and part of what defines him (and other acts with a Vocaloid background that are enjoying the spotlight right now) is how his actual artistry seems untouched. The credits for these songs usually feature one name at most — with Yonezu also drawing all the album artwork himself (not to mention those fancy fast-fashion designs).
Of course, you don’t land spots in battle royale games and score t-shirt collabs without some help on the biz side. Singing synthesizers didn’t bring on a paradigm shift in the music industry, and every artist I’ve mentioned works with a major label, benefitting from resources a fledgling producer working out of their bedroom lacks. They also turn the always-slippery idea of authenticity into a selling point — see YouTube channels like The First Take, capturing artists flexing their vocal skills in front of fancy mics, which I feel safe in speculating has major label backing behind it.
Yet that’s not on them, and they’ve made far better music while capitalizing on the situation than countless other Japanese performers have in the J-pop era. Yonezu and the flock that have come following his success haven’t changed the landscape entirely as much as they’ve found a healthy compromise between commerce and art — maybe they have to partner with an internet-themed energy drink, but the resulting song will still offer a catchy meditation on longing in the social media age with far more depth than, like, Mr. Children.
STRAY SHEEP is the moment this trend crystalizes. It’s Yonezu’s best work, offering him room to show how unsteady he can make a pop song or what a ballad might sound like if it was sung by a whale. He’s gotten better at those slower songs too, finding ways to brand numbers born for TV drama openings with his own personality. I’ll spare you the paragraph about the number that builds up to an accordion breakdown because — who does that in a pop song anywhere??? This being a J-pop blockbuster is weird, and if Yonezu is the biggest act in your country, something interesting is happening.
That’s a reflection of a bigger change that is helping to turn J-pop into something totally out of step with the rest of the world, but mostly in a good way. STRAY SHEEP isn’t just Japan’s biggest release of 2020, but the album to start with if you want to understand what’s happening here.
Author’s Note: Thanks so much again for subscribing and/or reading this, genuinely means a lot! Just for posterity sakes — this newsletter will feature an essay (like this!) every Wednesday, and a song round-up at the end of Friday. Please reach out to me at patrickstmichel@gmail.com, or follow me at Twitter.