Make Believe Mailer #113: Keep Rolling Rolling Rolling
Twenty Years Of The Katamari Damacy...And Peak Shibuya-Kei
In recent years, Japanese and international perspectives have aligned when it comes to the music defining the country’s canon. Critics in Japan took a while to get into the swing of making decades-spanning lists, but once they did they really got into it, whether investigating ‘90s J-pop or ‘80s city pop. An interesting development found on these efforts — an awareness, even a small one, of what sorts of Japanese songs have connected with listeners discovering all eras of the nation’s pop via the internet. Some of these lists look like Rate Your Music “ultimate box sets,” while magazines such as Record Collectors’ spent the September 2022 issue showcasing “city pop works loved by foreign fans,” an exercise in re-examining their own canons to make space for artists capturing the attention of a new global era.
It’s completely possible to imagine some fantastical roundtable where domestic critics and people setting Anri songs over anime beaches on YouTube come together to create a truly defining list of defining Japanese albums (Fishmans would probably top it). Yet a few gaps remain. As someone who scoops up any effort at Japanese canon building, I’ve seen a diverse set of sounds land on these lists — experimental noise sitting alongside Johnny’s pop, underground rap pioneers rubbing elbows with guys trying to make a big band revival happen — yet zero of them feature video game soundtracks. Arguably though, this might be the type of Japanese music most people globally know — and it has been acknowledged as such, with the Super Mario Bros. soundtrack getting a 33 1/3 entry and who knows how many blog-based lists celebrating the orchestral drama of the Final Fantasy series.
Japanese critics haven’t come around to seriously considering these when constructing canons. One day that will probably change — and when it does, I hope the listmakers of tomorrow save some space for a soundtrack released 20 years ago that isn’t just a delight to listen to…but represents the last great hurrah for one of the ‘90s defining styles.
I can’t remember how I learned about Katamari Damacy, the 2004 roll-everything-up Playstation 2 title. Maybe someone online wrote about the general zaniness of it after paying the Japanese verions that March, or perhaps a news story highlighted how it was coming to the States that September...or maybe I read a review praising it. Whatever the reason, it became one of the first games I bought after securing a second-hand console sometime late that year.
While high-school-aged me reveled in levelling entire cities to construct my giant ball, something much more important happened by booting this one up. I was, inadvertently, hearing my first Shibuya-Kei album ever. Everyone else charmed by Katamari too was experiencing a style that had already seen its peak days years earlier in Japan, with one last hurrah.
Divorced from any context, the soundtrack to Katamari Damacy is a Technicolor delight. Arranged by a mix of artists, the music matches the oddball nature of what’s happening on screen by skittering from style to style. Jazzy cuts bordering on standards share a tracklist with then-emerging picopop. There’s something finding two dudes sing-speaking like a freindlier Zazen Boys over glitchy electornics, and then you have multiple mambos and sambas. As delightful as it is to work towards getting your katamari big enough to roll up an octopus, the process could actually be kind repetitive. The game needed a varied soundtrack with enough going on — see, all these vocals, often about absorbing and crashing into things, either metaphorically or literally — to keep the player going.
A bunch of those genres above, though, should give away that the Katamari Damacy soundtrack exists within the lineage of Shibuya-Kei, the ‘90s-defining style that found artists plucking ideas and samples from a variety of aged sources. While the game’s music never reaches the “new stereophonic sound spectacular” levels of Pizzicato Five or the studio nerdery of peak Cornelius, the team behind Katamari Damacy’s songs clearly drew heavily from that period where all eras were fair game for creation. There’s a glee at pulling sound out of time, whether playing around with bossa nova or crafting a big goopy ‘80s-style ballad to serve as the ending theme. There’s also a playful desire to needle listeners — you can find lets-play videos of the game where YouTubers recoil at the children’s choruses powering some inclusions here, while I’ll draw from personal experience to say hearing a robotic voice inform me “YOU ARE SMART” over and over agin grew grating. I bet they loved that.
By 2004, Shibuya-Kei was already fading — Cornelius had ditched the sound in favor of the icier minimalism of Point, Pizzicato Five was over, a bunch of others were digging deeper into neo city pop — and the then on-trend sound in this lane was “neo Shibuya Kei,” a more fidgety, breakbeat-filled mutation on the style being pushed forward by Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, EeL, THE APRILS and more. The folks creating the Katamari soundtrack let bits of this movement in — “LONELY ROLLING STAR” being a prime example — while simply existing at a time where a lot of what was emerging out of this niche easily could have applied to the sonic world Katamari Damacy created. Like, I don’t believe you if you can’t picture yourself rolling up various skycrapers and tankers while Perfume’s “Vitamin Drop” plays.
Despite being so focused on the past, Shibuya-Kei isn’t nostalgic. Yesteryear is ultimately a source for raw materials rather than emotional connection. City pop — as it is understood today — connected with listeners around the world in part because it offered the pull of an imagined past…that, actually, happened to exist, becuase the music was made with folks living in Bubble Era Japan in mind, which nearly half a decade later sounds like a fantasy. Shibuya-Kei, meanwhile, was all about private knowledge (and privilege) in the pre-internet era. You needed time and money to sift through Ochanomizu’s record stores to find Magoo In Hi-Fi (today, I search YouTube to provide you the delights of Jim Backus). Any emotional connection to the records that would end up being the sonic backbone of Shibuya-Kei was a coincidence…it was a style thriving on scarcity, with the best acts being able to re-appropriate a lost past to modern times.
The Katamari Damacy soundtrack falls somewhere between familiar longing for the past and the cool digging of Shibuya-Kei. As emphasized above, the genres mined for this collection get quite ecclectic and dusty as you go. It isn’t quite an exercise in rarity, though. As primary composer Yuu Miyake has stated, the team selected vocalists who “were well-known in Japan but nobody had heard from in awhile for whatever reason.” The names making the final cut have rich histories albeit obscure notoriety in Japanese music — Kenji Niinuma, who speak-raps on “The Moon And The Prince” was a prolific enka singer in the ‘70s, pop singer Yui Asaka once appeared on big music TV shows but for various complications vanished pops up, and they got jazz act (and Lupin The Third contributor) Charlie Kosei to turn up for my personal favorite “Que Sera Sera” — yet this is the most telling detail of the soundtrack. These performers were definitely forgotten in 2004, but it’s not quite digging for obscurity in the veign of Flipper’s Guitar in the ‘80s. Nobody remembered these artists…but at one point, they were very well known.
Katamari Damacy strikes a balance, between cool rarity and familiar comforts. None of this probably mattered for anyone outside of Japan playing the game in 2004, but for the folks behind it, they were walking a tightrope between the bricolage of Shibuya-Kei and a morea emotional nostalgia for the pop of yesteryear. This soundtrack allowed them space to play with it, and create an interesting twist on both ends in the process.
The 20th anniversary of the Katamari Damacy soundtrack arrives at such a perfect time as to almost feel scripted. Months before, similarly Shibuya-Kei-adjacent project Serani Poji enjoyed newfound TikTok love thanks to a pair of cheery-sounding songs. Those works…similarly navigating a space between the more sample-delic sounds of ‘90s Shibuya-Kei and Aughts-era Neo developments…also exist becuase of a video game. Serani Poji is the name of an in-game pop star found in the Dreamcast curio Roommania #203 (and subsequent sequel), which after watching hours of footage to assist with my profile of Serani Poji I’d describe as a “life simulator, but not like The Sims.”
It’s a happy development becuase once again a video game helped deliver an extremely popular sound to the world. As mentioned, most Japanese music journalists discount the imprtance of video game soundtracks…so when something like “where is smiely?” comes around, they have to act fast to figure out what is going on. Plenty of people saw the rise of “Plastic Love” or “Flyday Chinatown” on YouTube, but something made for Playstation throws them for a loop. Now, though, they have to expand their scope, to see just the type of music making a meaningful connection with listeners.
The Katamari Damacy soundtrack is the best-case scenario for this. It’s a monument to Shibuya-Kei and the influences that helped shape it (Miyake cites Haruomi Hosono’s Video Game Music as a reason he got into this world) while also being a bit more heart-on-sleeve when it comes to the sounds of the past it references. It’s a fitting, albeit kinda confounding, closer to the era of Shibuya-Kei as was once known, while still sounding just as delightful now as it did two decades ago. Perhaps in 20 more years, it will appear on lists commemorating the Japanese music of the Aughts, as it should.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
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