Make Believe Mailer Vol. 74: Selling Tradition
Everyone wants to find the next old Japanese gem to upload to YouTube or re-press for a new generation of obscurity seekers to gobble up. At some point though, that rich soil full of ambient art gallery music and outsider jazz will give way to an unbreakable limestone made up of fewer interesting releases and more labels hesitant to deal with the rights. One way to move forward has become clear recently -- just get even older.
Two article ran this week highlighting a pair of artists drawing from traditional Japanese music for a modern audience. Bandcamp Daily published a story about Minyo Crusaders, a group whose latest album (well, latest internationally, having come out last year in Japan) merges "minyo" music with styles from the Caribbean and Africa among other places. The Japan Times ran a feature on Meitei, a Hiroshima artist whose latest full-length merges modern electronic flourishes with samples of nature and elements of traditional Japanese music. Both performers sound totally different, but the through line between them is a focus on preserving a time both appear to argue has vanished from modern Japan.
“Minyo used to be music for the common people; popular music," Minyo Crusader Katsumi Tanaka told Bandcamp Daily. "but it doesn’t work like that anymore. It’s regarded as a forgotten, out-of-date music. By comparison, reggae, cumbia, and ska are very well accepted. By combining the two, I believe traditional Japanese song minyo could be revived, bringing back its own charm as a music for the people.” Meitei mastermind Daisuke Fujita is less interested in any one specific style of music, but rather a vague loss of tradition and rural community. He tells The Japan Times “I don’t feel like I’m composing music. I feel like I am using paints. I just leave my own spirit to the beautiful feeling and unique elements of Japan.”
The key drive for both appears to be preservation, of specific styles or ideas from Japan's yesteryear. Minyo Crusaders save history through fun, though context reveals their mission to be far stranger than that. In an interview with The Japan Times last year, Tanaka stresses that early superstars such as Hibari Misora merged minyo music with international styles, serving as a way to introduce global trends to the market. So in reality, the band is preserving this youth trend from the '50 and '60s rather than actual minyo (thank goodness actual organizations do this too).
Meitei comes at this from a more personal place -- his latest album was inspired by the death of his 99-year-old grandmother, who he thought was "one of the last remaining people to have experience and understanding of traditional Japanese ambience" according to press materials. Not to lift PR writing too much, but it goes on that his "music and art is driven by a desire to cast light on an era and aesthetic that he believes is drifting out of the collective Japanese consciousness with each passing generation, what he calls 'the lost Japanese mood.'"
Reading multiple interviews with Meitei and reviews of the album hasn't really helped me figure what exactly this "Japanese mood" lost to time is exactly, and I think that vagueness is part of the point. Still, with both releases and the coverage around them, something has felt off to me in how this is being presented. And that's mostly because of Omodaka.
"When I was a child, I was so interested in traditional Japanese music. But I can't say [that] to my friends, because most Japanese [aren't] interested in Japanese traditional songs," Omodaka [aka Soichi Terada] told The Verge in 2012. Terada's entire career has featured moments of similar preservation, from house tracks featuring sumo wrestlers fighting to dance numbers riffing on minyo via their titles. This has unfolded over the course of 30-some years.
Taking older Japanese music and introducing it to a new audience has been commonplace for decades, to the point where the idea of preserving something that is constantly being preserved feels a little silly. Omodaka was my first encounter with this after moving to Japan, but plenty more before and after have played around with traditional Japanese styles. Pizzicato Five did this on their 2001 swan song of an album, while Vocaloid producers have similarly fiddled around with pre-World War II ideas or outright covered minyo songs.* Koda Kumi had that whole "Japan" centric album, and Wagakki Band's entire existence speaks to this. Minyo Crusaders and Meitei might worry about these old Japanese styles slipping away, but that might be near impossible given how frequently Japanese artists turn to them when they need a new idea.
*(Or outright cover Japanese military songs, which is a good segue into something that I also think has to be mentioned -- all this pining for the old days runs the risk of getting nationalistic really fast. I don't think any artist mentioned here necessarily desires for the bad parts of old Japan to come back, but it's a thin line between craving yesteryear and then embracing retrograde political policies [any countries like that right now?]. Minyo, after all, is also Korean for similar folk songs, introduced during Japanese colonization.)
This recent spotlight on Minyo Crusaders and Meitei feels to me more like it's aimed at people outside Japan than those living here who are constantly surrounded by attempts at merging the modern and the traditional. About 90 percent of the current boom in older Japanese music plays out the same way -- sure, you ask most people if they know Mariah they'll probably say "All I Want For Christmas Is You," but many other artists from that time have continued working while city pop has been a constant from the '90s onwards. "Mainstream" would be a stretch, but it also isn't quite the obscure music that a lot of Western listeners and writers describe it as. This pre-Meiji turn in recent coverage of Japanese music follows the same path, and could easily appear on some Spotify playlist called "Daily Zen" or "Mono No Aware" that indulges in some slight exoticism (like...nobody is hankering for the preservation of big band music or whatever, let me know when Light In The Attic puts out a ragtime compilation).
Maybe part of what irks me about this is how much better music out there drawing from older Japanese sounds exists out there. Minyo Crusaders and Meitei are fine, but a little too reverent and a touch too sleepy (the positive Pitchfork review of the latter brings in lo-fi hip-hop beats to chill to, which for me is an apt one to mention but also the reason I'm not quite charmed by the album as a whole). Not to just rehash last week, but Suiyoubi No Campanella and FAMM'N both have offered better takes on this over the past decade, while Omodaka's "Hohai Bushi" is a far more interesting update of the song than Minyo Crusaders' version. These artists don't play the role of museum keeper, but actually update sounds and find new perspectives on them. Living history ends up far more interesting than a diorama version of it.
News And Views
Mariya Takeuchi's "Plastic Love" got a music video in the wake of its online revival. Of course it's a short version, but I'm willing to give this one a pass because of how progressive Takeuchi's label has been in dealing with fan uploads of the original song -- check how many other labels responsible for city pop artists have taken down older songs. Speaking of...the upload that made it all possible is also back up, after being taken down for some time due to moves made by the photographer of the photo.
Hey! Say! JUMP cancelled an upcoming tour because of fans behaving badly on trains. Completely possible that this is some kind of excuse for something else, but the gesture itself is pretty interesting (and, frankly, welcome) at a time when online fandom has morphed into this MAGA-lite thing. Imagine, a top-level pop star telling their fans to chill out a bit with the harassment! Probably never!
Someone behaving well in the presence of Johnny's hunks? Shinzo Abe.
The saga of YOSHI is a fun one to dig into, though I don't encourage anyone to actually listen to his album unless you like SoundCloud rap as delivered by the 1 percent. Anyway, I've had multiple people speculate this is Sheena Ringo's kid, though I'm not sure it quite matches up. But lord I hope it is.
One playlist YOSHI could try to aim for? Apple Music's new "Wasabi" set, which I think is just their "Japan: New Fire" playlist rebranded (get it???). The description says these are the tunes burning up the chart, but uhhhhh well I don't know what reality Parkgolf is on any chart but I want to live there.
Other idols are pivoting to...appearing in a show where a chubby baseball bird mascot becomes a cop.
Oricon Trail For The Week Of May 6, 2019 To May 12, 2019
Hmmmm, I'm just passing on this one.
Look At Me!
Japan Times highlights, all of them unrelated from music: checking out Matsuyama, child YouTubers making everyone angry and going on the paper's podcast to talk Terrace House.
Blog highlights: Nate and Flip Flop Fly, i-fls, Okinawa Electric Girl Saya
My entry in the 33 1/3 series is still out there! Get it at Amazon or Bloomsbury.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
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