![]() Starting with the release of Pizzicato’s best album to date, On Her Majesty’s Request, which melded satirical 60’s spy concepts and orchestral retro pop with twee, and then followed-up by the debut album of fellow Shibuya-kei originators Flipper’s Guitar. The following year, 1989, as the genre began in earnest, an underground Shibuya-kei arms race began. The bright pop choruses and infectious retro melodies, which incorporate a strong element of soul, are a wholly unique revelation despite the album itself being a bit lacking, oft considered one of Pizzicato’s weakest efforts. It's a slave to its own aesthetic, where as their follow-up in 1988, Bellissima!, has a quality of life and exuberance to it that makes it feel wholly unique. Couples, along with it’s sister album Pizzicatomania!, feel so enslaved to its retro qualities that it could earnestly be mistaken for the classic 1960’s easy listening music it is parroting. Their first album Couples, from 1987, has that central quality of twee pop mixed with easy listening and a retro aesthetic, but if you ask me it doesn’t quite feel like Shibuya-kei yet. My highly unpopular opinion is that the group never really achieved the sound they were going for until 1988, three albums into their career, though the popular convention is that their debut is Shibuya-kei’s start. ![]() Even limited to that one name though it's a struggle to say when exactly Pizzicato Five became a Shibuya-kei band. The most likely answer though, and the most universally agreed upon one, is that Pizzicato Five are the prodiginators of the genre. The question entails a very personal determination of what the core elements of Shibuya-kei are, and that determination could then potentially involve three or so distinct artists and time frames. Determining when exactly that transition to Shibuya-kei occured is as difficult as describing what Shibuya-kei itself is, a struggle which is only further marred by the fact that when and where it started it is more of question of gradience. As lounge music and easy listening grew in popularity small Japanese variations were being added into the mix until suddenly lounge wasn’t there anymore, and instead Shibuya-kei remained. The inevitable conclusion of Japan’s postmodernist culture carnivores.Įssential Song: Cornelius - 'Star Fruit Surf Rider' A New Genre (1987-1990) Pizzicato Five - Pizzicatomania! Flipper's Guitar - Three Cheers For Our Sideĭuring City Pop’s waning years in the urbanite boroughs of Tokyo, something was brewing. Named after a small burrow of Tokyo, the Shibuya district (the name literally means “Shibuya-style”) where the genre had started, Shibuya-kei initially fused French ye-ye, jazz, bossa nova, lounge music, funk, and 60's psychedelic pop into a futuristic retro-pastiche. Obsessions with jazz music and French ye-ye began to form communities of Japanese urbanites with complex musical palettes and far-out postmodernist notions of Japanese identity.Įventually, at the end of that long existential struggle in the waning years of the 1980s, a decade which had also birthed shibuya-kei’s parent genre City Pop, the genre of Shibuya-kei arrived. Something which many militant Japanese resisted. Not just in a limited sense, but in the totality of Japanese life, as western culture and multi-nationalism began pouring into the country. Questions remained of what it meant to be Japanese. The nation had regained its feet, but not necessarily its identity. ![]() Gone were the bombed out neighborhoods and listless feelings of defeat. Political Demonstration Turns Violent As Police Attack Union Workers, 1950s But from destitution rose vigor, and through the ’60s, 70’s and 80’s Japan experienced an almost unprecedented rate of economic growth, growing hand-over-fist until the country stood as one of the world’s most formidable economic players by the mid-80s. The Jewel Voice Broadcast quite literally disintegrated every bit of identity and purpose that the Japanese empire had set out for itself. Their industry and institutions were utterly devastated, and worse yet, their very sense of themselves was brought to its knees. To tell that story though, you have to go back even further.Īt the end of WW2 Japan was a broken state. Shibuya-kei’s cultural moment, and it's ensuing cultural monopoly, is a sprawling epic which describes Japan itself throughout the 1990s. To call something “A Beginner’s Guide To: Shibuya Kei” is to emphasize the ‘Beginner’ part of that statement. Electronica.Įvery one of the genres and ideas listed above were either initially, or eventually, incorporated into the sound of Shibuya-Kei.
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