Retromania

Shibuya-kei emerged from the rich culture of music collecting and consumption which had established itself by the late 1980s in the fashionable Shibuya shopping district of south-west Tokyo. At the beginning of the 1990s, the opening of the HMV and Tower Records flagship stores, in addition to others such as Wave and Shinseido, created what David Marx calls an ‘ecosystem’ of record stores which provided outlets not just for Japanese but also for imported foreign music.Footnote ³ As Marx recounts (Reference Marx2010), the term ‘Shibuya-kei’ itself began to be applied to a select group of Japanese indie bands, including Flipper's Guitar, Pizzicato Five, and Love Tambourines, among others, which were promoted at the newly opened HMV store as being more interesting than the familiar Japanese-language clones of Western pop genres, and which derived the bulk of their sales from the record stores in the Shibuya district.Footnote ⁴ It is no coincidence that two of the figures regarded as most influential in Shibuya-kei's emergence, Konishi Yasuharu and Oyamada Keigo, were avid music collectors. As Marx explains:

Konishi's band Pizzicato Five, fronted by the glamorous Nomiya Maki, was to become perhaps the most iconic example of what Shibuya-kei was about. Yet in a very different way, Oyamada's band Flipper's Guitar are also regarded as one of the pioneers of the Shibuya-kei sound, with Oyamada himself subsequently becoming one of its central figures under the moniker Cornelius – a name inspired, in a typical piece of pop-culture eclecticism, by the central character of the 1960s American science fiction movie classic Planet of the Apes. Both bands were characterised in different ways by an eclectic internationalism: while Pizzicato Five was a postmodern mélange of jazz, easy listening, Motown, disco and club music, Flipper's Guitar was heavily indebted to more recent British indie-pop and the neo-psychedelia of The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays. The indie labels founded by Konishi and Oyamada, Readymade and Trattoria, along with others such as Crue-L and Escalator, became the distribution platform for the bands and solo artists who were or became part of the Shibuya-kei scene, including Love Tambourines, Kahimi Karie, Takako Minegawa, Yukari Fresh, Bridge, and numerous others. While Shibuya-kei was primarily a Tokyo-based scene, it also had affinities with the Kyoto-based acid-jazz scene through DJs such as Tanaka Tomoyuki (Fantastic Plastic Machine) and Kyoto Jazz Massive.

If there were one characteristic the diverse group of artists gathered under the Shibuya-kei umbrella shared, in accordance with larger cultural developments within 1980s Japan, it was an ostentatious internationalism.Footnote ⁵ While Japanese bands had been known for their imitation of Western bands and popular music genres since at least the 1960s, what differentiated the Shibuya-kei bands were their references not just to contemporary but to retro popular music genres, including 1960s French and British pop, Brazilian bossa nova, easy listening and exotica, European movie soundtracks, Motown, disco and 1980s UK indie-pop – a phenomenon which Simon Reynolds recently dubbed ‘retromania’.Footnote ⁶ The references in question were not limited to music alone, but also extended to the styling of bands and artists in album art, promotional media, photoshoots for magazine articles, music videos and live performances. An early photograph of Pizzicato Five (1985) poses the band against the background of a movie poster for Jacques Tati's film Mon Oncle (1958), purchased by Konishi Yasuharu while on a trip to Paris. The band's first single, produced by Hosono Haruomi and released in the same year, bore the English title ‘Audrey Hepburn Complex’. The French nouvelle vague, the Italian glamour of Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), the Swinging London of Antonioni's Blow-up (1966), or the 1960s French musicals of Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand are variously invoked in Pizzicato Five music videos, Nomiya Maki's reincarnations of 1960s fashion icons Twiggy and Veruschka, or Kahimi Karie's EP Giapponese a Roma. Much could be written about Shibuya-kei's French connection, from the ubiquitous French-language samples of Shibuya-kei songs to actual collaborations with French artists such as Philippe Auclair (of whom more later), Raphael Sebbag (of acid-jazz unit United Future Organisation) or producer Bertrand Burgalat. Kahimi Karie lived in Paris for a number of years and self-consciously styled herself after 1960s chanteuses such as France Gall or Claudine Longet.

The notion of ‘internationalism’ requires some clarification in this context. The Shibuya-kei artists were of course not alone in their fascination with easy listening and other retro genres; indeed, it was in many ways symptomatic of the larger tendencies in Euro-American music culture of their time, which also involved a postmodern (often camp) nostalgia for retro genres such as exotica and the pastiches and remixes of these which became known as ‘lounge music’. From this perspective, Shibuya-kei's internationalism, rather than a direct or ‘vertical’ reference to Euro-American retro genres, can also be seen as a Japanese response to parallel shifts taking place contemporaneously (or ‘horizontally’) within the postmodern music culture of the 1990s. The Shibuya-kei sound can thus be seen as tapping into and synthesising a number of highly cosmopolitan music scenes in cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, New York or Rio. In what follows, I will explain in more detail Shibuya-kei's connection to some of these scenes, with the goal of disarticulating it from the local context within which it has tended to be discussed.

London – Paris

In 1992 Japanese indie label Crue-L Records, founded a year previously by DJ and producer Takimi Kenji (LN-CC, n.d.), released the first album by a then little-known singer known as Kahimi Karie (Hiki Mari). Titled Mike Alway's Diary and produced by Karie's boyfriend at the time, Oyamada Keigo, the mini-album included a song of the same title which was an homage to the founder of the short-lived 1980s British art-pop indie label él Records, known for its postmodern pastiches of 1960s British bubblegum pop and the neo-baroque stylisation of its artists after European nobility (Louis Philippe, The King of Luxembourg).Footnote ⁷ As Alway explained in a recent interview, the label's primary market was not Britain but Japan, with él artists such as the Would-Be-Goods or Bad Dream Fancy Dress stylised specifically to appeal to Japanese youth (McNay, I. n.d.). While the British music press remained largely indifferent to él's releases, they enjoyed a cult following in Japan, even meriting a Japanese tour by three of the label's artists organised by Alway in the late 1980s.Footnote ⁸ The song ‘Mike Alway's Diary’ itself, as Alway acknowledges, is essentially a pastiche of the él Records signature sound, originating from his acquaintance with the Francophile Karie and Oyamada. The song is an indication of the cult status enjoyed by él Records and its founder in Japanese indie music culture of the time. While it remains unclear whether the UK label was the inspiration for the similar-sounding Crue-L Records founded only a few years later, both Kahimi Karie's early work and that of other Crue-L artists (such as Love Tambourines) can be attributed to the British label's cult following in Japan. It was, indeed, a Japanese funding offer which persuaded Alway to return to the music industry in 1997 with Songs For The Jet Set (1997–2000), a neo-él compilation series, after he had abruptly parted company with the label in 1989. Among the innumerable compilations of él Records artists to have been released over the past decade, one titled simply All About Mike Alway was released by the Japanese label Rambling Records in 2004.

French musician, arranger, producer, France Football journalist, biographer of French football legend Eric Cantona, and diehard Arsenal fan Philippe Auclair (a.k.a. Louis Philippe) has lived in the UK since the 1980s, and along with Simon Fisher-Turner (a.k.a. The King of Luxembourg) was one of the mainstays of the él Records catalogue before a later rift with Alway in the 1990s. After the demise of él Records in 1989 he turned to Japan and found the support of Oyamada Keigo, who invited him to executive produce one of the earliest releases of Oyamada's Trattoria label, the compilation Fab Gear (1991). Mentioned by British expatriate dandy Nick Currie (a.k.a. Momus) as ‘the founding record, some say, of Shibuya-kei’ (Currie Reference Currie2008), the compilation includes, in addition to a song co-written by Auclair, four cuts by él-Records alumni The Monochrome Set and Currie himself (as Momus). According to the Louis Philippe website, Trattoria's major-label parent, Polystar, subsequently became Auclair's ‘second home’, releasing a series of his albums from 1991 to Reference Currie1998, as well as several compilations, and facilitating licensing deals with labels in France, Spain, the UK and the US. Trattoria's catalogue until Cornelius's Point (2001) included numerous other Western artists (Apples in Stereo, Le Hammond Inferno). Based, himself, in Japan, Currie was influential in the Shibuya-kei scene throughout the 1990s, writing songs and producing records for Kahimi Karie and other artists (Poison Girl Friend). Given the close involvement of figures such as Alway, Auclair and Currie with the Shibuya-kei group more or less from its inception, one begins to see the problems involved in treating it as an exclusively Japanese phenomenon.

While Japanese indie labels Crue-L and Trattoria served as a bridge between the él Records and Shibuya-kei scenes, outside Japan Shibuya-kei artists were distributed across a network of European and US indie labels and producers, including Paris (Tricatel), London (Cherry Red), Berlin (Bungalow), New York (Matador), Chicago (Minty Fresh) and LA (Emperor Norton). Among these, Matador Records merits particular mention, playing a key role in popularising Pizzicato Five for American audiences, as well as Germany's Bungalow Records, whose Sushi 3003 (1996) and Sushi 4004 (1998) compilations also circulated widely throughout Europe and the US. In their seemingly endless releases of Shibuya-kei labels such as Escalator and Readymade, these labels connect Japanese Shibuya-kei artists with larger currents in Western popular music inspired by a similar nostalgia for 1960s retro-pop and exotica, including Paris's Bertrand Burgalat, LA's April March, or European DJs such as Dimitri From Paris and Señor Coconut. Within this transnational arena, the Japaneseness of Shibuya-kei metamorphoses into a transnational soundscape, part of a larger mix that includes many of its own sources, including French retro-pop, the art-pop of él Records, the exotica of Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, and Brazilian bossa nova.

New York – Tokyo

‘Shibuya-kei is dead’, declared Nick Currie with characteristic archness in a Reference Currie1998 column for the Glasgow Herald. Currie's tongue might have seemed to have been planted firmly in his cheek: had he not, of all people, recently played a key role in the popularisation of Shibuya-kei in the West as the producer of Paris-based Kahimi Karie's first non-Japanese EP (1995)? Had he not also recently collaborated with her in a series of performances in New York called ‘Portable Shibuya’? Yet Currie's title was also, in a sense, correct; his article provided one of the first English-language introductions to a musical subculture which had been percolating for much of the past decade, but which within Japan itself was already considered to have passed its peak by the time Currie introduced it to his Western readers.

Thanks in part to Currie's promotion of it, over the subsequent decade Shibuya-kei developed a cult following among American and European youth. Pizzicato Five were the first to arrive, performing for three years at the New York New Music Seminar (1992–1994); in his new persona as Cornelius, Oyamada débuted his first domestic US album release, Fantasma (Reference Currie1998) at the South-by-Southwest Festival in 1998 as part of his first world tour. Distributed by Matador Records in the US, each artist has reportedly sold over 100,000 records for the label (cited in Marx Reference Marx2004, part 5). Pizzicato Five's Happy Sad EP was featured in Robert Altman's documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, Unzipped (1995), and from the mid-1990s onwards their songs became increasingly popular sources for remixes by club DJs in Europe and the US.

Other than Portable Shibuya, Shibuya-kei's main New York connection was expatriate Japanese Korean DJ Towa Tei, formerly of the early 1990s band Deee-Lite, whose acid-jazz début Future Listening! (1994) exhibited the Shibuya-kei staples of ironic references to 1960s easy listening (starting with its title), sample-heavy dance mixes, and bossa nova, featuring Pizzicato Five vocalist Nomiya Maki as well as contributions by Arto Lindsay and the then-rising diva of Brazilian lounge music, Bebel Gilberto. Towa Tei's extensive remix credits include a number of Pizzicato Five songs, while the addition of French (or French-accented) vocalists to his subsequent albums enhanced their overlap with Shibuya-kei's pop-cosmopolitanism.Footnote ⁹ Also in New York, Cibo Matto, comprising expatriate Japanese musicians Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, have often been associated with Shibuya-kei, although they did not to my knowledge collaborate with Shibuya-kei musicians, and their 1995 album Viva! La Woman reportedly sold only 20,000 copies in Japan, compared to 74,000 in the US (Bell Reference Bell1999).

Over the past decade, the emergence of the Web as a mass medium has played a key role in the internationalisation of Shibuya-kei: by the late 1990s a network of Pizzicato Five websites produced by North American and European fans had already begun to appear, and a Shibuya-kei Yahoo! group was launched in 2000, although blogs and social networks have since become the preferred sites for fan activity. Today, music by Shibuya-kei artists is readily available via YouTube, CD mail-order companies, digital download services and torrent sites.

Global Shibuya-kei

By 2004, Shibuya-kei fatigue was setting in among some of its Western fans, with David Marx publishing a series of online articles declaring that Shibuya-kei had run its course (Marx Reference Marx2004), and looking to emerging genres such as the electronics-heavy Akiba-kei or the younger generation exemplified by Tokumaru Shugo as new sources of subcultural capital. In spite of vanguardist proclamations of its demise, however, Shibuya-kei has stubbornly refused to go away either in Japan or worldwide. In recent years, Flipper's Guitar tributes and Shibuya-kei remixes and retrospectives have begun to appear with increasing regularity. While Konishi's latest protégée, Nomoto Karia, or girl-duo Vanilla Beans exemplify the style in its more commercial form, a new generation of neo-Shibuya-kei bands (Qypthone, Capsule, Dahlia, Elektel, Aprils) continue to produce music inspired by the Shibuya-kei sound.

As I indicated earlier, the Shibuya-kei artists were certainly not alone in their fascination with 1960s easy listening and other retro-pop and exotic genres, but rather were symptomatic of a larger, postmodern tendency within popular music that produced similarly retro-inspired bands (often identifiable by their use of the mantra-word of 1960s musical consumption, stereo: Stereolab, Stereo Total, Apples in Stereo, Humming Urban Stereo, and the like). What the Shibuya-kei artists did was to put their own, specifically Japanese mark on these retro-pop genres, which in turn has now become a distinctive style in its own right. The past decade has seen a growing number of Shibuya-inspired projects and artists outside Japan, including the UK's Gentle People, France's Dimitri From Paris and Nouvelle Vague, and in the US, The Flaming Lips or LA retro-pop duo The Bird and The Bee. The Shibuya-kei Yahoo! group lists, in addition to Japanese artists, several dozen ‘like-minded acts’ from France, the US and UK, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands. Shibuya itself has been eulogised in songs such as Momus's ‘Anthem of Shibuya’ (1997) or Glaswegian indie band The Pearlfishers' exquisitely titled ‘The Umbrellas of Shibuya’ (2007), and there is even a UK indie band called Shibuya Crossings. In the US, retro-pop duo The Bird and The Bee's song ‘Love Letter to Japan’ (2009) is an homage to J-pop more generally. South Korean bands Clazziquai Project, Casker, and Humming Urban Stereo are often seen as representing a Korean neo-Shibuya-kei movement.Footnote ¹⁰ Spanish indie band La Casa Azul and Argentina's Modular have both produced neo-Shibuya-kei albums, while La Casa Azul's first Japanese release, a compilation called Cerca de Shibuya (2011), offers Japanese record collectors the interesting experience of acquiring a Spanish Shibuya-kei CD at Tower Records Shibuya itself. Neither imitations of nor references to Shibuya-kei, this growing catalogue of examples can be seen as contributions to the continuing development of Shibuya-kei as transnational audiotopia. Moreover, Japanese Shibuya-kei artists are still actively involved in collaborative projects with non-Japanese musicians around the globe, ensuring that the style continues to follow new and intriguing itineraries in the present.

Belo Horizonte – Tokyo

Along with French and British pop, bossa nova is one of the signature styles of the Shibuya-kei sound. Originating in Rio in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after initial success in the US it quickly globalised and bands such as Sergio Mendes's Brazil '66 became staples of easy-listening music around the globe, inspiring numerous European and other imitators.Footnote ¹¹ Bossa nova has long held a special place in Japan, in part because of the historical links between Brazil and Japan through migration (de Carvalho Reference de Carvalho2002; Masterson Reference Masterson2003; Maeda Reference Maeda2007). Brazilian musicians such as Nara Leão (Cabral Reference Cabral2009) enjoy a cult following there, bossa nova bars with names like Barquinho abound and, as the recent documentary Bossa Nova Sol Nascente (2010) attests, a substantial body of bossa nova music has been produced by Japanese-Brazilian as well as Japanese musicians (see also Tartan Reference Tartan2006). It was perhaps inevitable, then, that bossa nova would be part of the Shibuya-kei repertoire, and that Shibuya-kei would find a receptive audience in Brazil, particularly among producers of the increasingly ubiquitous compilations of bossa-based club music such as Bossacucanova.

One of the more interesting encounters is the recent collaboration between Nomiya Maki, formerly of Pizzicato Five, and Fernanda Takai, a Brazilian of Japanese descent and lead singer of indie band Pato Fu. Although Takai's grandmother is Japanese, she reportedly only began studying Japanese as an adult (Mikevis Reference Mikevis2008), though she clearly has a longer familiarity with Shibuya-kei: Pato Fu's 1999 EP Isopor includes a Shibuya-kei pastiche titled ‘Made in Japan’,Footnote ¹² while the band's 2010 album Música de Brinquedo includes a cover of the Pizzicato Five song ‘Twiggy Twiggy’ performed in Japanese by Takai. The Maki-Takai collaboration began with a joint performance of some Pizzicato Five songs in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and during Pato Fu's subsequent Japanese tour in 2008. This was followed by the neo-Shibuya-kei EP Maki-Takai: No Jetlag (2009), with each singer performing both in Japanese and Portuguese, and including a Shibuya-esque cover of Roberto Menescal's bossa nova standard ‘O Barquinho’ sung in Japanese.Footnote ¹³ The duo have since performed together again at a series of 2011 concerts at the Festival de Cinema Japonês in São Paolo.Footnote ¹⁴ I mention this encounter not because it is particularly unusual – on the contrary, such encounters between like-minded musicians are an everyday occurrence in today's global music industry – but because it exemplifies both the transnational reach of Shibuya-kei today, and the genre's continuing evolution in an ongoing, transcultural dialogue with other musicians and musics around the globe. Given its own globalisation over the past decade the question remains as to whether Shibuya-kei can now be considered as a style of ‘world music’, albeit one which challenges that term's received definition.

Saudade do Futuro

I will conclude with some thoughts about affect, as it is one of the most distinctive aspects of Shibuya-kei and offers a way of talking about the music in terms beyond music-industry economics or transnational flows. In contrast to the darkness, alienation and rage that characterise much contemporary popular music, Shibuya-kei music tends toward a sunnier disposition. In this respect it resembles some of its sources, most notably the perennially cheerful indie-pop of él Records (and it comes as little surprise that Louis Philippe's website is named ‘Sunshine’). It has been suggested that the sunniness of Shibuya-kei reflects the economic optimism of the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the end of the bubble economy, when consumer spending was still high, especially among Japanese youth. Shibuya-kei songs reflect the affluent, cosmopolitan lifestyles of the artists who produced them, focusing on leisure and play rather than the world of work: shopping, nightlife, watching movies, fashion, favourite sports players, hanging out with friends in coffee-shops, partying, being in love. They are utopian in the same way that commodity culture more generally is utopian, projecting a world of better living through consumption of the ‘right’ items. It is, of course, all too easy to dismiss such musics as merely frivolous and superficial, in contrast to the high seriousness of angrier musics; fortunately, the picture is more complex than this. Here él Records again provides a useful prototype: while the almost cloying sweetness of some of Louis Philippe's songs, for example, may not be to everyone's taste, they do prove on closer examination to be more bittersweet or wistful rather than just naïvely happy. Shibuya-kei could be said to be characterised by a similar emotional ambivalence, with happiness always tinged with sadness, loss and nostalgia. While the word ‘happy’ may seem to occur like a mantra in Pizzicato Five songs, for example, it is noteworthy how often it is juxtaposed with an opposite or countervailing term: ‘Happy Sad’ is the most obvious example, but the title of the band's 1997 album Happy End of the World strikes a similarly dissonant note (while also, in a classic piece of overdetermination, referencing Hosono Haruomi's 1970s pre-Yellow Magic Orchestra band Happy End).

In discussions of Brazilian music, the concept of saudade is often cited as defining both the essence and the uniqueness of that music, especially in genres such as bossa nova.Footnote ¹⁵Saudade is often referenced explicitly in bossa nova in songs such as ‘Chega de Saudade,’ and given Shibuya-kei's love of bossa nova it is hardly surprising that it is also referenced there, for instance in the Fantastic Plastic Machine song ‘Pura Saudade.’ The happy-sad ambivalence mentioned above could also be seen as close to the affective register of saudade. But what could such yearning be for? I would suggest that it is closely related to the nostalgia of Shibuya-kei musicians for the 1960s and the popular music of that period, and could be characterised more specifically by the Portuguese notion of saudade do futuro (best translated as ‘nostalgia for the future’). Much of the charm of 1950s and 1960s popular music genres such as easy listening, or what postmodern listeners of the 1990s started to call ‘space-age bachelor pad music’, arguably lay in its naive optimism about the future, and its cult of modern design and technology – whether in the home or in space – as the basis for human progress.Footnote ¹⁶ Nowhere is this technological utopianism more evident than in the domain of music production and consumption, with the advent of ‘hi-fidelity’ recordings, stereophonic record players, and with them the rise of a new genre of recordings designed to demonstrate their new features. Such records are the origin of the ‘new stereophonic sound spectacular’ sample which recurs in various Pizzicato Five songs, and serves as an auditory symbol of the techno-futurism of its time.Footnote ¹⁷ Pizzicato Five's artwork is pervaded by such nostalgia-for-the-future imagery, from ultra-modern lounges to Nomiya Maki posing in a space suit for the cover of a remix compilation. This fantasy of an ultra-modern future, promised by many world fairs over the past century, had become an object of ironic nostalgia by the 1990s, for a postmodern generation now living in the much less rosy future. Pizzicato Five's saudade do futuro, like that of similar retro-futuristic bands such as Stereolab or the Gentle People, yearns nostalgically for the future as the 1960s imagined it, the future of space-age bachelor pads and supersonic air travel, of moon landings and Barbarella.

The concept of saudade itself, while difficult to translate and often claimed to be a uniquely Brazilian affect, nevertheless has some similarities to the Japanese expression mono no aware, often translated as ‘the pathos of things’, which refers to the awareness of the transience of everything and the gentle sadness or wistfulness this brings:Footnote ¹⁸ and of course, Momus has a song about it, ‘The Sadness of Things’ (1995), written in the midst of his collaborations with Shibuya-kei artists. Happy-Sad, saudade, mono no aware: All Things Must Pass, as George Harrison might have put it.

Which brings us, appropriately, to Konishi Yasuharu's latest post-Pizzicato Five project. Released on 25 May 2011, the date of the 10th anniversary of the band's official dissolution, under the melancholy name of Pizzicato One, its cover depicts a black-clad, snow-covered Konishi standing stiffly alone in a wintry landscape, and is described as a collection of ‘very sad’ cover songs (Universal Music 2011). ‘Gathered from around the world regardless of genre’, arranged by Konishi but sung in English by different singers, it includes a cover of perhaps the definitive statement of musical utopianism: John Lennon's ‘Imagine’. Among several Brazilian songs, one is a spoken-word performance by bossa legend Marcos Valle of his classic, ‘Preciso Aprender a Ser Só’ (‘I need to learn to be alone’, 1965), in a new translation which accentuates the saudade of the Portuguese original.Footnote ¹⁹ One could scarcely wish for a more succinct encapsulation of the Shibuya-kei ethos of connoisseurship, internationalism, utopianism and bittersweet memory. Saudade/mono no aware becomes self-reflexive here, a nostalgia for its own passing. While the release of the album in the aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake and in the midst of Japan's nuclear crisis was no doubt coincidental, its melancholy evocation of the transience of things suddenly became a metaphor for the national mood more generally. In post-311 Japan, its mono no aware seems as in tune with its time as the music of Pizzicato Five was in the heady days of the bubble economy.