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- Convenor:
-
Lauri Kitsnik
(Hiroshima University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Michael Bourdaghs
(University of Chicago)
- Section:
- Performing Arts
- Sessions:
- Friday 27 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel examines various directions that popular music took in 1970s Japan by looking at agendas and agencies of several players in the field. In order to provide a pluralist view, the focus is on four cases that represent mainstream industry practices as well as those going against the grain.
Long Abstract:
The 1970s were arguably a watershed for the development of Japanese popular music as the entire way of musicking was undergoing substantials shifts during this decade that saw the country emerge from the tumultous 1960s and become a markedly conformist and consumerist society. For popular music, this period meant further domestication of a variety of sounds and genres as well as adoption of new production and promotion practices. At the same time, this facilitated calls for critique towards what was often perceived as a commercial takeover of the youth counter-culture of the 1960s.
This panel is invested in exploring various agents and agendas that actively shaped the face and sound of Japanese popular music during the 1970s. This includes the agency of individual artists, producers, audiences and, quite literally, talent agencies. At stake is also the general issue relating to the capacity of popular music for authentic expression, social protest and political activism. As the four papers comprising this panel will elucidate, what emerged during the decade were several trends that contributed to the further development of Japan's mainstream music industry. This was while the legacies of underground folk music and political youth movements that had all but waned by the early 1970s were being renegotiated and finding new outlets.
In particular, papers on the music manager Kitagawa Johnny and the singer-songwriter Matsutōya Yumi will explore ways how certain influential individuals and their respective agendas have shaped popular Japanese music for the decades to come. While these examples represent cases of positively embracing the opportunities presented by changes in social fabric of Japan, at the other end of the spectrum are the directions taken by those who sought to contest these very tendencies. This could be done by establishing spaces such as Kyōdai Seibu Kōdō, that allowed the music to retain some of its activist features despite becoming mainstream entertainment elsewhere, or, as in the case of Kagawa Ryō, by forging a broader critique towards everyday life. All in all, this panel aim to consider the polarities and proximities during this particularly prolific period for Japanese popular music.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 27 August, 2021, -Lauri Kitsnik (Hiroshima University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the history of Seibu Kōdō, a legendary concert venue at the campus of Kyoto University. In order to chart its role and significance within the popular music culture of 1970s Japan, the focus is placed on its links to radical student movements and community-based management model.
Paper long abstract:
A building with an imposingly tall roof reminiscent of a temple hall stands hidden on the edge of the main campus of Kyoto University. Initially erected to commerate the birth of Crown Prince Akihito, Seibu Kōdō (Western Auditorium) first came to national prominence as a venue of Kyoto's emerging arts and music scene. This paper aims to bring together and examine the wealth of apocryphal evidence and urban legends surrounding Seibu Kōdō in order to chart its role and significance within the urban popular culture of 1970s Japan and beyond. In the beginning of the decade, the fortnightly concert series MOJO WEST provided a forum for a number of now-legendary local musical acts such as Murahachibu, Zunō keisatsu, Carmen Maki, PYG and many others. At the same time, Seibu Kōdō became associated with student movements and left-wing politics of the era: the three stars that still decorate its roof allegedly represent the souls of the Japanese Red Army members involved in the Lod Airport massacre in 1972. By the second half of the decade, Seibu Kōdō's status as a concert hall had crossed national boundaries, attracting performers such as Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Talking Heads, XTC and The Stranglers. After an infamous incident during the concert by The Police in 1980 any further performances by foreign acts were suspended. However, Seibu Kōdō has remained an important presence in Kyoto's alternative band scene to this day and has undergone virtually no changes in its appearance or operating model despite repeated efforts by the university authorities. The venue's implied links to radical politics and its peculiar community-based management model exemplified by the Seibu Kōdō Renkaku Kyōgikai deserve particular attention for considering its potential to address the dynamics of this era in Japanese history characterised by both conformity and dissent.
Lasse Lehtonen (The University of Tokyo)
Paper short abstract:
Singer-songwriter Matsutōya Yumi is typically associated with the birth of New Music - a hybrid pop genre emphasizing musicians' authorship and authenticity in the 1970s. This presentation examines the implications of 'new' in Matsutōya's work with an emphasis on production and textual content.
Paper long abstract:
Singer-songwriter Matsutōya Yumi (b. 1954) is typically associated with the birth of New Music - a prominent genre of Japanese popular music in the 1970s. As the name of the genre suggests, New Music was associated with novelty. But what was exactly 'new' in New Music, and what does this suggested novelty contrast with? This paper seeks to answer these questions by locating the 'new' in the genre based on Matsutōya's work from viewpoints of both production and textual content. Musically, New Music is distinguished by its hybridity, but it can be also defined as a production model. Like politically and socially subversive folk and rock of the late 1960s, New Music claimed the musicians' 'authenticity' by emphasizing their 'authorship.' In contrast with rock and folk, however, New Music did not negotiate its position by claiming 'anti-commercialism.' Rather, it was openly commercial and disinterested politically from the outset; Matsutōya, for example, famously referred to her musical style as 'middle-class sound' (chūsan kaikyū saundo). In other words, New Music assimilated certain ideals of folk and rock but articulated them through the more commercial practices. There were several social, productional, and musical implications in this process that are best located by conceptualizing New Music as a musical discourse representing changes in Japanese popular music and society of the early 1970s. Matsutōya played a significant role in these changes by introducing new musical idioms and lyrics celebrated for their novelty, and by establishing the concept of the female singer-songwriter in Japanese popular music. Based on her example, the rise of New Music was principally enabled by two factors: productional practices established by the older, socially subversive genres, and Japanese society becoming middle class in the 1970s. By asserting content celebrated for its innovativeness - eventually resulting in the genre conceptualization 'New Music' - Matsutōya's work both reflected and participated in constructing the 'new' in Japan of the time.
Scott Aalgaard (Wesleyan University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses Ryo Kagawa (1947-2017), a singer-songwriter who debuted in Japan's critical-folk moment of around-1970. Kagawa worked to shift the critical impulse of folk away from topical, oppositional critique and toward a broader destabilization of the terms and conditions of everyday life.
Paper long abstract:
Kagawa Ryō (1947-2017) is remembered today as one of the most influential artists to emerge onto Japan's music scene in the early 1970s. An erstwhile singer in Beatles cover bands who became a disciple of sorts to critical-folk legend Takada Wataru (1949-2005), Kagawa made his debut at the second Nakatsugawa Folk Jamboree (1970) with his acoustic anthem 'Kyokun I [Lesson I].' This work would remain one of the best-known songs of the folk music moment of Japan's late 1960s and early 1970s, and inspire numerous covers and re-releases, both within Japan and beyond. Largely on the basis of 'Lesson I's success, Kagawa would go on to be celebrated over his nearly fifty-year career as a central figure in Japan's critically-oriented folk music boom. Despite his successes and the degree to which he is associated with this moment, however, Kagawa expended considerable energy rejecting/resisting the label of 'folk singer,' pleading to be understood according to different terms. This paper takes this apparent contradiction as its starting point and interrogates Kagawa's critical stance as it is enunciated in 'Lesson I' and other works. It argues for an understanding of his art as a form of what I call anti-folk, which in fact aims to amplify the productive critique manifest in the best of the music from this period even as it seeks to move beyond what Kagawa (and others) understood as folk's limitations. By attending in particular to the playful, disorienting deployment of gender that underpins 'Lesson I,' I show how Kagawa shifts the critical impulse of folk away from the topical, oppositional 'protest' that is regularly associated with the genre, and toward a broader critical destabilization of the terms and conditions of everyday life, and especially of the modern nation-state itself. By developing a critical strategy that refused to rely solely on the specific conditions or figures of around-1970 for its legibility, opting instead for critical interrogations of the broader historical phenomena that framed them, Kagawa was able to both survive the mid-70s demise of folk and help save the critical promise of this music from itself.
Michael Furmanovsky (Ryukoku University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the life and motivations of the Kitagawa Johnny, the recently deceased pop impresario beginning with his teenage years in the post-war Nisei community of Los Angeles to his eventual status as founder of the most successful idol-producing agency in pop music history.
Paper long abstract:
The death of Kitagawa, Johnny, the long-time president of Johnny's & Associates (J&A), in July 2019, led to an outpouring of media commentary on the achievements of the enigmatic boss of perhaps the most successful boy band idol-producing agency in pop music history. This paper explores Kitagawa's life beginning with his early years as a wartime evacuee in Wakayama and teenage years in the post-war Nisei community of Los Angeles. In July 1950, in what was already a multicultural city with a vibrant entertainment culture, Kitagawa met and acted as a guide for the touring teenage star Hibari Misora, a pivotal moment in his early life. This paper examines the impact of this experience on his subsequent decision to return to Japan during the 1950s and his involvement a decade later in the country's nascent pop music industry. Focus is placed on the ways in which Kitagawa drew on the hybrid jazz-musical approach to ensemble stage dancing that was triggered by the release of West Side Story in 1961 and which was further popularized by the energetic dance troupes appearing on mid-1960s American TV shows such as Shindig and Hulabaloo. Additional influences on his approach to marketing and managing his boy band agency, are also examined, most notably that of Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the creators and managers of the of the iconic faux Beatles idol group, The Monkees. Through an exploration of his early experiences, this paper attempts to give insight into how this complex and controversial returnee to Japan, after numerous setbacks and considerable personal scandal, reshaped a major segment of the Japanese entertainment business and arguably much of the East Asian music business now dominated by multi million-selling K-Pop artists.