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.