J-pop
J-pop, natively known simply as pops, is the name for a form of popular music that entered the musical mainstream of Japan in the 1990s. Modern J-pop has its roots in traditional music of Japan, and significantly in 1960s pop and rock music. J-pop replaced kayōkyoku, a term for Japanese popular music from the 1920s to the 1980s in the Japanese music scene.
Japanese rock bands such as Happy End fused the Beatles and Beach Boys-style rock with Japanese music in the 1960s1970s. J-pop was further defined by new wave and crossover fusion acts of the late 1970s, such as Yellow Magic Orchestra and Southern All Stars. Popular styles of Japanese pop music include city pop and technopop during the 1970s1980s, and J-Euro and Shibuya-kei during the 1990s and 2000s.
Japanese country had popularity during the international popularity of Westerns in the 1960s1970s as well, and it still has appeal due to the work of musicians like Charlie Nagatani and Tomi Fujiyama, along with venues like Little Texas in Tokyo. Japanese hip hop became mainstream with producer Nujabes during the 1990s–2000s, especially his work on Samurai Champloo, and Japanese pop culture is often seen with anime in hip hop. In addition, Latin music, CCM, and gospel music have scenes within J-pop.
Form and definition
The origin of modern J-pop is said to be Japanese-language rock music inspired by the likes of The Beatles. Unlike the Japanese music genre called kayōkyoku, J-pop uses a special kind of pronunciation, which is similar to that of English. One notable singer to do so is Keisuke Kuwata, who pronounced the Japanese word karada as kyerada. Additionally, unlike Western music, the major second was usually not used in Japanese music, except art music, before rock music became popular in Japan. When the Group Sounds genre, which was inspired by Western rock, became popular, Japanese pop music adopted the major second, which was used in the final sounds of The Beatles' song "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and The Rolling Stones' song " Satisfaction". Although Japanese pop music changed from music based on Japanese pentatonic scale and distortional tetrachord to the more occidental music over time, music that drew from the traditional Japanese singing style remained popular.At first, the term J-pop was used only for Western-style musicians in Japan, such as Pizzicato Five and Flipper's Guitar, just after Japanese radio station J-Wave was established. On the other hand, Mitsuhiro Hidaka of AAA from Avex Trax said that J-pop was originally derived from the Eurobeat genre. However, the term became a blanket term, covering other music genres—such as the majority of Japanese rock music of the 1990s.
In 1990, the Japanese subsidiary of Tower Records defined J-pop as all Japanese music belonging to the Recording Industry Association of Japan except Japanese independent music ; their stores began to use additional classifications, such as J-club, J-punk, J-hip-hop, J-reggae, J-anime, and Visual kei by 2008, after independent musicians started to release works via major labels. Ito Music City, a Japanese record store, adopted expanded classifications including Group Sounds, idol of the 1970s–1980s, enka, folk and established musicians of the 1970s–1980s, in addition to the main J-pop genres.
Whereas rock musicians in Japan usually hate the term "pop", Taro Kato, a member of pop punk band Beat Crusaders, pointed out that the encoded pop music, like pop art, was catchier than "J-pop" and he also said that J-pop was the pops music, memorable for its frequency of airplay, in an interview when the band completed their first full-length studio album under a major label, P.O.A.: Pop on Arrival, in 2005. Because the band did not want to perform J-pop music, their album featured the 1980s Pop of MTV. According to his fellow band member Toru Hidaka, the 1990s music that influenced him was not listened to by fans of other music in Japan at that time.
In contrast to this, although many Japanese rock musicians until the late 1980s disrespected the kayōkyoku music, many of Japanese rock bands of the 1990s—such as Glay—assimilated kayōkyoku into their music. After the late 1980s, breakbeat and samplers also changed the Japanese music scene, where expert drummers had played good rhythm because traditional Japanese music did not have the rhythm based on rock or blues.
Hide of Greeeen openly described their music genre as J-pop. He said, "I also love rock, hip hop and breakbeats, but my field is consistently J-pop. For example, hip hop musicians learn 'the culture of hip hop' when they begin their career. We are not like those musicians and we love the music as sounds very much. Those professional people may say 'What are you doing?' but I think that our musical style is cool after all. The good thing is good."
One term recently coined in relation to "J-pop" is gacha pop coming from the industry's association with other popular cultures within Japan that has gained international attention like city pop, anisong, Vocaloids and VTubing.
History
1920s–1960s: Ryūkōka
Japanese popular music, called ryūkōka before being split into enka and poppusu,has origins in the Meiji period, but most Japanese scholars consider the Taishō period to be the actual starting point of ryūkōka, as it is the era in which the genre first gained nationwide popularity. By the Taishō period, Western musical techniques and instruments, which had been introduced to Japan in the Meiji period, were widely used. Influenced by Western genres such as jazz and blues, ryūkōka incorporated Western instruments such as the violin, harmonica, and guitar. However, the melodies were often written according to the traditional Japanese pentatonic scale. In the 1930s, Ichiro Fujiyama released popular songs with his tenor voice. Fujiyama sang songs with a lower volume than opera through the microphone.
Jazz musician Ryoichi Hattori attempted to produce Japanese native music which had a "flavor" of blues.
He composed Noriko Awaya's hit song "Wakare no Blues". Awaya became a famous popular singer and was called "Queen of Blues" in Japan. Due to pressure from the Imperial Army during the war, the performance of jazz music was temporarily halted in Japan. Hattori, who stayed in Shanghai at the end of the war, produced hit songs such as Shizuko Kasagi's "Tokyo Boogie-Woogie" and Ichiro Fujiyama's "Aoi Sanmyaku". Hattori later became known as the "Father of Japanese poppusu". Boogie-woogie, Mambo, Blues, and Country music were performed by Japanese musicians for the American troops. Chiemi Eri's cover song "Tennessee Waltz", Hibari Misora's "Omatsuri Mambo", and Izumi Yukimura's cover song "Till I Waltz Again with You" also became popular. Foreign musicians and groups, including JATP and Louis Armstrong, visited Japan to perform. In the mid-1950s, Jazz kissa became a popular venue for live jazz music. Jazz had a large impact on Japanese poppusu, though "authentic" jazz did not become the mainstream genre of music in Japan. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Japanese pop was polarized between urban kayō and modern enka.
Modern J-pop is also sometimes believed to have had its roots with Chinese immigrant jazz musicians who had fled Shanghai during the communist takeover, and were collaborating with American soldiers to help introduce a variety of new genres to the Japanese public. In 1949, when the communists took over and established the People's Republic of China on the mainland, one of the first actions taken by the government was to denounce popular music as decadent music, and for decades afterwards the Communist Party would promote Chinese revolutionary songs while suppressing Chinese folk songs, Chinese pop songs and Western pop songs. Dissatisfied with Chairman Mao Zedong's new music policies, a number of Shanghainese jazz musicians fled to the British colony of Hong Kong and established Cantopop, which is pop music sung in Cantonese. However, a few musicians instead settled in Japan, where they became members of the Far East Network and collaborated with the American soldiers to help expose the Japanese public to a wide variety of western genres. This eventually lead to the establishment of modern Japanese pop music, known as kayōkyoku.
1960s: Origin of modern style
Rokabirī Boom and Wasei pops
During the 1950s and 60s, yakuza manager Kazuo Taoka reorganized the concert touring industry by treating the performers as professionals. Many of these performers later became key participants in the J-pop genre.In 1956, Japan's rock and roll craze began, due to the country music group known as Kosaka Kazuya and the Wagon Masters; their rendition of Elvis Presley's song "Heartbreak Hotel" helped to fuel the trend. The music was called "rockabilly" by the Japanese media. Performers learned to play the music and translate the lyrics of popular American songs, resulting in the birth of Cover Pops. The rockabilly movement would reach its peak when 45,000 people saw the performances by Japanese singers at the first Nichigeki Western Carnival in one week of February 1958.
Kyu Sakamoto, a fan of Elvis, made his stage début as a member of the band The Drifters at the Nichigeki Western Carnival in 1958. His 1961 song "Ue wo Muite Arukō", known in other parts of the world as "Sukiyaki", was released to the United States in 1963. It was the first Japanese song to reach the Number One position in the United States, spending four weeks in Cash Box and three weeks in Billboard. It also received a gold record for selling one million copies. During this period, female duo The Peanuts also became popular, singing a song in the movie Mothra. Their songs, such as "Furimukanaide" were later covered by Candies on their album Candy Label. Artists like Kyu Sakamoto and The Peanuts were called Wasei Pops.
After frequently changing members, Chosuke Ikariya re-formed The Drifters in 1964 under the same name. At a Beatles concert in 1966, they acted as curtain raisers, but the audience generally objected. Eventually, The Drifters became popular in Japan, releasing "Zundoko-Bushi" in 1969. Along with enka singer Keiko Fuji, they won "the award for mass popularity" at the 12th Japan Record Awards in 1970. Keiko Fuji's 1970 album Shinjuku no Onna/'Enka no Hoshi' Fuji Keiko no Subete established an all-time record in the history of the Japanese Oricon chart by staying in the Number One spot for 20 consecutive weeks. The Drifters later came to be known as television personalities and invited idols such as Momoe Yamaguchi and Candies to their television program.