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Choice quotes
'Golden age' of kayoukyoku holds lessons for modern J-pop
By IAN MARTIN
...the postwar roots of the modern Japanese entertainment industry, and two key influences: the U.S. military and the yakuza.
The full extent of the relationship between the Japanese entertainment industry and the U.S. military is unclear, but military bases were certainly the primary venue for touring Japanese singers and musicians, and control of access channels to performing on those U.S. military bases meant control of the pop industry.
...The constant honing of musicians' and singers' skills in the live environment meant that, for all the murky backdrop of the business, Japanese artists of the '50s and '60s were often seasoned professionals by the time they made it big, and the company that benefitted most from this arrangement was Watanabe Production (Nabepro), which dominated the music scene in the '60s.
[By the 1970s]
Another seismic shift in the structure of the industry came in 1971, when Nippon Television first broadcast "Star Tanjou!," ("A Star is Born!") an audition show that used the magic of TV to create stars without the need for all the grubby touring and military bases.
The key to the success of the '70s pop generation was the combination of a vast pool of professional musicians, honed through hard touring during the '60s, coupled with a vibrant generation of young, creative, yet (the odd drug bust aside) largely harmless and unthreatening songwriters — not to mention a fresh delivery format that gave Japanese audiences their own music free of the cultural filter of an occupying military force.
All-girl idol trio the Candies were a textbook example of the classic '70s pop act.
The '80s saw the rise of new centers of power, and also sowed the first seeds of the industry's current creative malaise.
Advertising giants Dentsu created the "CM idol," a multipurpose "commercial media" star whose fame would be manufactured through strategic placement in advertisements and TV commercials, and for whom singing was only part of a larger media product. Meanwhile, the agency system largely fell under the sway of Ikuo Suho and Burning Production, a secretive organization about which there is still very little known and even less written, but who are widely acknowledged by insiders as the single most dominant power in Japanese entertainment.
(1985) "That was the year (AKB48 founder Yasushi Akimoto's first mass idol group) Onyanko Club appeared," he states, "and Onyanko Club member Sonoko Kawai was the last Nabepro singer."
"Onyanko Club was a revolution," agrees fellow music writer Hiroki Iwakiri, while Teruyasu adds, "Since Onyanko Club, and more recently Morning Musume and the others, music has become so intertwined with TV that it can't really be appreciated outside that context. Professional musicians aren't really the creative driving force behind the music anymore."
Perhaps due to the more settled nature of the talent agency/TV/advertising axis, and perhaps also due to other external factors, it seems that J-pop has become increasingly stagnant.
...As for how to revive Japanese pop, in some senses there is nothing that can be done; the factors that have led to its downfall aren't going to be undone, after all. In fact, as music sales decrease and reliance on advertising increases, the soulless drones at Dentsu are only going to dig their claws ever deeper into the creative process.
...Perfume are in many ways a modernized reconfiguration of the Candies template, and demonstrate that there are still creative and commercial rewards out there for those willing to take a chance.
