![]() Pizzicato Five’s music is unabashedly sample-heavy, often including obvious references to pop songs or seemingly out-of-place sounds. Unfortunately, the usual journalistic focus on Nomiya’s image and the Shibuya-kei ethos results in an almost complete lack of focus on the content of their great music. Above all else, the band’s output serves as a testament to Konishi’s incredible talents as a collector. Pizzicato Five eventually emerged from this cloud of self-conscious hipness and extreme insularity to concoct a musical sound that stands completely alone. As the Japanese economy began to crumble, the members of Flipper’s Guitar instead directed their ire at the major record labels of Japan and demonstrated an ostentatious belief in the superiority of their music and style. Martin Roberts notes that “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.” It was a very insular community, with lyrics (at least at first) focusing on the trivial concerns of well-to-do young people. While their appropriation of consumerist Western culture may seem the opposite of subversive, it was, counterintuitively, a critique of the Japanese pop music of the day. Eventually, they became the first underground Japanese groups to receive international attention, being released on notable Western indie labels and retaining cultural resonance with avant-garde artists across the world to this day. The makers of Shibuya-kei were a group of young artists who were incredibly popular among the Tokyo indie scene and, at first, absolutely nowhere else. Literally, Shibuya-kei simply means “Shibuya style,” in reference to the record stores of the Shibuya neighborhood, one of the major commercial hubs of Tokyo. After a short while, the music also got much better.Īt this point, it would probably be good to describe what “Shibuya-kei” actually means, or at least what it represents (as the artists it encompasses would never self-identify as a cohesive collective). Nomiya is often credited for giving the band a strong visual identity, wearing multiple wigs during every concert and providing a sense of drama and theatricality. The band really hit its stride after 1990, when vocalist Maki Nomiya joined its ranks, and they went on to gain some acclaim (even if they are currently inaccessible on many streaming services). Their debut single “Audrey Hepburn Complex” was released in 1985. Pizzicato Five was founded in the early 1980s by Yasuharu Konishi, one of the wealthy, young, Japanese music collectors that defined this scene. At first, their music may appear to be anything but class-conscious, but Pizzicato Five’s focus on foreign sounds shows a desire to distance themselves from 90s Japan and all its struggles. Their influences were primarily Western rather than Japanese, as the hip record stores they loved stocked British, French, and American albums. These musicians, of whom Pizzicato Five and Flipper’s Guitar were the most notable, were self-consciously chic in all aesthetic areas, and this translated to the music they made (and all the accompanying visuals). ![]() But this crisis did not really affect the musicians of Shibuya-kei, who came from wealthy Tokyo families and spent their days curating record collections rather than worrying about their wages. This frivolity is especially striking when you consider that the 1990s were a dire decade for Japan’s economy, after a real-estate bubble burst and left many unemployed, especially the young lower-class. The musical movement of Shibuya-kei, based in Tokyo in the early 1990s, had the rare quality of being an underground musical style based on frivolous consumption, not making any attempts to speak for vulnerable members of society. ![]()
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