Listen In!
In an age when “Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah! Roma-Roma-ma-ah! Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!” has become an iconic watchword, you have no choice but to commence eyeroll sequence when some dunderhead flails his arms and cries, “I DON’T SPEAK JAPANESE AND AM INCAPABLE OF APPRECIATING SOLID MELODIES, IMPRESSIVE VISUALS, AND GENERAL KICK-ASSERY.” Now more than ever, pop is about the importance of exciting sounds, on-key warbling, nifty outfits, and sharp art direction above the actual conceit of “lyrical content.” This is precisely why the J-Pop pentagram of Utada Hikaru, Namie Amuro, Shiina Ringo, alan, and Yano Junko is one all people with ears should learn to love. But to pace ourselves, let’s wrap our heads around the queens first: Utada and Amuro.
Utada presents a welcome foil to such a case study in dunderheaded xenophobia. While flirting with an English-language career, Utada hasn’t made it the centerpiece of her artistic ambitions. Still in her twenties, she is essentially a bizarro-world Britney Spears: a picture of the prototypical American pop star had she (a) not suffered a tragic meltdown and (b) learned the value of creative autonomy. Utada is proof that child stars pushed into popstardom at an early age need not come apart at the seams as they stumble into their twenties. Like most young popstrels, Utada built her name on mediocrity, shilling J.Lo-esque pastiches at first, like “Addicted to You” (1999).
But unlike her American counterparts who stall and ultimately crumble before they can evolve, Utada managed a brilliant evolution, heralded by singles like “Traveling” (2001) and “Sakura Drops” (2002). Although it would still be another three years before she’d finally grow into her musical maturity, as someone who could handle more layered pop.
As Utada gravitated towards mid-tempo pieces with more substance, this ultimately left a vacuum for a proper J-Pop dance diva. It was a niche that Koda Kumi and Ayumi Hamasaki couldn’t fill, because the former was uninspired and the latter—while holding the “Queen of J-Pop” title for certainly some time—struggled to keep up with trends. Enter Namie Amuro.
Amuro essentially peddles Pocky pop—it’s cavity-inducing stuff that places a premium on style over substance. It’s also an aesthetic that shamelessly engages in product placement, like in this Patricia Field-assisted Vidal Sassoon-hawking video for “New Look” (2008):
Although perhaps it’s here that she had even purported pop forerunners like Lady Gaga beat.
But what’s exciting with Amuro’s pop is the gimmick that comes with each release. “New Look” served as one-third of a triple A-side single (the entire effort financially fronted by Vidal Sassoon) dubbed 60s70s80s. With “New Look” sampling The Supremes’ “Baby Love” (from the 1960s, obviously), “Rock Steady” sampled Aretha Franklin’s song of the same name, while “What A Feeling” rounded out the the set by appropriating Irene Cara. Then there is also Amuro singing songs like the double A-side “Dr.” / “Wild” (again, Vidal Sassoon-sponsored), and managing a number of musical styles within a traditional pop structure.
What Amuro and Utada both do well is entertain the mainstream. We could ethnocentrically liken the Amuro–Utada dynamic to a heady Madonna–Kylie Minogue style of pop tension, though unlike that pop pair, neither Amuro nor Utada seem withered enough to ever devolve into something as dreadful as a leather-clad Madonna stumbling awkwardly around sad rap beats. Perhaps the best thing about this duo is that their oligopoly on J-Pop creates a slightly lower class of even more interesting pop—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Rohin Guha is hard at work on his first novel, which features steamy scenes of tea-sipping and a back-handed slap or two. If you Google his name, you’ll find that he has, at one point or another, aroused the curiosity of the following communities: Adam Lambert fans, white supremacists, feminists, Taylor Swift fans, and Japanophiles. You’ll also find that he’s written for quite a few places.
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