Skip to main content

Hear Enchanting Mixes of Japanese Pop, Jazz, Funk, Disco, Soul, and R&B from the 70s and 80s

Franz Kafka’s unfinished first novel, published by his literary executor Max Brod as Amerika, tells the story of a young European exiled in New York City. He has a series of madcap adventures, winds up in Oklahoma as a “technical worker,” and adopts the name “Negro.” Amerika is a novel written by an artist who had never been to America or met an American. His impression of the country came entirely from his reading. And yet, Kafka leaves readers with an authentically vivid, lasting impression of the din of American life.

We may feel similarly when watching the films of Sergio Leone, who had never seen the West when he started making Westerns. Detached from their cultural origins, Western tropes in the Italian director’s hands reveal their archetypal depths as avatars of lawless violence.

Europeans have been dreaming imaginary Americas for hundreds of years. And given U.S. popular culture’s global reach in the 20th century, nearly every place in the world has its own Americana, an homage from afar made up of local ingredients. Nowhere, perhaps, is this truer than in Japan.

“Jazz and Japan shouldn’t mix,” notes Colin Marshall in an earlier post on Japanese jazz, quoting the book All-Japan, which alleges a lack of improvisation in Japanese culture. But they have mixed particularly well, as you can hear in the 30-minute mix of 70s Japanese jazz above from Coffee Break Sessions, a YouTube channel filled with introductions to genres and styles from around the world. What’s more, jazz arrived in Japan as a double import, two steps removed. It “dates back to the 1920s,” writes Marshall, “when it drew inspiration from visiting Filipino bands who had picked the music up from their American occupiers.” When Japan itself was occupied by U.S. soldiers two decades later, the country already had a jazz tradition.

Japanese culture has long since surpassed the American influences it absorbed to create hybrid genres Americans have been furiously importing at a seemingly exponential rate. One of the newest such genres was actually created by an American DJ, Van Paugam, who aggregated a collection of Japanese records into what he calls “City Pop.” In another Open Culture post on this YouTube phenomenon, Marshall describes the music as “drawing influences from Western disco, funk, and R&B, and using the latest sonic technologies mastered nowhere more than in Japan itself.” Like Japanese jazz, city pop comes from music that began in the U.S. but become globalized and cosmopolitan as it traveled the world.

Paugam characterizes his City Pop mixes as infused with “themes of austere feelings, melancholic vibes, and a sense of having memories of living in a different time and place.” The cultural dislocation one might feel when listening to these songs comes from their uncanniness—they sound like hits we might have heard on top 40 radio, but their idioms don’t exactly click into place. This is especially apparent in the Coffee Break Sessions mix of late 70s, early 80s Japanese pop singers, above.

But there’s something too provincial in calling City Pop—or the disparate types of smooth pop that fall under the designation—a Japanese take on American music, since American music is itself a hybrid of global influences. YouTube phenomena like City Pop have themselves become part of a universal internet pop culture that belongs everywhere and nowhere. Someday everyone will experience the historic 80s pop music of Japan just as they'll experience the historic 80's pop music of everywhere else: as part of what Paugam calls a “false sense of nostalgia" for a past they never knew. Hear more mixes of Japanese pop, jazz, and funk over at Coffee Break Sessions.

Related Content: 

A 30-Minute Introduction to Japanese Jazz from the 1970s: Like Japanese Whisky, It’s Underrated, But Very High Quality

Stream Loads of “City Pop,” the Electronic-Disco-Funk Music That Provided the Soundtrack for Japan During the Roaring 1980s

How Youtube’s Algorithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japanese Song Into an Enormously Popular Hit: Discover Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Hear Enchanting Mixes of Japanese Pop, Jazz, Funk, Disco, Soul, and R&B from the 70s and 80s is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2MV3DpX
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more