Ayumi Hamasaki Sekai - [article] Shibuya-kei leaves a warm afterglow

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Although the artists once grouped under the Shibuya-kei umbrella -- Cornelius, Kahimi Karie and Fantastic Plastic Machine, to name a few -- have moved away from their old musical styles and want distance from the genre, Shibuya-kei remains a convenient expression to identify that loose assembly of 1990s musicians who rebelled against J-pop hegemony and transformed the international image of Japanese culture.

The Japanese media invented the term more than a decade ago to describe the hodge-podge of young musicians ignored by the mainstream, but who sold anomalously well at Shibuya's import record stores HMV and Tower Records. Sonically, the artists did not share a specific style, but more of a guiding philosophy. They worked almost exclusively in pastiche and bricolage -- mixing, matching, rearranging, deconstructing and straightup stealing from California '60s soft rock, French Ye-Ye, Chicago house, East Coast hip-hop sampling (Pizzicato Five), German Krautrock (Buffalo Daughter, Takako Minekawa), Scottish anorak pop, Madchester club beats (Flipper's Guitar), Brazilian bossa nova, Italian film soundtracks (Fantastic Plastic Machine) and any and all other internationalist, retro-futurist genres. Labels often referred to the result as "Japanese yogaku" -- Western music created by Japanese artists.

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Shibuya-kei's subsequent overseas success is still its greatest legacy. Pizzicato Five and Cornelius sold tens of thousands more records in the United States than Utada Hikaru and her million-dollar marketing campaigns ever managed. Some of Japan's contemporary appeal as a "cultural power" stems from the foreign cognoscenti's fascination with and admiration of Shibuya-kei and the music's influence on Western artists -- such "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots"-era Flaming Lips. Along with manga and anime, this helped change the worldwide image of Japan from a nation of undiscerningly imitative consumers automatically eating up anything foreign to a wonderland that absorbed, chopped up and spat out the coolest content. As with Ura-Harajuku fashion, Shibuya-kei raised standards for mass culture in Japan high enough that the Japanese started to sense that they had actually surpassed the West.

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