A Bridge over Troubled Music

PseudoPop playlist #4 takes a deep dive into legendary Japanese trio Yellow Magic Orchestra and its pervading influence

Oct 26, 2020

Happy Monday!

Hi, it’s Suwaid here.

We hope you received our update.

This week, we’ve decided to do something a little different. We’re going to combine our piece and playlist into a single newsletter. We’ve also got a few people working on this and got their thoughts across.

We think it’ll be worth the wait cause it’s also being curated by our music nerd - Nandu, who has been eager to contribute to the newsletter.

When Nandu isn’t being occupied by Zoom meetings through the day, he’s assembling an encyclopedia of articles on music and sending them across to the members of PseudoPop.

So what does he have in store for us today?

With Japanese pop being consumed on a global scale, his path would cross some of the household names in Japanese pop in the current landscape like Shintaro Sakamoto, Mitsume, and Kaho Nakamura. His curiosity piqued.

Before we got down to writing, we were struggling to define this confounding genre. Nevertheless, we have some strong thoughts about it.

Nandu suggests that these sounds evoke nostalgia for experiences he’s never really had. He doesn’t comprehend Japanese and his forays into the culture are limited to a few Japanese films and anime, yet, he feels them all the same.

Japanese does not have the stress accent which languages such as English have. Sleepinbro, who curated our last playlist, believes that there’s a rhythm to the Japanese language that complements the sound.

My own thoughts after dipping my toes into this sound are that it has some melancholy to it but it’s the sort of melancholy that you could sway to. When The Beatles advised that you take a sad song and make it better – this fits the bill.

We insist that you familiarize yourself with this track by Shintaro Sakamoto.

However, the subject of our playlist isn’t this genre or the artists launching it in the mainstream. It’s a look at a group whose members started from Japanese pop beginnings but would go on to play a significant role in weaving a tapestry of seemingly dissonant genres, spurring a web of new possibilities for experimental music. However, before we take a peek into their dense catalogue, we’re going to have a look at the members of the Yellow Magic Orchestra and what made it all click.

The Crown and its subjects

He’s endearingly called Harry "The Crown" Hosono by some but we’re going with Haroumi Hosono (細野晴臣) for the purpose of this piece.

Hosono is, perhaps, the greatest name in Japanese pop history but his sound and influence aren’t limited to Japanese pop. Hosono’s youth was almost entirely immersed in American culture and music – primarily Jazz and Rock and Roll. You can see why he’d welcome the moniker, Harry. No really, this is what he had to say on the matter at a conference in 2014 at the Red Bull Music Academy.

“I was completely Americanised, I even felt sorry that I wasn’t American. We were disconnected from our roots. I knew nothing about traditional Japanese music. I understood the importance of these roots in Californian groups, but my influence was Japanese literature, and especially poetry.”

Much of what makes this sound so unique is that Hosono never really catered his music to an audience outside of Japan. Most of the stories we hear of Hosono are based around those he influenced.

Almost as influential as Hosono was band member Ryuchi Sakamoto. Where some might suggest Hosono was the shapeshifting bohemian of the group, the same couldn’t be said of Sakamoto. A large section of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s listeners would’ve discovered them through the works of Sakamoto, who has gone on to become a very successful composer for the screen and television.

Sakamoto was a precocious talent and had been honing his craft since the tender age of three. He was classically trained and experimented with electronic music at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

This could, at times, lead to idealistic clashes between the two, which is why Yukihiro Takahashi would play the role of mediator. Takahashi was part of the progressive rock outfit – Sadistic Mika Band prior to YMO.

So how influential are we talking here?

Heard of Michael Jackson? Good, that’s a start. Heard of his best-selling album Thriller (1982)? Even better.

Sakamoto had written a little instrumental for a Seiko commercial in 1978 titled Behind the Mask – the year the Yellow Magic Orchestra was formed. The song would go on to feature in their second album Solid State Survivor (1979).

Quincy Jones brought it to the attention of Jackson and the Jackson version was to be included in Thriller but was dropped following legal disputes. Wait, so Michael Jackson wanted Japanese pop songs in Thriller?

Well, not really. Yellow Magic Orchestra was an experimental group that initiated the electropop boom of the ‘80s. Our first playlist on PseudoPop was a celebration of electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk and the Yellow Magic Orchestra isn’t that far behind the Germans and Giorgio Moroder (father of disco) when it comes to shaping the electronic music of today.

In fact, we’ve got Behind the Mask as the very first song on the playlist because the uninitiated listener is most likely to respond with a, “You’re sure this isn’t Daft Punk?”

The track Computer Game was used in games like Space Invaders (remember Ready Player One?), Circus and is also a massive influence on Tetris. The song also samples the opening chiptune used in the arcade game Gun Fight. For those unfamiliar with Chip Tune, think Nintendo’s Game Boy and the Commodore 64.

The influences go further than Michael Jackson, who had a remixed version of the song released on the 2010 posthumous album, Michael. Only, Eric Clapton got there before with his own version.

Yellow Magic Orchestra might’ve only lasted five years but its sound pervaded its own electronic beginnings to inspire new genres. Pioneers of other genres like J Dilla (master cratedigger and one of the forefathers of hip-hop production) sampled Go get em while Afrika Bambaataa used samples of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Firecracker.

Lance Taylor, the mind behind Afrika Bambaataa, isn’t the only one to have sampled Firecracker. In 2001, Jennifer Lopez did the same for her track I’m Real (catalyst for the feud between Mariah Carey and J Lo).

If there’s any track that’s most emblematic of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, it’s Firecracker.

East meets West meets East

There was a satirical quality to the music of the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Much of Japanese art and literature following the aftermath of WWII is borne out of a conflict between the old and the new.

There’s a back and forth that we see in the history of cinema as well. Akira Kurosawa, the most distinguished film director of the time, often had his films set in the Edo period that hark back to traditional Japanese principles while using innovative film techniques.

These techniques and story beats would be borrowed to make Westerns and Space operas. Decades later, we got Anime like Cowboy Bebop and Trigun that used the Western formula (originally the Samurai formula).

There’s maybe no film in the history of cinema that encapsulates this conflict like Yasujirô Ozu’s Toyko Story (1953). Tokyo Story is a heartbreaking look at the cracks in the relationship between children and their elderly parents. The parents find themselves alienated in Tokyo following all the changes in the aftermath of the war before its poignant conclusion.

Firecracker was the sound of all that conflict. It used Asian Melodies with this new synth-pop sound.

Another very interesting takeaway is the English lyrics to many of the tracks that were written by Chris Mordell. Despite the dystopic writings that happened to align with the emerging Cyberpunk movement, YMO was successful at holding onto the whimsical sound that we associate with Japanese pop.

“I think that’s a Japanese thing,” says Sakamoto.
“Japan used to be an animistic society before Shinto imperialism was established. But most of us still have an animistic sense. And you can see it in the way in which we use tools. For us, those tools are not just objects. Japanese people can feel some attachment in what they are making, whether it is a car or a TV or a computer. It’s like when Sony made that pet robotic dog. From the beginning, nobody in Japan had any fear or apprehension about that. Even old people thought it was cute.”

What are Hosono and gang up to today?

You might, unbeknownst to you, be familiar with Hosono’s work in Hayao Miyazaki’s film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind or 2018 Palme D’Or Winner at the Cannes film festival - Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Shoplifters.

Sakamoto, meanwhile, has dedicated most of his time to film scores, video games, and anime compositions. He won an Oscar for The Last Emperor and a Golden Globe nomination for his work on The Revenant.

None of Hosono’s work is likely to make Rolling Stone magazine's greatest Albums list but there aren’t many others alive today who have had such a seismic impact on the music industry.

Here’s the link to the playlist on Spotify.