I've mentioned in the first post that this blog will primarily deal with Japanese music from the 1960s through the 1980s (and some ventures into the first few years of the 1990s), so we will be seeing music as diverse as Kyu Sakamoto's 1961 hit "Ue wo Muite Arukou", which later charted at number one two years later in the USA as "Sukiyaki" to the middle stages of singers and groups like Dreams Come True and X-Japan, which border at the point where people into J-Pop will start to hear familiar sounds.
J-Pop for the most part, is not much different from popular music elsewhere, and is also full of the subgenres typical to current popular music, such as folk, rock, bubblegum, dance music and so forth. There is a Wikipedia article on J-Pop that is decently informative, but I think is poorly organized and is not broad enough in scope.
As is said in the article, various influences shaped the sound of Japanese popular music, drawing both from traditional sources from the country to foreign sounds like jazz or rock and roll. After WWII, the general term for most popular songs in Japan was Kayoukyoku (歌謡曲), which to this day still has a concrete definition. It ranges from "music with lyrics" to excluding other song forms like Enka. From the 1960s, much of the music dominant at the time were similar in sound to what may be considered "pop standards" today, akin to the likes of Frank Sinatra and Doris Day. There was also the emergence of Enka (演歌), a particular brand of traditional pop music driven by melancholy and complex romances. By the late 1960s, stronger influences from folk and Western rock music gave rise to the Group Sounds genre, patterned after the British invasion, as well as seeing the first of Japanese Rock such as The Mops and Happy End.
The pop sound of the turn of the 1970s were heavily influenced by European pop music and sounded much like mid 60s American music at the time (for the most part, Japan usually had a 5 to 10 year lag behind the Anglo-American musical front, but that difference diminished significantly in the 1980s). That period also saw the beginnings of the fickle and intense Idol culture that would dominate Japanese music for the next two decades. Artists from the time such as Agnes Chan and Momoe Yamaguchi would later become commonplace in the Asian music world. The rise of New Music and the singer-songwriters like Yosui Inoue and Yumi Matsutoya (neé Arai) and the appropriation of Disco in the middle of the decade showed how quickly the J-Pop sound evolved and adapted to changing tastes.
By the 1980s, the Idol genre was at its peak churning out dozens of potentials but only producing a handful of superstars such as Seiko Matsuda and Akina Nakamori. The tunes became even poppier and the average pitch of female singers began to rise (a trend that doesn't appear to be stopping soon). Mid-decade, the increasing portability of music and increasing connectivity of media worldwide made sure Japanese popular music tastes would not be far behind from the West. During that time, dance-pop from both America and Europe would heavily influence artists that would craft their music in that style, as seen by the likes of Yoko Oginome and Miho Nakayama. As we get to the turn of the 1990s, the J-Pop sound has entered into somewhat familiar territory, and that is where the scope of this blog ends, as there are plenty of resources for music from that point forward.
As for how the content of this blog will be done, a majority of the entries will showcase a single song with statistics as well as lyrics and a video clip if applicable. There may also be entries focusing on a single genre or an artist, when the time seems right for that. Otherwise, the format will be generally free-form, as I doubt there are many English language sites that cover what I'm covering to that extent.
Now we begin the fun part: exploring the genre!
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