This past New Years Eve my family and I were invited to the home of some Japanese friends of ours to watch Kouhaku Utagassen, a TV show that NHK broadcasts every New Years Eve where all the year’s most popular musical groups and artists get together for a big concert-disguised-as-singing-contest. Basically it’s seen as a “who’s who” of the music industry: getting invited to sing at it cements your status as one of the years hot artists. This is the first time Ryoko and I were able to see it live instead of bittorrenting it days later (actually we saw it 15 hours later due to time zone differences, but close enough) since we were first dating over 10 years ago.
As we sat and chatted while we watched the show, I came to realize several things I hadn’t noticed before:
I really detest Johnny’s Jimusho. Not just for the business practices of the studio, and the ruthless nature of its head, Johnny Kitagawa (not to mention the fact that he abuses the boys in his employ, making him look like some kind of cross between Machiavelli and Michael Jackson), but because all the boy bands in his employ share the exact same three qualities:
1.) They are all very handsome, bordering on androgynous/beautiful
2.) They are talented entertainers
3.) They can’t sing
That third one might come as a surprise to you, but the ability to sing is not one of the requirements to be a J-pop star. Similar to the US, there are two roads to music stardom: one is to start small playing at clubs and such and slowly build to greater popularity until you get a major label to sign you, and the other is to be a bought-and-paid-for product of the musical-industrial-complex. This is the path of people from the Disney pop star assembly line, like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Hannah Montana, Jonas Brothers, etc. Pretty much all boy bands fall into this category too. Heck, even the Monkees were the same way (in fact you might call them the first boy band).
In Japan, products of the musical-industrial-complex are often in boy bands like like all the products of Johnny’s Jimusho, or large girl groups like Morning Musume (who are now eclipsing, they didn’t perform at this last Kouhaku) and the currently rising AKB48 (who seem to be the new group for middle-aged men that show an unhealthy interest in cute teenage girls), though there are solo artists as well.
Anyway, the important qualifications for rising to the top of the ‘talent’ pool in these organizations is that they look very cute/pretty, can dance, and are able to present themselves as interesting people on TV. No where in there is the ability to sing well. If you can it’s a bonus, I suppose, but not necessary. Like here in the US, autotune and its ilk fix any problems for the studio-produced songs, and I assume autotune is used for concerts and such too. However, autotune does not seem to be used at the NHK Kouhaku concert, which makes listening to the out-of-tune singing a guilty pleasure for many Japanese.　The best (worst?) offenders in recent times of recent times is SMAP, who have been the powerhouse group for Jonny’s Jimusho for almost 20 years (though recently they were supplanted by Arashi, from the same company).
Anyway, that’s enough about mass-produced J-pop, One other thing I noticed is that I didn’t find the Enka songs as boring or uninteresting as I had in the past. An explanation of Enka could be a whole post (or a whole wikipedia article, if you’re interested), but to paraphrase the article it’s described as sentimental ballad music that stylistically borrows from traditional Japanese musical forms. In this way you could think of it as the Japanese equivalent of country music here in the US, and it does have a lot of parallels: it traces it’s origin from folk music, it’s generally more popular with blue-collar and working class people, and many of the songs deal with loss, regret, and longing often mixed with a good bit of nationalism.
Generally my assessment of Enka is that all of it sounds exactly the same. They tend to use the pentatonic scale (like half of the entire world’s traditional music), which makes things sound a lot more similar, and they often tend to follow a similar structure. Also the vocalists sing in a distinctive style called kobushi, where they rapidly switch between notes on the same syllable. It’s evidently descended from singing styles of Buddhist monks chanting sutras, so it’s a style that we’re not really used to in the West. However this year after listening to a few during the concert and comparing them to the standard J-pop tunes, I couldn’t help but notice that the Enka artists were very very good singers. Pitch control and intonation is almost perfect. As for the style and such, I guess it grew on me or something. By the end of the show I found myself enjoying the Enka songs more than the pop songs. So when I considered that I really didn’t know many of the J-pop artists, and that I enjoyed the Enka more than the J-pop, there was only one logical conclusion: I must have become middle-aged, since Enka is consistently dissed by the younger generation and enjoyed by the older generation.
Anyway, for those that don’t know Enka music, here are a few samples:
Kobayashi Sachiko is one of the big powerhouses of Enka, probably the most popular female Enka singer. She has performed in the Kouhaku Utagassen every single year for the past 35 years – a testament to her continuing popularity. One major reason for that popularity has to be the fact that she is an incredibly good singer:
Another song that really impressed me is called Amagigoe by Ishikawa Sayuri:
The only major complaint I have about Enka is that sometimes the lyrics are really hard to understand. Since the musical forms borrow heavily from traditional Japanese music, the lyrics too borrow heavily from traditional Japanese literary forms: something that is very hard for those not raised in the Japanese culture to be able to understand and takes years of study to be able to ‘catch up’ with your average educated Japanese in understanding all the literary cues, subtle double-meanings, and archaic vocabulary.
Yup. You’re old. :)