J-Pop Is Slowly Crossing the Pacific
Two J-pop stars are Puffy AmiYumi's Yumi, left, and Ami, who've made a transition from music to screen with their cartoon alter egos on "Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi."
(Cartoon Network)
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In Tokyo's massive music stores, the term "J-pop" refers to virtually all music recorded in Japan, from folk to metal to punk to fizzy, high-pitched pop. On this side of the Pacific, however, only the last on that list is generally called J-pop.
And, until recently, almost no one was buying it.
Lots of mainstream Japanese pop stars have made a push in the United States with little success. (In 1980, Pink Lady even got its own TV show but vanished from the American consciousness as soon as the short-lived program was canceled.) Meanwhile, a small but fervent following exists here for the antithesis of J-pop: noisy experimental rock, frequently with aspects of jazz, psychedelia, minimalism and sheer chaos. Such bands as the Boredoms, Melt Banana and Acid Mothers Temple draw crowds to smaller U.S. clubs, and New York jazz-rock-klezmer extremist John Zorn's Tzadik label regularly releases eccentric Japanese din. Yet
mass acceptance for such squalling
music is just not a possibility .
Now J-pop has a potential new route to American success: anime. Puffy AmiYumi are classic Japanese idoru ("idols"): cute, young women with a repertoire of bouncy, eclectic tunes. (Many of them are written by Andy Sturmer, late of California's Jellyfish.) Ami and Yumi aren't American superstars yet (on Cartoon Network's "Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi" series), but they've attracted more followers in the United States than most of the Japanese chart stars who've attempted to make the trans-oceanic crossover.
Still, the most Japanese act to go platinum in the states was made in the U.S.A.: Gwen Stefani, whose four Japanese backup singers interject trebly remarks into "Harajuku Girls." Harajuku is Tokyo's youth-fashion district, and the song's lyrics extol the city's clothing designers, not its pop stars. Perhaps much of the American audience still thinks that J-pop should be seen and not sung.
-- Mark Jenkins
