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Pizzicato five made in usa12/20/2023 ![]() ![]() While many would identify 1993-1995 as Shibuya-kei’s shining moment in the sun - an era where Pizzicato Five’s “Sweet Soul Revue” and Kahimi Karie’s “Good Morning World” were pop chart hits - the genre crystallized as a dance music movement much later in the decade. So here we are: The Best of Shibuya-kei, Volume One. The time has been right for a new mix that showcases, celebrates, and reintroduces the best tracks from Shibuya-kei’s peak years. Yet the musicians’ œuvres are partially buried under the sands of time, and knowledge of the genre’s hidden gems are locked in the heads of obsessive former young people (and in the bargain bins of provincial used record store dumps with pages on Yahoo! Auction). No one ever liked being pigeonholed under the dated term “Shibuya-kei” in the first place, but once the trend was over and its cachet depleted, artists wanted a chance to be themselves without all the SK-related baggage.īut here we are nearly 25 years after Shibuya-kei’s birth, and its eclecticism once again stands out on a global stage, this time as an antidote to the globalized factory-made pop monotony of the Twenty-Tens. The last fifteen years, however, have been unkind to the genre, as the movement’s originators abandoned its signature sound and pleaded for distance from the terminology. Thanks to the international success of Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, and Towa Tei, the loosely-defined, decade-spanning Nineties indie music movement known as Shibuya-kei has been one of Japan’s most influential cultural exports. Think of it as retromania for retromania. So, enjoy this first issue of NJP on Shōwa Tokyo, an exploration of modern culture in Tokyo from the prewar to the late 1980s.Ī new DJ mix to capture the best of a vintage Nineties Japanese dance music sound. Okay, here is one more reason for print: All of us love books and magazines, and a paper-based issue lets us explore our specific aesthetic vision in more depth, giving Ian LYNAM, our designer, a canvas for his graphic design and space for excellent illustrators to show off their work. A final bonus: Print means we can collect our “occasional publishing” into bursts rather than letting you down with the false promise of regular updates. And by virtue of being a physical object with limited distribution, print manages to deliver our writing to the suitably sized, highly targeted audience we aimed for at the beginning. A print Néojaponisme - NJP - is our latest destination: something to buy, read, enjoy, save, pull off the shelf once in a while as a reference. In the old age of our second decade (website years are like dog years), print may be a better match. We have a distinct (read: niche) point of view on a distinct (read: niche) set of topics that other outlets are unlikely to serve.īut in this new media environment, maybe websites are not the answer. And we want Néojaponisme to continue to exist. Now, of course, we want to stand brave in the face of this upheaval. Japan’s shift inside the global community from hard economic power to soft culture fun zone has quieted much of the online debate we felt a need to engage in. Japan of the 2010s was less of a misunderstood other and more of an internationalized tourist hub for vacation delights. Japan has changed as well in the last decade, opening up to the world in new ways. Where an article is hosted feels increasingly irrelevant.Īnd then there is Japan, our initial focus of interest. Meanwhile, websites are no longer destinations and clubhouses since people find their news on social media and discuss it there. Any webpage on the Internet will end up with angry partisans drifting in from rival taste worlds, doomed to miss the point. The Internet is now for everyone - which is great! no really, it’s great! - but us weird folk with extreme curiosity and unusual interests are no longer left alone to mumble quietly amongst ourselves. More than a decade later, the Internet is a very different place, and at some point this affected how we thought about Néojaponisme as a website. Little did we know at the time, 2007 was the last year someone could harbor such misconceptions about the nature of the Internet. We started Néojaponisme in 2007 - a year that carried all the promise of the Internet as a hallowed bastion for reasonable, intelligent people who liked to exchange reasonable, intelligent comments underneath long-form essays about serious topics. This is an excerpt from our first print issue, NJP#1: Shōwa Tokyo. ![]()
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