Tokyo’s New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular
How Pizzicato Five created their unique, adventurous style from the environment of 90’s Japan.
artwork by Wyatt Warren.
The musical movement of Shibuya-kei, based in Tokyo in the early 1990s, had the rare quality of being an underground musical style based on frivolous consumption, not making any attempts to speak for vulnerable members of society. This frivolity is especially striking when you consider that the 1990s were a dire decade for Japan’s economy, after a real-estate bubble burst and left many unemployed, especially the young lower-class. But this crisis did not really affect the musicians of Shibuya-kei, who came from wealthy Tokyo families and spent their days curating record collections rather than worrying about their wages. These musicians, of whom Pizzicato Five and Flipper’s Guitar were the most notable, were self-consciously chic in all aesthetic areas, and this translated to the music they made (and all the accompanying visuals). Their influences were primarily Western rather than Japanese, as the hip record stores they loved stocked British, French, and American albums. At first, their music may appear to be anything but class-conscious, but Pizzicato Five’s focus on foreign sounds shows a desire to distance themselves from 90s Japan and all its struggles.
Pizzicato Five was founded in the early 1980s by Yasuharu Konishi, one of the wealthy, young, Japanese music collectors that defined this scene. Their debut single “Audrey Hepburn Complex” was released in 1985. The band really hit its stride after 1990, when vocalist Maki Nomiya joined its ranks, and they went on to gain some acclaim (even if they are currently inaccessible on many streaming services). Nomiya is often credited for giving the band a strong visual identity, wearing multiple wigs during every concert and providing a sense of drama and theatricality. After a short while, the music also got much better.
At this point, it would probably be good to describe what “Shibuya-kei” actually means, or at least what it represents (as the artists it encompasses would never self-identify as a cohesive collective). Literally, Shibuya-kei simply means “Shibuya style,” in reference to the record stores of the Shibuya neighborhood, one of the major commercial hubs of Tokyo. The makers of Shibuya-kei were a group of young artists who were incredibly popular among the Tokyo indie scene and, at first, absolutely nowhere else. Eventually, they became the first underground Japanese groups to receive international attention, being released on notable Western indie labels and retaining cultural resonance with avant-garde artists across the world to this day. While their appropriation of consumerist Western culture may seem the opposite of subversive, it was, counterintuitively, a critique of the Japanese pop music of the day. Martin Roberts notes that “What differentiated the Shibuya-kei bands [from other Japanese artists] were their references not just to contemporary but to retro popular music genres, including 1960s French and British pop, Brazilian bossa nova, easy listening and exotica, European movie soundtracks, Motown, disco and 1980s UK indie pop.” It was a very insular community, with lyrics (at least at first) focusing on the trivial concerns of well-to-do young people. As the Japanese economy began to crumble, the members of Flipper’s Guitar instead directed their ire at the major record labels of Japan and demonstrated an ostentatious belief in the superiority of their music and style.
Pizzicato Five eventually emerged from this cloud of self-conscious hipness and extreme insularity to concoct a musical sound that stands completely alone. Above all else, the band’s output serves as a testament to Konishi’s incredible talents as a collector. Unfortunately, the usual journalistic focus on Nomiya’s image and the Shibuya-kei ethos results in an almost complete lack of focus on the content of their great music. Pizzicato Five’s music is unabashedly sample-heavy, often including obvious references to pop songs or seemingly out-of-place sounds. They punctuate their songs with a voice saying “A new stereophonic sound spectacular,” a phrase that calls back to the hi-fi sound effects records of the 1950s, and which can be taken as a sort of thesis for the band’s work. However, the band is equally reliant on Konishi’s excellent bass playing and Nomiya’s charismatic vocals, and the captivating grooves of their songs are anything but manufactured.
The first 7 or 8 years of Pizzicato Five’s output, including the entire pre-Nomiya period, saw constant stylistic experimentation without much musical quality to show for it. Pizzicatomania (1987) and Sweet Pizzicato Five (1992) see an exploration of electronic and house styles, while Belissima! (1988) and This Year’s Girl (1991) take more cues from soul and funk music, respectively. It’s interesting to hear the band gain more faculty with each style as time goes on, and witness the origins of the musical motifs that would eventually mark their sound. But none of these albums are very impressive, even after Nomiya joined the band in 1990.
Greatness would arrive, however, in 1993, with the help of Flipper’s Guitar member Keigo Oyamada (better known as Cornelius), who co-produced Bossanova 2001. The album sees the band hone their electronica, funk, and sunshine pop influences into tight, catchy four-minute songs. Most notable among these is the semi-famous “Sweet Soul Revue,” which takes the beat of Sly Stone’s “Dance to the Music” and adds organ and cheerful strings, elevating 60s California pop with a slight modern, cosmopolitan twist. Other songs on the album sample The Beatles and make liberal use of electric guitar, showing considerable pop rock influence (despite the album’s name). The main difference between this album and its predecessors is that it knows when to develop ideas and when to add more variation – it’s cohesive enough to feel like a full experience, but no song goes on too long, and each one has a memorable hook and distinct instrumentation. The stylistic choices of this album may show a greater awareness of the times – the constant references to the music of the 1960s and the West read as a sort of escapism from the current Japanese socio-political context.
The next year, they followed Bossanova 2001 up with Overdose, a more R&B-styled album that also features an extended ten-minute electronic cut in “東京は夜の七時” (7 P.M. in Tokyo”)—though the single edit is much better. Despite having a similar sound to the previous album, Overdose feels a bit more urgent and metropolitan, as confirmed by the album cover picturing the Brooklyn Bridge. Pizzicato Five save the best for last here, with “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” a warm, groovy song that quotes Stevie Wonder and punctuates its hooks with a horn section. The band then released Romantique 96 the next year, a good album but not one worth going in-depth on, before taking two years to record 1997’s Happy End of the World.
And it was certainly worth the wait. Here, Pizzicato Five brought an entirely new sound and made an album that is the result of fifteen years of improvement. Happy End of the World features sound collages, insane drum breaks, and some of the best pop songwriting of the 1990s. This album sees the band at their most committed to genre-bending but also at their most catchy. Songs that start with pop melodies become electronic experiments and vice-versa. The formula is perfected on “It’s a Beautiful Day,” as a rock beat plays under the verses but transforms into a synthetic drum fill between sections, optimistic backing vocals spell out the name of the band, and plucked strings and organ fill out the backing track—and it’s all held together by an adventurous funk-inspired bass line. Several songs seem to be styled as advertisements, with clearly pre-packaged string and drum sounds and deliberately generic backing vocals, as well as several interludes featuring spoken word. This aesthetic directly acknowledges the cognitive dissonance of living in the hyper-capitalist but largely unhappy society of 1990s Japan; advertisements present a curated idea of success away from the context of the real world, a similar sentiment to that of this album’s title. But behind this commercial aesthetic are clever and heartfelt songs that showcase the performance and the creative abilities of their creators, from the experimental “Trailer Music” and “Collision and Improvisation” to the wholly joyous “アリガト WE LOVE YOU” (Arigato We Love You) and “Happy Ending.”
Pizzicato Five continued to make music for a few years after this album, and much of it is very good, but it seems right to finish their story with Happy End of the World, as it’s the most unique product of their career and the perfect representation of their musical ideals. Over the course of their career, Pizzicato Five saw Japan transition from an optimistic nation with a booming economy into one in a prolonged recession. While it’s not clear how much this decline personally affected them, it’s possible to see their nostalgic bend and their optimism for the future as manifestations of a desire to escape the present. At the same time, their home city features prominently in their lyrics from “7 P.M. in Tokyo” to “Mon Amour Tokyo.” Their musical influences may have come from around the world, but Pizzicato Five was always a band from Tokyo, and they drew both good and bad from their environment.
edited by Maia Driggers.
artwork by Wyatt Warren.