Streaming in the Rest of the World: Japan’s Invisible Rock History
Yellow Magic Orchestra before a live show, from left to right: keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto, bandleader Haruomi Hosono, and drummer Yukihiro Takahashi (who also designed their outfits!)
History is only as good as its accounts. If there is no record, it doesn’t really matter if it happened at all. Time and time again, totalitarian regimes prove their ability to disregard, disprove, and disavow historical events. There’s no war in Ba Sing Se, per se. Yet, even sans records, memories can live on through firsthand accounts and oral traditions. The same cannot be said for things which are lost altogether: memories of the Library of Alexandria serve little to no purpose. Luckily for us, the internet provides a secure, internationally accessible, and everlasting library for us to chronicle culture and history. Well, except for art, which you have to pay for, or go see in person. So, maybe 45% of culture and history is actually readily available. At least music is cheap, five to ten dollars a month and any song is at your fingertips, right? I mean, sort of, it’s possible to go about your way and never have any problems finding specific songs or albums on Spotify, they definitely don’t have everything, but supposedly everything important. Take a step back, though, could it be that Spotify has put up walls around its selection of music, restricting access to the outside, and called it ‘all important music’? I’d like to believe that this isn’t intentional, but the intention doesn’t really matter: if streaming remains as the norm for music listening, this is exactly what will happen. Whatever becomes the standard channel through which music is consumed becomes both a limiter and an enabler, enabling accessibility, while limiting what is allowed to pass over.
Spotify is headquartered in Stockholm and traded publicly on the New York Stock Exchange. A majority of Spotify users reside in Europe and North America, and, as a result, their offering is western world-centric, to the point of ignoring certain regions’ music cultures. For example, of the top 20 Japanese Rock Albums, as listed in a 2007 issue of Rolling Stone Japan, twelve are not available on streaming services. Included in these twelve is the #1 album, Kazemachi Roman by the band Happy End. Credited as the first rock band to sing fully in Japanese, Happy End deviated from their compatriots who were attempting to mirror western rock music. This marked an extremely significant milestone for Japanese Rock, separating itself from the rest of the world, with the intention of creating its own unique identity. Not only is Happy End important for this reason, but the music is really, really good. Kazemachi Roman is a loose concept album, focusing on the period of Japanese history before the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, as the city rapidly transitioned into a mecca of the information age, marking the post-war progression into the neon-clad Tokyo we know today. Happy End would later dissolve, but two of its members would continue to alter the course of Japanese music culture. Eiichi Ohtaki and Haruomi Hosono would both have very successful solo careers and would go on to help produce even more music for other artists. Most notably, Hosono would go on to found Yellow Magic Orchestra, pioneering a fun, upbeat synthpop sound that inspired hip-hop, new wave, video game, and modern indie music, among others. YMO also launched the career of Ryuichi Sakamoto, classical auteur and award-winning film scorer. The question is then, why is Happy End’s music so hard to find? Why, with so much influence and significance on its own, is Kazemachi Roman not on Spotify?
This presents an interesting quandary, because if Spotify and streaming as a whole is the dominant listening medium, then this Japanese history becomes at risk of being largely erased, and this is absolutely not a priority for Spotify. Their current policy puts the onus on music owners to upload their music to the service. For some reason or another, the owners of Happy End’s catalog have not made it available, but because of the significance of their releases, does Spotify, then, have a moral responsibility to seek out and do as much as they possibly can to make this music available to the world? It’s a fair debate to have, alongside all the other issues with Spotify’s growing pains. If Spotify decides they don't want to seek these recordings out, do they really need to be available to the mass market? What if, instead, they were simply stored for historical purposes? That’s what institutions like the Library of Congress serve to protect, making them available somewhere, kept safe for archival. Sure, this is valid, as long as these recordings are not lost totally, that’s good, but in that case, why even have a mass network of global information if you’re not going to use it to bring international culture to the masses? What purpose does an internet serve if it lacks the ability to globalize information for human progress?
Originally I set out to write something about YMO and each member’s origins, with an accompanying mix, and although I couldn’t find the right footing for the writing part, but this article had some overlap, so I kept the mix:
Tracklist:
Sorairo no Kureyon - Happy End (0:00-4:01)
Boku Wa Chotto - Haruomi Hosono (4:02-7:41)
Fuyugoe - Haruomi Hosono (7:42-10:58)
Sumie No Kuni e - Sadistic Mika Band (10:59-15:47)
Drip Dry Eyes - Yukihiro Takahashi (15:48-21:12)
Mac Demarco briefly on Hosono (21:13-21:40)
Sports Men - Haruomi Hosono (21:41-25:46)
Don Cornelius in conversation with Yukihiro Takahashi (25:47-26:20)
Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu) - Yukihiro Takahashi (26:21-28:49)
One More Chance - Yukihiro Takahashi (28:50-32:35)
I’ll be there - Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kazumi Watanabe, & Akiko Yano (32:36-38:42)
Don Cornelius introducing YMO on Soul Train (38:43-38:55)¹
Cue - yellow magic orchestra (38:56-41:39)
David Bowie on YMO during an interview on Japanese TV (41:40-42:19)²
Behind the mask - Yellow Magic Orchestra (42:20-45:51)³
Flashback - Yukihiro Takahashi (45:52-48:20)
Turn Down Day - Sketch Show (Yukihiro Takahashi & Haruomi Hosono) (48:21-51:39)
¹(Watch YMO on Soul Train here)
²(Bowie was promoting Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, which Ryuichi Sakamoto acted in and did the music for. Watch Bowie kiss Ryuichi in this scene)
³(with a portion of the Michael Jackson version)