Undeservedly Forgotten Japan
English 80s Pop Band: A Reappreaciation

by Von Bark
goo spacer Okay: first point conceded: they had big hair; the state of contemporary pop culture appreciation delegates this trope to the smirking graveyard, but, if we might look beyond the antennae for receiving extra-terrestrial signals (and the attendant head-cutters in the employ of the government), we might glance at that which lay beyond. more...

- sally mckay 5-25-2006 7:17 pm

japan

Undeservedly Forgotten Japan continued...

Japan was a stylish, glam/punk/funk/new-wave band, with not just exquisite hair, but also suitably androgynous eye-liner and a flashy array of blazers featuring a variety of lapel widths. Their self-titled first album (the red album) kicked off with a set of raspy tunes capped with their punky cover of "Don't Rain on My Parade." Side two was a work of genius: a quartet of perfect songs: the raucous, trippy, "Adolescent Sex"; the sensual, trippy "Suburban Love"; the introspective, trippy "Communist China"; and the final statement: the hypnotic, disturbing, trippy "Television": a ten minute epic with an understated slightly funky beat, a glimmering electric piano, a snarling insistent guitar riff, and singer David Sylvian's grumpy mumbling eventually raging against "too much fucking television!" in an indelibly memorable crescendo. T'was a perfect moment in popular music.

Their second "black" album was not quite as raw, rough or immediately engaging, but their more tentative, more thoughtful style did climax with another mini-epic, the enigmatic orchestral "Suburban Berlin." Themes of suburbs and contemporary European culture continued. By the third "white" album entitled In Vogue lead singer David Sylvian's sultry drawling baritone focuses valiantly on trying to forge a stance between his more popular models David Bowie and Brian Ferry, even to the point of singing a dolorous dirge, "Despair" entirely in the French language. Bass guitarist Nick Karn slathers copious murky electronic chorus effects over his instrument, and producer John Punter buffs and polishes the tapes to a fine glassy sheen. The final result is a sort of tribute to either Bowie or Roxy Music, one which was actually superior to the work their idols were doing at that time.

Their final "grey" album Tin Drum was the precursor of a style of oriental sounding western pop music which tragically never transpired. Spikey, innovative, minimalist synthesizer textures, combined with overt Maoistic, Peking-Opera imagery, made for a lost fad decades before its time.

David Sylvian split from the band in order to lead his solo career in an even more orientalist direction. His first single with Rick Sakamoto, "Bamboo Music," was a breath-taking introduction to the potential of digital percussion rhythms, innovations which were rapidly trampled underfoot by the pervasiveness of the use of these technologies since then. After working with Sakamoto on the soundtrack album for the movie Merry X-mas Mr. Lawrence (featuring David Bowie in a starring but not singing role) Sylvian ironically appeared as a virtual ghost voice for his idol.

Sylvian's first solo (pale yellow) was Brilliant Trees a set of subdued meditative zen pieces, featuring the touching lament, "Nostalgia." The only hint of a beat came with the bouncy but restrained "Red Guitar."

His next solo album (we haven't bothered noting the colour of them by now) was a droney atmospheric double album inspired by a Kundera book, and featuring members of his former band as well as guitar guests Robert Fripp and Bill Nelson, and also a dollop of audio fragments stolen from the files of Peter Gabriel.

Around this time, which would be the late 1980s, I saw David Sylvian live in concert at Massey Hall. It was the dullest concert I had ever attended in my life. Sylvian appeared with three out of four members of his old band, Japan, but he did not do one song from Japan's repertoire. There was no lighting on the dim stage. Every song was a drone in the key of e-minor. I hung out with the cops in the stairwell, smoking. They offered the opinion that the music was not very energetic. Sylvian peaked out for an encore and someone in the crowd yelled out "Red Guitar." The audience roared in approval at this suggestion, but Sylvian shook his head and murmered another drone in e-minor for his encore before retiring for the night. I ceased following his career after this, but I have noticed that he has attracted virtually no music press coverage since then in the past years.

A brief fact check notes that the band Japan was always extremely popular in the oriental nation after which they are named, an entirely appropriate bit of cross-cultural irony most worthy of Japanese popular media. Apparently Sylvian and Fripp have made several successful live performances there in the past decade or so, events which have gone virtually unreported in North American music journalism.

The decline of David Sylvian's cultural significance is not really a big deal, but what might be worth a brief comment is his band Japan's early stylistic tripod, with its toes delicately balanced on the genres of punk, funk, and glam. Balanced just subtly enough to evade the continuing separate revivals of interest in these sub-genres of popular music.

Von Bark, "Undeservedly Forgotten Japan," first published in Grey Goo (Print Edition), Toronto, 2005
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