JPOP and JAZZ

Jazz was invented in the 16th century when Bach made up the 12tet system and wrote Fly me to the Moon, but Japan only found out about jazz in the 1920's. They became big fans, but like most things the Japanese have ever done for fun, it was promptly banned by the emporer, causing America to declare war on them and so on, and the Japanese would only end up listening to it again in the 1950's, this time as a result of all the American soldiers "bringing their culture" with them. (Zionist mind control with the intent of subjugating a defeated people"). But this time jazz would be around to stay, and lots of jazz clubs appeared, spawning many epic jazz musicians. While Japan had lots of talent, the opinion of most is that they didn't make any innovations on their own, and were mostly derivitave of Americans like Bud Powell and Charlie Parker. This would change with the coming of Jazz fusion in the 1970's and 80's.

Jazz in Japan split in two, (obviously there's more than just these two, but this is how I see it.): Free jazz(based) and Jazz fusion(cringe). There wasn't exactly a huge split between these two, musicians would cross over from one to the other, but Free jazz remained niche and Jazz fusion made a BIG WAVE. As far as the history of JPOP goes, there's no reason to give a fuck about free jazz, so forget about that.

To me, the 1970's-80's was the true birth of JPOP, even though "Japanese Pop" obviously existed long before then the songwriting techniques and innovations made by names such as Tatsuro Yamashita, Akiko Yano, Ryuichi Sakamoto and others made such huge ripples that still haven't gone away. That's why we could have this recent City-pop craze, and why there probably isn't going to be an Eleki craze any time soon. Pretty much everything we know about JPOP in the modern day can be traced back to this era. The Royal Road, the JPOP progression, Suspended Dominants, Parallelism, Secondary Dominants(I can't think of any examples for these right now lol). These concepts didn't originate in this era, but they were used in a way that was more marketable and listenable and addicting than ever before.

With the 90's came the boom of Akiba Pop, Dempa, Idol culture, these had their beginnings in the 80's but I think in the 90's became a more sizeable force in Japanese culture. This is where you'd be better off reading someone like ArtificialNightSky, who knows a lot about denpa, and not me who only knows a little bit. Denpa is basically gone now, but J-pop is still in it's "Moe" Period, and this will continue until society collapses. Thank you for reading. Die.

toshiko akiyoshi, mai waifu