Yellow Magic Orchestra and solo
City pop picks. By Andrew Male.
“The three members effectively helped forge the cultural identity of ’80s Japan.”
IN 1973, Japanese folk rock group Happy End arrived at Los Angeles’ Sunset Sound Studios asking to meet Van Dyke Parks. The group, Beach Boys obsessives thanks to the West Coast tastes of founder member Haruomi Hosono, had come seeking “that California Sound”. Parks, then working on his baroque calypso travelogue Discover America, refused to help until he saw the group’s suitcase full of money. The sessions were fractious, complete with a drunken argument about Pearl Harbour, and the resultant album was steeped in a languorous melancholy reflecting Hosono’s disenchantment with both the Western perception of Japan and his own vision of America. The group split and Hosono realised a new sound was required.
His first option was to reappropriate the fake Asian exotica of Martin Denny, and make it sound authentically ‘Japanese’. His next idea was for “an international disco band” – a Japanese product that could be successfully exported overseas. Recruited to help were classically trained session keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto and drummer Yukihiro Takahashi. Sakamoto, a former student of electronic music composition at the Tokyo National University of Fine Art, brought with him a deep love of German groups such as Kraftwerk and Neu!, bands who’d responded to the post-war Americanisation of their own culture by creating a new sound disconnected from that past.
Takahashi, former drummer with
UK-based Japanese art-proggers
Sadistic Mika Band, had toured with Roxy Music and been friends with Malcolm McLaren, and was deep-schooled in art rock and pop disruption. Together, the trio attempted what Sakamoto called a “Bento box” fusion of all these influences and ideologies, combined with a sense of humour that bordered on self-parody, and knowledge of Onmyõdõ (the ‘yellow magic’ of the band’s name).
The project was successful. YMO’s clean, crisp “techno pop” sound – simultaneously futuristic and retro, Western and Eastern, influenced US hip-hop, Detroit techno, UK synth-pop and, arguably, Kraftwerk themselves (hello, Techno
Pop). More importantly, it allowed Japanese musicians to develop their own modern ‘city pop’ sound. The three members worked as producers, collaborators and effectively helped forge the cultural identity of ’80s Japan, before splitting off into three wildly different directions. Out of over a hundred solo and band albums, here are 10 to start you off.