カテゴリー: English

In February 2018, PRS Foundation launched a campaign named Keychange. By encouraging music festivals to achieve a 50:50 gender balance by 2022, it aims to make the music industry more inclusive and create a better future. Initially, their partners were 45 festivals around the world but now they include more than 130 festivals.

Nowadays, music festivals are the industry’s most important opportunity to reach a major audience. Moreover, as some big festivals started to stream their stages via YouTube, music festivals became not only a place for the live experience but also a crucial platform of the business. So Keychange’s activity is to the point. Festivals could epitomize the whole industry in many ways.

While Keychange aims to create the future, some media is examining the status quo statistically with vivid visualization. In May 2018, Pitchfork published the result of their own research for the festival’s gender equity in America. According to the report, in 2017, festivals’ lineup in the US festivals had 74% male acts, 14% female, and 12% mixed. The next year’s had 70% male, 19% female, and 11 % mixed. For a more detailed investigation, you can read this article.

Then, how’s it going here in Japan?

Since the first Fuji Rock Festival in 1997, music festivals in Japan saw rapid growth throughout the 00s. By the early 2010s, music festivals became one of the most popular leisure activity. This given situation even encouraged some rock bands to invent “Festival Rock,” which features uplifting four-on-the-floor drum beats and sing-along friendly melodies.

Thus, although music festivals have been playing a pivotal role in Japan’s music industry, there are few mentions on gender equality. I couldn’t find statistics on it so I decided to collect data by myself.

There are four major music festivals in Japan: Fuji Rock Festival, Summer Sonic, Rock In Japan Festival, and Rising Sun Rock Festival. The former two are known for their international lineup in contrast to the latter two focus on acts that are based in Japan. I limited the scope of this research to those four festivals’ lineup for the last five years. I scraped those festivals’ web site by Python and checked out each acts’ gender as far as I could find.

Below is what I found.

SUMMARY

• In 2019, the lineup for major festivals in Japan was 65% male acts and 35% female or mixed acts.
  • Comparing those festivals, it seems there’s no big difference between them as far as concerning male : female (or mixed) ratio.
  • The festival that included the most female acts in 2019 was Summersonic (22%).
  • The festival that included the least female acts in 2019 was Fuji Rock Festival (12%).
• From 2016 to 2018, the lineup for major festivals in Japan had been 69% male acts and 31% female or mixed acts.
  • Looking at annual changes, there is hardly a particular tendency on the male : female ratio.
  • However, some festivals’ transitions show possible intentions to reduce the male ratio.
    • In 2016, Fuji had 75% male acts and Rock In Japan did 68%. On the other hand, in 2019, the former was 64% (11 points lower) and the latter was 65% (3 points lower).
    • Given that, I’m planning further research for the transition throughout Fuji’s and Rock In Japan’s entire history.

Then, is Japan’s gender equality in music festivals better than the US?

As seen above, Japan’s gender equality in the festivals’ lineup seems a bit better than the US. There might be many explanations for this, but I don’t have any clear opinion now.

Having said that, I am not so optimistic. It’s because Japan’s society as a whole seems very sexist. I’ve been disappointed at our society’s indifference to any kind of gender gap. (One of the most shocking news was this… worth reading. Two more Japanese medical schools admit discriminating against women | World news | The Guardian)

I think the gender ratio I mentioned above is a baseless and arbitrary consequence of the society’s indifference. Even though the score looks better than other countries, it doesn’t mean there’s less gender inequality in Japan. If we don’t consciously deal with the problem, it can be worse in the future.

Anyway, this is merely a score just calculated numbers on spreadsheets. A more precise analysis is needed. I hope this would motivate someone (and help me tidying data…).

Tables

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Honestly, I had very little knowledge about People In The Box until their latest Kodomo Rengou, which was released in February 2018. I was relatively new to today’s Japanese rock music ‘cuz I was crazy in dance music since the late ’00s. However, one of my friends strongly recommended the album, saying that it would be the album of the year. Then I tried listening and soon fell in love with it. I’ve listened to it over and over, even ignoring other new releases.

The album reminded me of some math-rock acts but it had a more physical and active groove. Rather than indulging in sweet and violent tones from the amplifiers, just as some bands do (oops, I don’t blame on them. just for comparison), they play riffs and rhythm patterns with strong clarity. From a note to note, I can hear their intention–how they want them to sound, how they want them to be. The interplay between melodies is dizzying yet compelling me to dance to it. I dare say that it’s like something fusing prog-rock, chamber music and afrobeat.

Their lyrics are also important. With quite simple vocabulary, they often depict the ordinary life around us, especially in Japan’s suburbs. Let me take “町A (Town A)” as an example. In its chorus, Hirofumi Hatano (Vo. & Guitar, who also writes all of their lyrics) sings like this: “huge mall, restaurant, public library, udon noodle stand, book store, bakery, housing, flower shop, ramen stand, shrine, temple, secondhand car shop, room with sunlight.” Most Japanese people may easily imagine such a tasteless landscape. It belongs nowhere, as the title suggests. It has no name. If anything, it can be everywhere. It might be my hometown, or else, someone’s hometown instead.

“This is not heaven, let alone a paradise. / However, this is not hell even. / One night after another / Say, a buffer zone or resting place between nights / This is not heaven; just my hometown” Hatano sings. Ok, this is certainly the mise-en-scene of our everyday life. But how strange, weird, and uncanny is this? It’s like the Brechtian theatre’s distancing effect. It’s pretty ambivalent that the album closes with a song named “僕は正気 (I AM sane)”. Are we still sober or losing our minds in this world?

Hatano deliberately manipulates words and depicts people’s inherent anxiety without any sentimental rhetorics. But it moves my mind so hard that I almost cry when I listen to “かみさま (God)” and “僕は正気”.

The tight groove of the ensemble, the complicated texture of the sound, and the lyrics’ peculiar poesy. This is obviously the best Japanese rock album of 2018.

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Enuma Fumiya’s #1 is his first full-length as a solo singer-songwriter. After the break-up of plenty in 2017, the introspective frontman of the band took some synths and a daw into his hands instead of the guitar. While plenty’s music was characterized by the shoegaze-like guitar noise with catchy melodies–say, very “indie” in a sense–the album was completely rid of such catharsis. It was like something between psychedelic folk and alternative r&b which could be compared to James Blake’s or Frank Ocean’s seminal works. I would say that he was finding another way to express his thought with a great delicacy. And he actually did it.

In the endless reverberation and infinite echoes, his voice tells us how he’s sad and desperate. This sadness once used to be quite dramatic and ecstatic especially when he was with his band, but now it’s more nuanced as he elaborates the sound design. Every sound of the album is deliberately modulated to express feelings that couldn’t be said with words. M9 “take my hands” is the best example I think. The guitar loop is granulated and pitch-shifted voices are haunting the entire song. The song sounds like memories suspended in the air, slowly falling into oblivion.

From this March, Enuma has released three singles which would be featured in the new album. These three songs, “うるせえんだよ”, “偽善からはじめよう”, and “積み木くずし” are more friendly in sound but much more pessimistic in words. FYI “うるせえんだよ” and “偽善からはじめよう” can be respectively translated like “Shut the fuck up” and “Let’s begin with hypocrisy”, both are very shocking as song’s name. However, while he sings about his distrust of the people and the impossibility of mutual understanding, he is also breaking the walls of creativity.

Enuma recently plays his show with a young and mysterious band 木 (ki), one of the most anticipated new comer in Japan. Among music lovers, they’re known for an eccentric and minimalistic approach with a definite pop sense. Their avant-garde pop rendered in a smooth R&B flavor, which is 木’s signature style, certainly resonates with Enuma’s solo works (check out the band’s debut EP Vi below). This collaboration is pretty fascinating to me. I’d like to watch their show someday this year.

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When I found that RM (from BTS) was listening to Tempalay’s “どうしよう (dooshiyou)” I was very excited since it was one of my most favorite songs then. The song starts with slightly out-of-scale riffs which have a dislocating feeling. After a sudden glitchy edit, the band’s vocalist Ryoto Obara begins to sing with the mesmerizing guitar and the bold beat, embraced by their multi-instrumentalist AAAMYYY’s backing chorus. I was not satisfied with the cheesy vid but I couldn’t help watching it over and over and over. I thought RM might feel the same way as me.

Tempalay is a Japanese psychedelic rock band, whose music apparently resonates with the Aussie star band Tame Impala (oh, their names resembles each other btw). Raw, lo-fi, and strangely chill. Listening to them is like a lucid dream or a psychedelic trip without losing minds. The band was formed in 2014 and officially debuted in 2015 by the EP Instant Hawaii. It took only two years to take ‘em Austin, Texas to play at SXSW 2016. They’ve been so prolific that they’ve released three EPs and two full-length from 2015 to 2018, even they’re gonna release their third full-length 21世紀より愛をこめて (can be translated like From 21st century with love) this June.

なんて素晴らしき世界 (Nante Subarashiki Sekai, which means What a wonderful world) is their third EP which includes “どうしよう” the single mentioned above. As the original bass player Yuya Takeuchi left the band in 2018, the former support player AAAMYYY, who’s also known for her solo career as a beatmaker officially joined in. Since she was not a proper bass player (she mostly play samplers and synths) welcoming her in the band led them a more eclectic sound, featuring a variety of instruments and electronics. For example, “テレパシー (Telepathy)” has 808 in its verse, popping electronic sound effects in the chorus, and AAAMYYY’s rap is also featured in the bridge.

Moreover, you may hear more elaborate and tricky songwriting in songs like “SONIC WAVE”, which has a lot of sudden scene changes, or “Last Dance”, which heavily features metric modulations. Yes. The ensemble is pretty tight. The songs are well-written and playful. I bet their upcoming 21世紀より愛をこめて is gonna be their true breakthrough. Fortunately, they just released a single called “のめりこめ、震えろ。(Nomerikome, furuero.)”, roughly translated like “Lose yourself and shiver”. I’ll listen to it and lose myself as they ask me to do.

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