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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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I couldn’t post last Wednesday because I was too busy and tired. One of my distraction then was preparing my dj set at Gampeki Music Festival which would be held at the weekend. I’ve almost quit djing years ago and my skill is not great at all tho, I enjoyed playing. You can hear it on mixcloud.

Today I’d like to write about ぼくのりりっくのぼうよみ (boku no ririkku no bo’yomi, ぼくりり in short)’s 没落 (botsuraku). The title means “fall” or “decay” literally. It was his last album under the name ぼくのりりっくのぼうよみ. He was a young and talented singer and songwriter with a unique voice and thoughtful lyrics, whose music attracted the wide audience. His dance-oriented beat and eloquent vocalization were mellow and youthful at the same time, no other singers had a charismatic atmosphere as his one.

However, suddenly he announced that he would quit ぼくりり, saying that he was exhausted with being a genius. He was also known for somewhat challenging or controversial remarks about Japan’s music industry, media coverage, and music critics. He was like a trickster. So I was suspicious about the statement. It seemed like a staged performance rather than an honest feeling, just aiming a social buzz to promote his new album. Moreover, his tweets following the statement contained some misogynistic phrases like calling some of his fans ババア (“old bitches” or something like that), which was offensive against women. I was disappointed, although his true intention remained unclear.

没落 was released in somewhat uncomfortable buzz. Against my expectations, it was an instant masterpiece which obviously deserved to be his accomplishment as an artist. While his signature style which had jazz-influenced chord progressions and vibrant melodies wasn’t changed, the variety of beats were more diverse than before, from UK Garage/Speed Garage to NY House to Future Soul.

The most surprising thing was like, some songs were like suites telling us dramatic stories, reminiscing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”. The good example of these was “輪廻転生 (Rin’ne Tensho, Metempsychosis in English)”. Beginning with a simple electro hip-hop beat, the song underwent from Minimalistic chamber ensemble to gospel-like choir with the Prismizer effect which reminded me of Bon Iver or Francis and the Lights. I was very surprised because very few J-POP acts have made a good use of such vocal processing technology (Yasutaka Nakata’s use of Auto-tune is a rare example).

The album was great, but this fact made me wonder why he had to quit the activity like that. It should have been the beginning of the next phase rather than an ending of the career. After his final show, he changed the stage name from ぼくりり to たなか which was one of the most typical family names in Japan. As he appeared some artist’s releases under aliases, it seems that it’s not retirement per se. So I hope someday たなか (or ぼくりり again) would release some materials.

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