Haruomi Hosono, Japan’s pop pioneer

By B.F.

OUTSIDE Japan, Haruomi Hosono is not a household name. Last month’s release of “Vu Ja De”, his 21st solo album, was not met with much fanfare. But for those who know the 70-year-old’s work, his impact can be felt in everything from pop, electronic music and hip-hop to film soundtracks and department store muzak. At this late stage of his career, he is returning to his early influences.

Japanese pop music may conjure up images of squeaky clean, auto-tuned groups embodying the kawaii ideal–cute, youthful and incongruously sexy. J-pop’s fusion of Western styles with Japanese tastes can trace its roots back to Mr Hosono’s band Happy End, which broke away from the Beatles clones popular in 1960s Japan by being the first rock band to sing in their native Japanese. As a teenager growing up in Tokyo, Mr Hosono felt isolated from traditional Japanese culture, listening instead to the American military radio stations serving US forces. Happy End bears little resemblance to the synthesised, bubble-gum pop coming out of Japan today, but the band’s sound—recently described by MTV as “rock with psych smudges around the edges”—paired the cachet of post-war American cool with home-grown influences such as minimal, folky guitar riffs.

In 1978 Mr Hosono made another leap forward when he formed Yellow Magic Orchestra, a synth-pop trio. He was captivated by electronic music originating from Europe, where Kraftwerk were proving that digital sounds could be emotive rather than anodyne. Yellow Magic Orchestra’s eponymous first release sent up the West’s trite imitations of oriental music, replacing lilting percussion with synthesised electronic beats. One track, “Firecracker”, was not only a huge hit in Japan but charted in America and Britain too. It went on to be sampled on hip-hop tracks throughout the 1980s and 90s, and even served as an unlikely underpinning for Jennifer Lopez’s song “I’m Real” more than two decades later.

By the mid-1980s, the rise of companies like Nintendo had put Japan at the apex of a meeting between technology and culture. The hypnotic tones of video games such as Namco’s “Xevious” and Nintendo’s “Super Mario Brothers” provided more creative fodder for Mr Hosono. He was one of the first musicians to ape their sounds with sequencers and synthesisers; the beeps and blips on the album’s opener, prosaically titled “Computer Game”, recalls playing “Space Invaders” on a hulking arcade machine.

Yellow Magic Orchestra separated in 1985, but Mr Hosono has remained a performer and a prolific producer, championing experimental artists. He has composed film soundtracks and even a series of minimalist, Brian Eno-esque ambient tracks to be played in the fashionable Muji homeware chain. In recent years, he has cast his eye back to a pre-digital age. Boogie-woogie, the fast-paced precursor to swing that was popularised in the 1920s, is the latest focus of a rediscovery of jazz and pop that characterises his recent releases. He injects a buoyant energy to previously-plodding blues riffs, and his new album has the playful feeling of a live recording.

“Vu Ja De” is split into two parts, the first made up of boogie-woogie covers of English rock’n’roll classics like Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”, and the rockabilly “Susie Q”. Mr Hosono has admitted that singing didn’t always come naturally to him. Despite this, his low, crooning tones are warm and unmistakable (even if the lyrics are not always entirely intelligible). The second part of the album is an odd mix of Mr Hosono’s compositions, most of which have been heard before in one form or another—one breezy samba-style track started life as an advertising jingle.

The album’s title refers to an inverted sense of déjà vu: experiencing something familiar as if for the first time. This may seem an unusual reference for an artist who is revered in Japan as a musical innovator and the father of J-pop, but it is fitting. Mr Hosono has spent a career turning familiar sounds into something new and uncanny, be it video-game code or post-war pop. He may be looking back, but Haruomi Hosono is still creating something new out of old sounds.