5 Songs Not on KanJam's Best J-pop Songs 2000-2020 List (But Should Have Been)

Presenting five of my write-in choices from the 2010s for Kanjam's top 30 list

Mar 24, 2021

This feature is part of This Side of Japan issue #29. You can return to the main issue here. You can check out previous issues of the newsletter here.

For its March 3 episode, music program KanJam counted down a list of the 30 best J-pop songs from 2000-2020, put together from a poll of 48 professional musicians. (Arama! Japan has the full 30, and you can also see 31-50 in the comments section.) The final selection understandably skewed populist in taste, but the general picture of the two decades in J-pop as observed by the list overall looked respectable.

The boldest claim may be its number-one pick, “Pretender” by Official Hige Dandism. The 2019 pop smash won out legacy names like Hikaru Utada, Shiina Ringo and SMAP among others. The band wasn’t the only current act in the top ranks, with King Gnu, Foorin and YOASOBI hanging out in the top 10. “The fact a song from 2019 is number one give a kind of hope,” said Yoshiki Mizuno of Ikimonogakari, one of the guests for the night. “It’s not just about looking back but there’s more that will be made. I feel optimistic looking at this list.”

Twenty-plus of the polled musicians chose “Pretender” somewhere in their votes with more than a few praising its lyrics and arrangements. Me? I would not have a single song from the band in my list, and even if I did, “Pretender” wouldn’t be my choice Hige Dan song (that would be “I Love…”). There are other picks that highlight the many exciting forms J-pop have taken in the past 20 years, though I also can’t deny “Pretender” is definitively J-pop in the sense that it represents the sound of what’s commercially popular in the country.

Upon the reveal of KanJam’s list, many J-pop fans on the internet shared what they thought was a glaring omission. Where is Ayumi Hamasaki for instance? (An awesome read related to the omissions is “The Lost Decade in J-pop: 2006 - 2015,” written in Japanese by Soichiro Matsutani for Yahoo! and translated to English by Ronald Taylor for Arama! Japan.) It’s fun brainstorming what was not on the list as much as appreciating what did make it, so I decided to participate and provide five picks as my own write-ins for this list of best J-pop songs 2000-2020. I focused on the 2010s because songs from that decade came to me easier than the other.

Here are the five:

“Nerve” by BiS [Tsubasa, 2011]

What would the decade in idol look like if BiS didn’t exist? The group’s influence doesn’t register in the slightest in the KanJam list; not even their successor BiSH makes an appearance. The mainstream best remembers them for the infamous “my lxxx” music video and hardly as a proper pop act than a has-been controversy. But within its respective subculture, they paved a way for an entire generation of groups that would later be categorized as “alt-idols” by presenting new ways in which idols can sound, look and simply be.

All that said, the group’s most iconic single ironically sounds contemporaneous with idols they are supposedly in contrast with. It’s a synth-pop tune with the brightest keyboard riff. The idols sing about their frustrations with a crush fully oblivious of the advances they make. The choreography takes inspiration from—parodies?—another popular idol dance. The reputation of BiS is told less through song in “Nerve” than word of mouth. Though, rest assured, they left a craze that united all fans as well as other idol groups plus something they can call a legacy.

“Zettai Kanojo” by Seiko Oomori [Pink, 2013]

Seiko Oomori has gone on to write songs far more intense, more complex, more purpose-driven than this track from her indie days yet “Zettai Kanojo” is significant for laying the foundations for future records to come. The aloof cadence, the lack of care for brevity or formalism, the candid narrative like a ripped page from the middle of a diary—Seiko Oomori, the writer, was already fully formed here, and it’s this style as well as her viscerally personal point of view that has gravitated an entire cult following to her music. “Zettai Kanojo” also has its rough, slapdash pop production working as a unique charm, humbling the singer-songwriter into someone more anonymous, who’s still finding herself in the world.

“Summer Soul” by cero [KAKUBARHYTHM, 2015]

Though he spotlights another song than the above, I still recommend reading Patrick St. Michel’s recent newsletter on the legacy of Suchmos last decade in regards to Cero’s place in the 2010s. The feelgood bohemia of Cero got recognized early on as part of a new city-pop movement, before “Plastic Love” drew in a new crowd of international audiences and music acts, and “Summer Soul” became a legit hit from a band who otherwise kept to themselves in their own zone. While they decidedly refrained from participating in the pop game as shown in 2019’s Poly Life Multi Soul, Cero more or less chalked the outline of the alternative rock sound many newcomers are still trying on for size today.

“Suisei” by DAOKO [Toy’s Factory, 2015]

While the original by Tofubeats equally deserves a spot in a list of the best Japanese pop songs of the last decade, DAOKO’s cover not only revamps the song but also confirms its impact in the lives of the current generation. If Tofubeats established the general tone of the 2010s—jaded about tomorrow while being nostalgic about today—DAOKO expands on it through a personal, lived-in perspective. She raps in a language informed by countless hours of Niconico Douga, whispering a chain of hypnotic word salads as if it’s a riddle only the youth can decode. While the chorus of mirror balls and journeys to Mercury remains intact from the original, the subsequent lyric “what lies ahead for me?” hits more bittersweet coming from an even younger voice. Almost a decade since the release of “Suisei,” the precariousness of the future that burdens both Tofubeats and DAOKO has yet to disappear.

“Ikkyu-san” by Wednesday Campanella [Warner Music Japan, 2017]

“Ikkyu-san” honestly is an effort to meet the KanJam panel half way. There are few other Wednesday Campanella songs that I like more, but if I had to choose a title to fit in a list with a populist bent, it would be this one that gained the group mainstream attention if only for a little while.

Not to say it isn’t great. “Ikkyu-san” is still an amazing introduction to what makes Wednesday Campanella one of the most fascinating pop act of the 2010s. Like many of their songs, it’s loosely inspired by the titular historical figure with the lyrics folding in references to the famous Zen Buddhist monk. “Ikkyu-san” shines through its very “anything goes” approach to what constitutes a proper song, and that’s partly thanks to frontwoman Kom_I, whose performance is as animated and cartoon-like as her absurd, surrealist verses: check her in the phenomenal bridge that twists the monk’s fabled origins into a nu-disco breakdown. Wednesday Campanella didn’t break the rules of J-pop as so much as they invented entirely new ones, inviting you into a world that moved according to their silly logic.