Issue #13: M Stands For...
Discussing the new Neibiss album, Ayumi Hamasaki's "Seasons" and the latest new entry on Music Station
Hello! Welcome to This Side of Japan, a newsletter about Japanese music, new and old! You can check out previous issues here.
A debut appearance on Music Station still feels like a big deal for new artists. While the music program consistently features Johnny’s acts, 46/48 groups, and EXILE Tribe units as almost a given, it’s the novelties tucked in between like rapper Rinne for last Friday’s line-up that makes it worth taking a look. The young rapper may lack name recognition from TV viewers compared to others such as LiSA and Sexy Zone, but he’s been steadily growing in visibility on the streaming front this year with “Snow Jam” popping up on Spotify and TikTok.
Rinne in particular joins a recent crop of artists who crossed over to Music Station from a digital outlet. King Gnu also debuted last year on the show with “Hakujo” ranking high on Spotify charts, and the band has since grown into a TV mainstay enough that singer Daiki Tsuneta has become a popular subject of impressions. Aimyon and Kenshi Yonezu are other internet names that continue to attract TV attention with their social-media engagements being a big draw.
With YouTube views and TikTok activity as the new metric of popularity, it’s only natural for Music Station to now peek at social media outlets to determine which artists to book. Physical sales don’t accurately measure engagement as it did before, especially as the sales charts have become easy to game during the past decade.
All that said, I’m not sure how far Rinne will go as an artist. “Snow Jam” is a sappy enough pop-rap single to be palatable for listeners who don’t normally seek out rap music, but for all its success on social media, it’s not as exciting of a song as, say, King Gnu’s “Hakujo.” Perhaps he’ll continue to thrive on TikTok, dropping more sweet songs for people to make content with. Music Station, however, isn’t the outlet to break artists anyway than it is a place to confirm their current position within the mainstream. The crossover of “Snow Jam” is more of a win for social media as a possible outlet that can produce more interesting line-ups on prime-time music TV.
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We got more rap music for this newsletter. Our Album of the Week is an amazing debut album by a rap duo. I also have a translated interview with a rap icon! I translated a 2017 interview done by Fuze with Zeebra, where he talks about him growing up with hip hop in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s and creating the rap scene in Japan. A lot of great insight on what the early hip-hop scene in Japan was like! One of the rappers of our Album of the Week grew up listening to Zeebra’s rap crew King Giddra, so I thought it would be a fascinating supplementary reading material. You can read that here.
We also look back at an Oricon chart-topper from the summer of 2000, and we cover three great new singles as usual. Happy listening!
Album of the Week
Hello Neibiss by Neibiss [self-released]
Recommended track: “Thema” | Listen to it on Spotify
The suburban world of Neibiss remains within close reach, if not a bit familiar. The setting in which the two rappers recorded their music comes alive in “Thema” with its drunken boom-bap evoking a dorm room littered with old, warped rap CDs and retro video games salvaged from the basement of their childhood homes. “The creative mode I get into on a Sunday with nothing to do,” Hyunis1000 kicks off his verse, and he continues to spit whatever is on his mind straight from the dome. The rap duo sounds right at home throughout their debut album, Hello Neibiss, not afraid to get as loose and spontaneous as they wish.
Hyunis1000 and his producer/rapper partner Kaisei channel the spirit of their old-school heroes as they bounce back verses with each other. The Native Tongues worship, from the dusty patchwork of samples to the very nimble cadences that enter freestyle territory, recall King Giddra and early Rip Slyme. Though Kaisei directly references the former crew in “Dream Corporation,” both rappers follow more of the latter group’s more hippie-like yet still off-the-cuff approach to rap where their thoughts unreel in a stream-of-consciousness manner.
While the two openly flaunt throwback influences, Neibiss aren’t strictly bound to the past. The more stoned Kaisei beats sound, the music becomes embedded in their own separate timeline and inspires the duo to dig deeper into their psyche. The scuffed-up kick drums of “Dream Corporation” nod to the ‘90s, but the groggy loop give the track an insular feel to put the two’s zoned-out mind into music. The woozy drone of “Heaven” sounds as baked while the rappers recite an equally lackadaisical verse about basically having enough free time to just stare at the ceiling.
Neibiss remain content to simply exist and watch the time pass by throughout Hello Neibiss. Most of the album finds Hyunis1000 and Kaisei recording their observations in real time as they strike their respective minds. “We’re almost there/ We’ll forget it all by tomorrow anyway,” Kaisei mutters in his unexpectedly morbid verse in “Feel the Rain,” and their lyrics feel as ephemeral with the duo too occupied on what they want to say next to be precious with any specific idea.
The thrills of Hello Neibiss, then, comes from bearing witness to how their restless thoughts unfold. The rhyme breaks of Hyunis1000’s run-on verse in “Feel the Rain” is a difficult one to map out as it constantly morphs into different schemes. He also switches his cadence at will in “Heaven” with every other line building off into something new from the laid-back sing-song flow that came before. Neibiss don’t overthink much as they rap for rapping’s sake in their debut album, and it provides a simple yet infectious joy.
Singles Club
“Stardust” by Asunojokei [self-released]
A brutal, gauzy riff comes crashing right from the start in Asunojokei’s contribution for their split EP with Unreqvited. The wall of sound is overwhelming in its density yet also soothing in its own way, like how it might feel to contemplate and eventually surrender to the vastness of the universe. The titular debris, then, becomes a fine metaphor to meditate upon existential dread for Asunojokei, and the band’s snarling black-metal voice and in-between monologue channel the internal doom that comes from such dense cosmic matters.
Nocturne EP is out now. Listen to it on Bandcamp.
See also: “Regret” by DEATHBED JP
“#FFFFFF” by Mawase! Groove Kaihatsubu [self-released]
Freshly debuted last fall, Mawase! Groove Kaihatsubu already have been developing more than a few electro-pop hits to call their own. The idol trio once again call up Alkome, the producer who contributed to the group’s CY8ER-esque debut single, to give “#FFFFFF” a more drum ‘n’ bass kick. The title’s Hex code alludes to the pure-white soul in the gaze of the idols, who try their best to protect them from harm. The three eventually realize that their precious person can handle it on their own—“That face and strong heart/ were so pretty all along,” they sing—and the sweet, frenetic beat breaks down like a firework in sync with their big sigh of relief.
Listen to the song in full on Spotify.
See also: “Korapusu” by Busujima Orochi; “Baby Baby Cupid” by Seireki13ya
“Manatsu No Yoru” by Passepied [Nehan/Universal Music]
Passepied have yet to skip a beat after delivering new-wave heat in last year’s amazing full-length, More Humor. The band’s second single for 2020, “Manatsu No Yoru” finds them a lot more extroverted than the bashful “Madara” from this spring while channeling their classic shifty rock sound. After the whooshing synths signal the launch, the band freely speeds up and slows down time until you almost lose track of which side is up. Natsuki Oogota meanwhile skips across the topsy-turvy music as if it’s a playground, and her playful singing keeps it pop no matter how off the wall the song gets.
Listen to the song on Spotify.
See also: “Oshimai No Miraiyori” by The Binary; “Post Kinkou” by Shiraha
This Week in 2000…
“Seasons” by Ayumi Hamasaki [Avex Trax, 2000]
No. 1 during the weeks of June 19-26, 2000 | Listen to it on YouTube/Spotify
In the year 2000, Ayumi Hamasaki was popular as water was wet. That fact was very obvious thanks to the pop singer’s constant commercial presence, if not her number-one singles from a year prior that eventually made up her second album, Loveppears. But I wonder if anyone would’ve guessed just how much more popular she would get strictly from the vantage point of the summer she released “Seasons.”
“Seasons” is a monster of its own. It moved more than a million units and ranked as the second best-selling single of 2000. The music of the ballad lives up to the epic scale written out by the charts with the dance beats of her previous singles set aside for solemn pianos and guitars. While the production builds an atmosphere fitting for a moment of spiritual reflection, it’s Hamasaki that provides it grandeur and emotional weight. Her poetic lyrics capture the peculiar nature of time and how it can feel all-consuming at the moment yet so precious in retrospect.
The singles of her next two albums, I am… and Rainbow, found Hamasaki talking in behalf of the people with some awareness of her place in culture. “Seasons” meanwhile is one of the last that seems written for herself with her words echoing more as a conversation to herself while trying to cope with lost time. She sings the ballad so stately with her words so precise that her dense observations—“even if I’m sad today and I’m crying tomorrow/ there will be a day where I can laugh/ ‘oh, there were days like that,’” she sings in the chorus—come off like a casual comment about the weather.
Monumental as it is, “Seasons” sounds pure in intent compared to what came after. Hamasaki would create singles that repeatedly outsized its scale. That same year alone saw her release “M,” its bridge more intentionally designed to engineer a heart-tugging climax. The singer entered a whole new level of fame and popularity two months into 2001 with “Evolution,” an anthem where she staked out a place for herself as the voice of a generation. In “Seasons,” she just so happens to land upon these deep epiphanies. The significance of it all doesn’t fully register until long after the track has stopped.
The next issue is out July 8. You can check out previous issues here.