Never End: Parting Words for Tetsuya Komuro Week
What happened to Komuro after the 2000s, and why time is right for a re-evaluation of the producer's hits
Hi! Welcome to Tetsuya Komuro Week at This Side of Japan, a newsletter about Japanese music, new and old. We are dedicating this week on a series of essays discussing the producer’s essential acts and singles. You can return to the Intro page of the series here. You can check out previous issues of the newsletter here.
When talking about Tetsuya Komuro’s decline from popular music, Japanese media likes to point to the debut of Hikaru Utada around the turn of the century as what put the nail in the coffin. Though the producer has been caught admitting so himself, pinning Utada as the sole catalyst of Komuro’s fall from grace is a very reductive read of J-pop history. The collapse of the Komuro Family, his influence giving rise to tougher competition, J-pop overall growing into an increasingly crowded scene: the runaway success of First Love isn’t the only thing that drove him out.
A bigger, more significant factor playing into Komuro’s creative decline is the very thing that rose him to the top in the first place. The producer’s fate into obsolescence was inevitable since he first decided to adopt club music to define his creative identity. Electronic and dance genres have a limited shelf life with their currency being very fickle. Eurobeat and trance had fallen out of fashion by the dawn of the 2000s, and it’s only in recent times that those corners of dance music have started to recapture some interest.
I would argue, however, that the more his period-specific production traps his music in the amber that is the ‘90s, the more powerful its lyrical contents become. If these five essays made one thing clear, Komuro’s best songs find their protagonist yearning to be free from their misery only to be doomed to never truly escape their fate. They wish and sometimes fight against a force bigger than them in hopes to transcend from their current predicament. The songs, then, become a metaphor of their own circumstance: they try to move on from the loops of the present into a better tomorrow but ultimately fail due to the tides of time.
All that said, the time is ripe for a look back at Komuro’s series of hits in the ‘90s. A majority of them admittedly have not fallen out of favor in the slightest. The albums by his numerous associated acts likely fill a good amount of space of used CD bins. But with once-quaint subgenres like Eurobeat and trance gaining some cache, his records are due for a proper evaluation beyond their place as nostalgia items.
I hope the five essays were worthwhile as attempts to critically engage in Komuro’s most famous songs through a lens other than analyzing borrowed aesthetics or its place in J-pop history. The life perspectives highlighted in the producer’s hits are not so distant from the vantage point of today. A similar doom and gloom about the current times reside in Komuro’s songs as the abandon of the future found in today’s post-recession or post-3/11 pop. The city no longer symbolized the same kind of upward lifestyle as the ‘80s after the bubble burst, and it hasn’t rehabilitated much since. If nothing else, Komuro’s songs reveal a rich insight to the prevailing attitudes of a particular time in Japanese culture. How he packaged such dark sentiments into karaoke-ready records is an astonishing feat to say the least.
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You can return to the Intro page to the series here. You can check out previous issues of the newsletter here.
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