Shibuya-kei: Japan’s attempt at bringing back sunshine pop
Reviving genres that once had their heyday is nothing new and has been done to death across various music scenes. The post-punk revival of the mid-2000s, led by bands like Interpol, Bloc Party, and Franz Ferdinand, paved the way for acts such as Parquet Courts and Ought to gain prominence in the 2010s. Similarly, electronic music has seen entire sub-genres rise to fame and fade into obscurity, only to experience sudden, unexpected resurgences—proof that even the most niche sounds can find new life with the right cultural moment.
Pop isn’t exactly a genre that will ever die out, but there have been certain sub-genres and movements that have come and gone over the years. Electropop had a big boom in the 1980s and then died out before having a renaissance, while the style adopted by the Brill Building was also only a short movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s that has only seen some of the elements passed onto future generations despite the successes of artists like Carole King and James Taylor having emerged from it.
Sunshine pop was made popular largely by bands from California in the ‘60s, such as the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas and the Association, featuring happy melodies that evoked feelings of sitting in fair weather and enjoying the simple beauty of life. However, the bliss-laden genre was only short-lived and didn’t stretch much further beyond the decade it began in, with pop music evolving in many ways and seeing several new trends supersede the sunshine pop movement.
On the opposite side of the Pacific, much later than the initial sunshine pop movement, Japan would become known for its own musical innovations, with the jazz-influenced city pop being prominent throughout the late 1970s and ‘80s, and the country also became known for producing J-pop, which has had a substantial cultural impact across the globe much like its Korean counterpart. However, during the ‘90s there was a movement happening in the Tokyo suburb of Shibuya that saw a rise in attempting to bring back the feel of sunshine pop.
Acts like Pizzicato Five and Flipper’s Guitar were noted as being two of the major proponents of what would become known as Shibuya-kei, or ‘Shibuya sound’, and were heavily influenced by the maximalist and vibrant pop music produced by the likes of Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson and Phil Spector. While it wasn’t a complete throwback to the sounds of California in the swinging sixties, throwing in some more modernist references and influences from electronic music, it reflected the jovial nature of the styles that had been so beloved before.
It can be argued that similar acts were emerging in other parts of the world, with Stereolab and Broadcast both looking back at the ‘50s and ‘60s, diving into exotica, lounge and space-age sounds to create their own spin on pop that felt contemporary. Bands in the Shibuya-kei movement regularly used samples that gave off a retro yet also cartoonish feel at times, with Flipper’s Guitar even kicking off their debut album Doctor Head’s World Tower with a sample of ‘God Only Knows’. While this is obviously something that wouldn’t have been present in the initial sunshine pop movement that took place in the US three decades before, their inclusion in the music was enough to cultivate a strong image of the culture of the past.
Pizzicato Five would be picked up and distributed to a wider audience by Matador later in the ‘90s, while Keigo Oyamada of Flipper’s Guitar would go on to release music under the moniker Cornelius, with his 1997 album Fantasma being hailed as one of the towering examples from the genre. In addition to this, other Japanese artists at the time, such as Lamp, Fishmans and Post-Squeeze Groove Box, all had periods where they dabbled in the Shibuya-kei genre, while not necessarily fully adhering to the sound throughout their careers.
It wouldn’t be a long-lasting revival, with many of the initial acts to have been proponents of the genre either disbanding or simply moving onto different styles, but it’s a moment in Japanese and global music history that’s worth taking note of. Shibuya-kei may not exist in the same way, but it had a brief and fruitful existence as a loving reinvention of a sound from a bygone era that sparked joy in its initial run and allowed the same to happen several decades later with its modern spin.
