J-pop goes def

A bold new generation of R&B sistaz serves up music their way

Heartsdales Toshiya Suzuki

Yoshika Courtesy of Warner Music Japan

Double COURTESY OF FOR LIFE MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT

Back in 2002, one of the biggest J-pop singers embarked on an ambitious solo project, riding a surging wave of interest in R&B. Namie Amuro was taking a risk few well-molded idoru would dare, and though seen as a little eccentric at the time, the resulting album, Suitechic, now seems like a smart business move.

With the likes of New York-born Hikaru Utada and Misia as role models, an abundance of mostly female singers indebted to American R&B have charged up the charts, many of whom also have significant backgrounds in the States. From Crystal Kay to Bennie K, AI to Double, and new acts Soulhead and Yoshika, R&B divas are giving J-Pop some attitude.

Also raised in New York, the Heartsdales sisters, Jewels and Rum, spent more time in the US than most. With their funky fourth album, Ultra Foxy, just out, the duo have experience adjusting their music for a Japanese market that was unfamiliar to the sounds of Salt’n’Pepa, Tone Loc and Run DMC they’d grown up listening to.

During their first ever English-language interview, the girls are quick to open up. “During our time (in the US), people would bring their stereos out after school and play around, rapping on the streets in the New York suburb of Yonkers. When we came back in our teens, we had culture shock for like a year,” recalls Jewels, the older of the two. “We didn’t even know how to speak the language!”

Rum took a chance and sent a demo to the audition segment of TV Tokyo morning show Asayan’s Hip-Hop Revolution’s, and by the time the sisters were recording their first albums, they noticed that to succeed in R&B, they’d have to do things differently. “We were writing in English, but the record companies said we had to do it in Japanese … otherwise (people) can’t sing it in karaoke. So the rap part can be half-English, half-Japanese, but the hook has to be a catchy melody for the Japanese to sing.”

The topics, too, had to change: Aggressive sexual and violent content just wasn’t going to resonate with a Japanese audience. “Being a female rapper, with the image that Japanese people have of them, no one would listen to you,” observes Jewels. “So our clothing and our look cannot be too aggressive, we have to take the edge off.” Wasn’t this a sell-out? No, she says. “Everyone’s thirsty and we want to give them water, but in Japan you have to freeze it a little and make it into ice. It was really hard to balance what we wanna do (and also) be able to have the Japanese people understand it.”

Like Heartsdales, both Bennie K and the Japan-born, African-American-Korean Crystal Kay had several albums under their belts before they found mass success in 2005. In 2006 they are joined by newcomers like Yoshika, whose smooth January debut is perhaps the closest to US-style R&B.

Yoshika spent time in Canada before going it alone at 16 at a high school in Modesto, California. She says that experience really opened her eyes. “I got to see all kinds of people … I had a chance to hear Common, India Arie, Jill Scott. I was listening to the radio every day, and in the States the music just goes on, no talking. I loved it, so I went CD shopping. I was like,
‘I should get it’ even because of the jacket!”

Returning to Japan at 18, Yoshika not only noticed that all her friends now considered her American, but discovered that, musically, she had something different to offer.

Singing primarily in English, Yoshika got her break when a song she recorded for a commercial was picked up for release. The success of that song, “Jolie,” kick-started her career, and she was soon working with Japanese R&B heavyweights m-Flo. “Japanese is really hard to sing in R&B—I feel that with R&B in the US, people are really feeling it with their body and soul.”
Lyrically, too, Yoshika’s international background was having an effect on her message. “I felt sad about the world. A lot of people don’t wanna talk about it— they want to do love songs … But when I wrote about (big issues) in Japanese, it looked so heavy, the words were so big and I didn’t mean it that way. English is so smooth and so natural, so I can express more hope.”
Japanese R&B may suffer from a lack of feeling that the pop sheen and the absence of an upbringing “in the ’hood” take away, but in the songs of artists like Yoshika, it gains a light, easygoing air—a sense that they’re just having fun rather than trying to prove themselves with the diva attitudes common in the US.

Despite Japanese R&B artists’ divergent backgrounds, there’s a sense of community among them. “We didn’t expect so many artists to come out four, five years ago,” Jewels confesses. “We worked with AI and Double back on our first two albums, but I think the real influence was m-Flo—half-Japanese, half-English, a mixture of cultures. And it was selling in Japan.”

Indeed, it seems that the duo of Taku and Verbal that make up m-Flo have worked with almost everyone in the current scene, including Amuro on her groundbreaking Suitechic. The imprimatur of m-Flo has become a mark of quality in Japanese R&B, much like that of The Neptunes in the US.

“For me, the second boom starts with m-Flo,” says Double, a leader of the Japanese R&B scene at a time when none of the artists had an American background. Sitting proudly in the luxury offices of her label ForLife Entertainment, she points out, “There was Silva, Sugar Soul and Misia … almost all are gone. It came back but now it’s changed because this second boom is international.”

Now a solo act after the sudden death of her sister, Double contends that those first artists were actively sought by a record industry that was trying to push R&B at that time, but that this second bigger boom is a natural trend. “Record companies think it’s a movement, but most of the artists never think that way.”

Double, who cut her teeth playing at the US Yokota Air Base, wasn’t impressed by her first exposure to R&B. “I couldn’t understand it, but after I saw the video of Mary J. Blige … it changed. The visuals were amazing and I was mesmerized.” R&B soon became her forte. “I could sing it better than other music, and it represented me better than any other style.” But without the American background of her successors, the struggle of matching Japanese language to a very foreign style proved a challenge. “R&B is originally in English, so it’s easier in English, but I wanted to try to develop a way to express R&B in Japanese that would be really good.”
For her part, Yoshika prefers the US style. “I want them to hear me and think, ‘English is so nice.’ I think it’s the rhythm with the words … Some people tell me I should do more Japanese because people won’t understand, but I don’t care.

I want both, I want people to listen to the English songs more, especially those who don’t listen to foreign music.”

The globalization of Japanese R&B was perhaps inevitable. “It would have happened anyway. It’s natural the way people move around the world that some should have that exposure or background,” says Steve McClure, Billboard's Asia bureau chief of and co-founder of Nippop (www.nippop.com). “It’s part of a broader trend of Japanese artists to be more gutsy, and it’s not exclusive to R&B.”

Yet while the likes of Sheena Ringo, UA or Kumi Koda are risky in their respective genres, it’s the R&B scene that has the most vocalists with international experience. And almost all of them are women.

Maybe that’s only natural. Over the last decade, Japanese women have had more freedom than ever before—perhaps more so than men—and have taken advantage of it by traveling and living abroad. Many have returned with something enthralling for Japanese listeners: new sounds and ideas that they’d internalized but which remain exotic for a Japanese audience used to formulaic pop. The women of Japanese R&B have something to say and are happy to say it. And in a style of music where the phrase “keep it real” is a mantra, audiences are responding to them as authentic. From the seductive and increasingly provocative Double to the philosophical Yoshika to the street-talk of Heartsdales, these girls are wearing their hearts on their sleeves like never before. Is it only a matter of time before the men follow suit? “I think people will get bored with the female artists, and then they will focus on men,” says Double.

Indeed, trends change fast in Japan, where idols come and go in a matter of weeks. But the shelf life of acts has lengthened since the ’80s, and today’s top stars have no trouble maintaining careers well beyond their mid-20s, while R&B debutants like Yoshika are already past their teens. “Record companies realize people want something other than a bunch of girls dancing around in bunny suits,” says McClure.

Yet, sighs Jewels philosophically, “What’s in now won’t be next year. It’s a small country, so if you are hot you are on every channel, every program,—people get tired.” Adds McClure, “To every Morning Musume, there is an equal and opposite reaction, it’s cyclical,” a reference to Japan’s most notorious producer-fabricated all-girl pop group.

The current internationalization of R&B is also part of a wider trend within Japanese music, and the record industry is now getting behind it with auditions targeting returnees and hafu. “They’re all looking for people who are influenced by different music and speak both languages,” Jewels points out. “A lot of artists, even if they can’t speak English, try to sing in English. Soul’d Out have never lived in the States, but half of their songs are written in English and they sing in English because it’s so cool.”

McClure sees a broader move away from clichéd J-pop. “I hear more female Japanese singers singing like they are emoting. I think it’s healthy. It’s nice to hear female vocalists who aren’t afraid to belt it out, get a bit funkier—and that’s not confined to R&B.”

At a time when acts like Puffy are icons for the North American pre-teen set and Gwen Stefani is dancing around with her Harajuku Girls, can any of these acts break through in the home of R&B? Jewels can only lament the failure of those who have tried to crack the US market. “I think you have to understand the culture, be able to speak the language, not just what’s in the song, but understand it.”

For Double and others, though, success here is more than enough. “I don’t want to try to appeal over there. I made it here by myself. I just want them to know that.” See concert listings (popular) for details.

Marven Payne contributed to this article.

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