The Mike Toole Show

J-Pop vs. America

Last week, I did something I'd been meaning to do for about sixteen years – I saw FLCL, which prominently feature their music. This made for an interesting atmosphere—the entire sold-out crowd (which supplanted a sold-out crowd at the much smaller Sinclair; they moved the show to this bigger venue to meet demand, and it still sold out immediately anyway!) were music lovers, but almost all were there in of a band they had discovered from watching anime.

In many ways, this tour, which just wrapped up at the San Diego SXSW festival.

Seeing the band, who still sounded sharp as hell, was exciting, and a tiny bit frustrating—it often is at appearances like this one. One the one hand, it was good to see the pillows in a venue built for music (I'd had the chance to see them at Anime Boston almost a decade ago, but I ed it up, suspicious of ending up at yet another concert at a convention center ballroom, with its echoey empty spaces and booming, reflective concrete floors and walls). On the other hand, the band stuck to the program, playing only music featured in FLCL. This isn't that bad, really—their FLCL offerings are still assembled piecemeal from earlier hits, so the FLCL soundtrack feels very much like a Pillows best-of retrospective. But limiting their set exclusively to FLCL music means that there's no chance of them dragging out “Kim Deal” from Happy Bivouac, or “Good Morning, Good News” from Smile.

I found myself thinking about this a bit at the show; for the pillows the FLCL soundtrack was sort of a blip, a moment in time when their career intersected with anime. Fans around the world know them for this reason, but they have 22 studio albums that were mostly created before and after the anime; even the “new stuff” for FLCL Progressive and Alternative mostly comprises of alternative takes of their older hits. Still, one fact remains: the pillows were able to use FLCL to leverage themselves a sold-out US tour, which is still a far-off dream for most Japanese musical acts.

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, the American music press—publications like Billboard and Spin and Alternative Press—loved to ponder the question of which Japanese pop/rock act would finally break through and have some mainstream success in the west. Would it be Shibuya-kei icons Pizzicato Five? Would it be punk rockers Shonen Knife, or noise-rockers the Boredoms? Or would a more mainstream-friendly act, like Cartoon Network as their landing zone in North America.

To hear Puffy, the singing duo of Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi. This led to more touring, a memorable turn in the 2004 Macy's Thanksgiving Parade (“we didn't know it was a big deal until we arrived and there were like 2 million people there” Yumi later commented), and all of the nonsense that a popular cartoon tie-in brings, like toys and video games and party favors. Puffy never climbed that high on the actual music charts, but for two years, they were on TV several times a week, part of the American pop culture landscape.

Amusingly, it wasn't until after their Teen Titans debut in the US that Puffy's trajectory intersected with actual Japanese animation; through the rest of the 2000s, they'd provide songs for fare like Chibi Maruko-chan ED, seen above, and a line of boutique grocery store snacks!

Puffy's first big splash on the American music scene was their 2000 album Spike, but did you know that they got beaten to the punch by another band notable for doing anime music? Anime fans know and love the late, great Nickelodeon's Kappa Mikey!

Even though Puffy Amiyumi and the Beat Crusaders established pop cultural beachheads before the pillows, the pillows did the one thing that neither other act could pull off in the US: they sold albums in large quantities. In the mid-2000s, Yoko Ishida. It kind of worked.

Ishida, at the time, was an interesting figure in Japanese music. She'd broken in by winning a contest, and was at first sort of a one-hit wonder, scoring a brief but major hit with the buoyant “Otome no Policy,” one of the Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar, a cover of the Rubettes' “Sugar Baby Love.” At the same time, Ishida worked on a series of Eurobeat cover albums from Pioneer, ones that utilized anime songs and latched on to the burgeoning parapara dance scene. In 2003, her solo album “Sweets” was released; just a couple of months later, it came out stateside.

Geneon Music obligingly cross-promoted their parent company's artist at anime conventions, but it was a peculiar balance. Ishida's solo work was light pop-rock fare, nothing like the high-energy parapara stuff. At Anime Central 2003, producer Yamamoto introduced her to anime fans by pointing out that the Japanese parapara scene was dead… and then went ahead and introduced her parapara performance. There was something kind of awesome about the sheer frankness of that; for her part, Ishida put on a great show. Here's a photo of her I took that weekend; she's wearing a sombrero!

From there, it only got weirder, with Ishida mounting a 13-city tour of Media Play and Suncoast Video stores, ostensibly to promote “Sweets.” Instead, she stuck to the more high-energy parapara stuff. That was probably a wise choice; I'm sure it was hard enough to get a mall courtyard audience interested in the music to begin with. Check out this Space Battleship Yamato 2199.

tweeted his for the Jojo's franchise. Each of these intersections might use old songs, but through this approach, new fans are discovering the artists. But this little trend is just an echo of one from back in the 2000s, when a slew of anime used popular western songs as openings or endings. What did this give us? Lots of licensing headaches, is what!

It started with “Girls on Film” Eden of the East was going to be prohibitively expensive, so they pulled a fun little trick; while most episodes open with the international version of the OP, the first episode uses the Oasis tune. Thus, the music licensing fee was small enough to make it work.

I'll close this piece by dialing the time machine all the way back to Serial Experiments Lain, which was all the rage at the time. Once again, this single moment, this brief crossing of anime and music, helped establish a young progressive rock band, and get them some key gigs overseas. Boa never quite eclipsed the success of “Duvet,” but the band is still going, and they still pay tribute to the song that made them and the anime fans that love them for it.

For a lot of these bands, intersecting with anime is just one brief beat in their career. But for anime fans, that one intersection is a defining moment, and draws them in for life. Who's your favorite artist, Japanese or not, that you discovered through anime? Is it the pillows, or one of the other bands I went into here? Or is it perhaps Maximum The Hormone, or Unicorn? Tell us your favorite in the comments!