(Image Source: CNN INDONESIA Website)
Ryukoka was supplanted by enka, a sort of emotional balladry, and kayōkyoku, a more polished and reserved variant, until the late 1950s, when popular music from the West, like rock and roll and rhythm and blues, began to infiltrate the Japanese music scene. These influences led to the rise of electric guitar-driven instrumental bands known as ereki and the “Group Sounds” movement that echoed the Beatles and other ‘60s-era pop-rock acts.
Homegrown versions of hard rock, singer-songwriter-styled folk, and punk soon followed. Pop diversified into the idol system in which music labels shaped singers’ images for maximum appeal to fans. Synthesizer-driven electropop and city pop, a sort of urban fusion of soft rock, funk, and boogie that focused on urban areas like Tokyo, grew in popularity. J-pop remained between the twin poles of enka (traditional Japanese music) and kayōkyoku until the 1980s and ’90s when the modern definition of the term became the music industry standard.
Japanese idol band Onyanko Club made their debut in 1985, and produced popular singer Shizuka Kudō. They changed the image of Japanese idols.
The J-pop music scene grew exponentially larger in the 1990s, thanks in part to groups like B’z and Mr. Children, which generated platinum sales with their band-oriented sounds. The group was supplanted in the late ’90s by dance-oriented singers like Namie Amuro, whose 1997 release “Can You Celebrate?” was the best-selling single by a female J-pop artist. Pop-rock acts like Glay and L’Arc-en-Ciel also came to prominence during this period, as did boy band and girl group acts like SMAP, Arashi, and Morning Musume.
J-pop trends embraced hip-hop, folk, and techno elements in the twenty-first century. Some acts created music by sampling actors’ voices from anime TV shows using a singing synthesizer. During this period, the most prominent J-pop acts were from the idol world: solo idol acts, like the Harajuku-influenced model Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, and idol groups, like AKB48, which is split into rotating teams and sister groups to allow for simultaneous appearances in multiple locations.
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