J-pop: from the ideology of creativity to DiY music culture
Yoshitaka MŌRI
Abstract The paper examines the development of J-pop under the post-Fordist condition and its ideological formation over the last two decades. J-pop, invented as a fashionable sub-genre by a FM radio station in the late 1980s, expanded its category throughout the 1990s and covers virtually all musical genres for young people in Japan. However, due to the lasting economic recession, the development of digital technology and the transformation of young people's lifestyle, the record industry faced a serious crisis during the 2000s. The paper explores ideological formations between the success of J-pop and the emergence of freeters' (young part-time workers) culture in Japan, by focusing on their nationalist sentiment and the idea of creativity, and tries to find a new way of reclaiming 'creativity' in DiY (Do it Yourself) music culture today.
Keywords: J-pop; freeter; post-Fordism; nationalism; creativity; DiY culture
Author’s biography
Yoshitaka Mōri is Associate Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies, Music Department, Tokyo University of Arts. He took his MA in Media and Communications and PhD in Sociology, at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He worked as Research Associate and Associate Professor at Kyushu University between 1998 and 2005. His publications include Culture=Politics: New Cultural-Political Movements in the Age of Globalization (in Japanese, Getsuyosha 2003), and ‘Culture=Politics: the emergence of new cultural form of protest in the age of freeter’ in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 17–29 (Routledge, 2005).