Billboard Japan’s Girls in Music initiative started in 2022 to have fun artists, producers and executives who’ve made important contributions to music and impressed different girls by their work. The WIM interview collection has highlighted feminine gamers within the Japanese leisure trade, with the primary 30 conversations launched in guide type as a Billboard Japan Presents assortment by author Rio Hirai.
Because the challenge strives to make clear the established order of the Japanese leisure trade and to discover methods the working setting might be improved for ladies and everybody concerned, it welcomes views from individuals of various backgrounds. For the newest installment, Hirai interviewed Kiyoshi Matsuo, an award-winning music producer who started his profession as a music author from his college days and switched to producing within the late Nineties.
A outstanding determine within the trade as one of many driving forces behind the R&B and soul music actions in J-pop, Matsuo has contributed to quite a few hits together with these by MISIA, Hikaru Utada, SPEED, and extra. Additionally identified for his opinions on politics and different subjects usually averted by the bulk within the enterprise, the outspoken music producer and author shared his views on a few of the points he sees within the Japanese leisure trade whereas opening up in regards to the journey of how he shaped his present stance on the subjects he feels strongly about.
You converse out on numerous social points inside and out of doors the leisure trade whereas working as a music producer. When did you first turn out to be conscious of such points?
Till the late Nineties, I used to work primarily as a author and journalist introducing Western music to Japan. I’d spend a 3rd of the yr within the U.S. and U.Ok. doing interviews after which deliver the fabric I collected again to Japan to put in writing articles. I used to include virtually all of what I lined in my writing, but it surely was onerous to search out media that might carry articles with political and social content material.
Once I was doing these interviews, probably the most thrilling discussions I had with artists have been about politics and social subjects. For instance, even after I made the appointment to speak a couple of new album, if the U.S. presidential election was developing, the subject of dialog could be all in regards to the election. The music I used to be fascinated with — R&B and soul — is the music of African Individuals. For them, the matter of who would turn out to be the chief of the nation was crucial, and so they most likely at all times felt the connection between politics and society and their very own lives.
Not with the ability to write about what these artists felt was vital again in my very own nation was irritating, however I progressively turned busy with my profession as a producer and stepped again from doing interviews. Ever since then till now, I’ve felt at numerous instances that one thing was unsuitable with society, and now that I’m at this age, it’s like I lastly really feel it’s about time I mentioned one thing about it.
You hail from the southern island of Kyushu, which is without doubt one of the areas in Japan that’s mentioned to have a large gender imbalance. Why did you turn out to be focused on gender hole points although you have been born and raised as a privileged, wholesome male in such an setting?
Vessels just like the household you have been born in or the corporate you’re employed for aren’t the one issues that nurture an individual’s spirituality. Whatever the setting you have been raised in, I’m certain you encounter many individuals who deliver you consciousness even after you attain maturity.
In my case, I received into soul music by jazz, which my father preferred, after which encountered hip-hop, thought-about to be the most recent music on the time, and have become focused on African-American music normally. Ultimately it turned my job, and as I engaged in dialogue with individuals from numerous walks of life, I started to study and take into consideration the historical past and ideas in individuals’s backgrounds. I’m a Japanese man dwelling in Japan, married with youngsters, and typically individuals say I’m dwelling the life, however by music, I’ve at all times tried to think about the views of the oppressed and people being managed.
I see, so your perspective on society modified by music.
In my case, sure. However Japan at the moment may not be too totally different from these days after I couldn’t write about artists’ political beliefs as a journalist. Author and philosophy scholar Ataru Sasaki tweeted on X the opposite day about how “after repeated calls to ‘not deliver politics into music,’ we’ve introduced the worst sort of politics into music.” Situations the place Japanese acts come below hearth for creating music movies utilizing historic figures that instigated invasions and massacres are exactly the results of having eradicated social views from music. I’m an optimist at coronary heart, however I feel the notion to “not deliver politics into music” might be linked to the nation’s lack of worldwide competitiveness.
From the late Nineties you shifted your focus to producing music, and it feels just like the artists you helped launch their careers — SPEED, MISIA, Hikaru Utada, and many others. — sang about themselves as self-reliant people, which was a transparent departure from the development of the “idol” singers that had been the mainstream as much as that time.
Songs by idol singers on the time have been mass merchandise aimed to turn out to be mega-hits, in order that they mirrored the most important widespread denominator of the general public’s choice. So it might be mentioned that these songs have been closely tinged with the pondering round gender roles in Japan on the time.
However, if the feminine R&B singers I helped as a part of the workforce had one factor in widespread, you may say all of them gave the impression to be strolling on their very own two ft. R&B itself is after all a style that’s been round for a very long time, and within the late Nineties when it was first gaining momentum in Japan, the highest 10 songs on the U.S. pop charts have been virtually totally dominated by R&B. Japanese artists have been additionally trying up Janet Jackson, Lauryn Hill, and TLC of their heyday. And people new J-pop artists weren’t being made to sing songs that different individuals wrote, and that most likely led to that sense of being self-reliant.
I ponder if one of many the reason why the gender imbalance within the Japanese leisure trade continues to exist is that the general public doesn’t appear to be very focused on mature feminine artists, that means it’s a matter of capability and literacy on the aspect of customers.
Individuals who develop up watching Japanese idol singers of their adolescent years, being taught that “that is how women are presupposed to be,” probably aren’t going to begin listening to mature feminine artists after they outgrow these idols. I really feel that these days, individuals favor songs which are straightforward to know somewhat than these with a mature perspective. I like lyrics written by Rokusuke Ei (“Ue wo muite aruko,” aka “Sukiyaki” and many others.) and Michio Yamagami (“Tsubasa wo kudasai” and many others.), and so they usually depict profound feelings that make you are feeling such as you’re watching a film in a three-minute music. Generally I need to strive that sort of method, however don’t get the sort of response I’m hoping for after I do, maybe as a result of individuals aren’t in search of views with depth and delicates gradation in new songs.
There’s additionally the long-standing actuality of administration positions within the Japanese music and leisure trade being dominated by males. What do you assume is important for ladies to thrive within the enterprise?
I feel it’d be higher to institutionalize a system to ensure a sure proportion of ladies, just like the French Parité Regulation (that mandates the equal inclusion of women and men on lists of candidates). Once I was interviewing artists within the U.S. within the ‘80s and ‘90s, I typically heard from African Individuals of their 30s and 40s that they have been the primary amongst their family members to be admitted to school by affirmative motion, although they got here from households that had been compelled into slave labor way back. They informed me passionately that their mission was to put in writing songs about what they’d seen as somebody dwelling in such an period. Affirmative motion means taking constructive steps to get rid of discrimination, and in Japan the place the gender hole index is so low, I feel that’s needed.
Sure. Like the best way music opened your eyes to the distortions of society, it may be a really efficient method in altering individuals’s minds. That’s why the construction of the trade that produces it should change.
Throughout the pandemic, we regularly heard the phrase “fuyou fukyuu” (pointless and non-urgent). It’s true that music and leisure might be thought-about pointless and non-urgent. But when politics and economics are the foremost arteries, music offers flexibility to individuals, like capillaries. A society that lacks flexibility and openness is cramped and suffocating, don’t you assume?
—This interview by Rio Hirai (SOW SWEET PUBLISHING) first appeared on Billboard Japan
