Perfume and Japan's Admirable Lack of Irony
To really understand Japanese culture, Americans are going to have to remember what it was like to be five years old again. I don't mean to imply that Japanese pop is immature, or at least any more so than American pop. No, I'm referring to that child-like ability to embrace things in an entirely unguarded way. American pop culture is so dependent on irony that it's impossible to make stateside pop that isn't even a little bit self-aware, or even self-conscious. Underneath our bubblegum and whimsy is a drive to be taken seriously, to be hard and stoic. Such is not the case with Japanese pop culture. It's a culture without doubt and unnecessary humility. As such, it can produce a nearly endless supply of candy-colored sap without so much as one batted eyelash.
Consider the techno-pop girl group Perfume. Since 2001, Ayano Omoto, Yuka Kashino and Ayaka Nishiwaki have been putting on perpetually beaming smiles and singing silly love songs. The same could be said for a lot of American acts around the same time, but there are a few major differences. For one, the girls of Perfume were all of 15 when they first hit the charts. Also, they weren't the product of some Svengali's greedy imagination. The above bubblegum music video came from an independent release, of all things.
That's the real difference between J-Pop and A-Pop. In America we don't allow our sunshine dreck to get produced through the same channels as our angsty upstarts. Stateside, indie is all but required to be synonymous with anti-establishment. It's all part of the self-conscious game of pop culture. Bubblegum is the sound of the clean corporation.
But why? Well, I suppose it's because Yanks live in a culture of doubt. That's what happens when you live under a de facto empire. The USA is top dog when it comes to dirty business. It's militaristic, competitive and all too aware of how cruel and ugly commerce can be, if only because we spent the better part of the 1980's being the bare-knuckle boxers of the corporate world. Gone were the lush primary tones of 1970's AM Lite. American culture is irreparably cynical, so our artists can't really be peppy without having a not-so-secretly dark underbelly.
J-Pop doesn't suffer from the same self-doubt. Sunny dance music like Perfume's can exist without irony because Japan never really followed us down that seedy road. There's a matter-of-factness to every aspect of Japanese culture. The dirty stuff is shamelessly dirty, the cute stuff is cute to the core. In the Japan of 2001, nobody needed a cynical record producer to doll up a 25-year-old like she's 15 because no one assumed social taint when a bunch of high school freshmen recorded a hit single about doughnuts and love.
The flipside of this simplicity is that J-Pop can't really pull off subtext very well. "Sweet Donuts" is not only free from the double entendre of, say, "Les Sucettes" or Fergie's milkshake, it's categorically incapable of it. By embracing the clarity of face-value, J-Pop has removed itself from depth. It's a trade off that's as old as the 20-years-or-more human lifespan. You can be innocent or worldly, but not both. Once irony comes into the picture, the pop will never be clean again.
