The Young Rebel — The Freedom Sounded by Electric Guitars and Folk

In the previous episode we watched the boogie rhythms rising from the ashes and the popular songs that blossomed alongside postwar recovery. The bouncing beat of Kasagi Shizuko, the soaring voice of Misora Hibari — these were the songs of grown-ups who could finally sing in brighter tones again.

But in the latter half of the 1960s, a new sound broke into that scene. The leading voices of song were about to change with the generations. These were young people born after the war, raised alongside television, who grew up bathing in Western rock and folk through the radio. They were no longer content merely to listen to the songs handed to them. To pick up instruments themselves, and sing in their own words — that impulse erupted in many different forms.

The songs of this era often carried the color of rebellion. Rebellion against grown-ups, questions thrown at society, and a rebellion against the very assumption that ‘a song is something made for you by someone else.’ In all sorts of ways, the young were in revolt.

Plug In the Electric Guitar — The Frenzy of Group Sounds

The first wave arrived with the sound of electricity.

In the mid-1960s, Britain’s Beatles and American bands swept across the world, and a craze for bands clutching electric guitars surged into Japan as well. Before long, this homegrown pop made by young bands came to be called ‘Group Sounds,’ or GS for short.

The Tigers came to symbolize that frenzy. In February 1967 they made their debut with ‘Boku no Marie,’ and that same year they accelerated their popularity with the hit ‘Seaside Bound’ and television appearances. With their long hair, flamboyant costumes, and sweet-faced vocalist, fans went wild, and concert halls are said to have been awash in screams and tears. In that same year, 1967, Jackey Yoshikawa and his Blue Comets won the year’s Record Award with ‘Blue Chateau,’ making a vivid impression that GS had surged into the mainstream of the popular-song world.

From 1967 into 1968, the GS boom reached its peak. Countless bands debuted and filled television music shows and magazine spreads. Yet the greater the frenzy, the colder the eyes that watched it. Long hair and gaudy costumes were seen as symbols of delinquency, and it is said that some schools forbade their students from attending GS concerts as ‘bad for their education.’ The dazzle of the light, and the shadow of grown-ups wary of it — from the very start, this era’s youth culture held both sides within it.

A Question from a Single Guitar — Folk and Anti-War Songs

In contrast to the frenzy of electricity, another wave was born from the plain ring of an acoustic guitar. This was folk song.

The ones who set it off were the Folk Crusaders, a student band from Kyoto. The ‘Kaette Kita Yopparai’ they released at the end of 1967 — with its strange, sped-up high-pitched voice and humorous lyrics — became a talking point and is said to have achieved record-breaking sales into 1968. A song that seemed like a joke proved that music made by young people’s own hands could reach the whole nation.

Before long, folk took on not only laughter but questions for society. In particular, the current that arose mostly around the Kansai region, known as ‘Kansai folk,’ put anti-war sentiment and protest against society into its songs. The figure regarded as its leading representative was Okabayashi Nobuyasu, later called ‘the god of folk.’ In September 1968 he debuted with ‘San’ya Blues,’ a song about a district of day laborers, and his following works too gazed squarely at the realities lurking in society’s corners. It was an era when opposition to the Vietnam War was rising worldwide, and the student movement in Japan was growing fiercer. To stand before people with a single guitar and question the world in one’s own words — folk became the voice that spoke for the hearts of such young people.

That said, it is also told that some of these songs became difficult to handle on the airwaves on account of the content of their expression. When a song reflects society and tries to cut into it, friction is always born. In the opposite direction from the wartime ‘songs that people were made to sing’ we saw in earlier episodes, there now was a struggle between ‘a power trying to keep them from singing’ and the young people who tried to sing all the same.

‘Make It Yourself, Sing It Yourself’ — The Buds of New Music

The greatest legacy left by the two waves of GS and folk was perhaps a single idea. A song may be made by yourself and sung by yourself — that freedom.

The one who carried this current greatly forward was Yoshida Takuro. ‘Kekkon Shiyou yo,’ released in January 1972, became an explosive hit and is said to have lifted folk — until then seen as something rather underground — into proudly mainstream music. A long-haired young man, in the unstrained words of everyday life, sings ‘let’s live together.’ That intimate texture had a great influence on the creators of later generations.

Around this time, music in which the singer-songwriters themselves handled both lyrics and melody spread, going beyond the conventional division of labor in which a singer sang songs written by professional songwriters. Before long, this current came to be called ‘New Music,’ opening up a new horizon of popular music in which folk, popular song, and the sensibility of Western pop melted together. Running alongside the heyday of idols we will see in the next episode, and at times intersecting with it, it would shape the foundation of Japanese music from the 1970s onward.

Even so, what this season carved into Japan’s songs was great. A song became not something handed down from the older generation, but something to be seized by one’s own hands. The roar of the electric guitar and the whisper of the acoustic guitar were both born from the same impulse — to face the world in one’s own voice. The young rebels drew the initiative of song into their own hands.

And the times moved on. While homemade rebellion was being widely accepted, the giant medium of television was about to produce, one after another, stars who shone with a different brilliance. In the next episode, let us gaze upon the idols who sparkled in the glow of the cathode-ray tube, and the maturation of the New Music that stood alongside them — the dazzling era in which popular song reached its golden age.