An Introduction to J-Rock

Tomorrow I’m going to a concert of my favourite Japanese metal band: the GazettE. That’s why I thought it was a good idea to talk a bit about Japanese music, and more specifically about J-Rock.

J-Rock: a definition

Just like in the West, there are a lot of different music genres in the Japanese music market: J-Pop (Japanese pop and idol music), J-Rock (Japanese rock and metal), Enka (traditional music and ballads), and more. Maybe I’ll also write a blog about those other two sometime, but now I’m going to talk about J-Rock.
As you can probably guess from the name, J-Rock ( ジェイ・ロック, jei rokku ) is the abbreviation of Japanese Rock. But, even though it has “rock” in the name of the genre, it isn’t limited to just rock music, for example metal is also included in this genre.

The history of Japanese rock music

Japanese rock originates from western rock music, which came to Japan in the ’60s. More specifically, this is about psychedelic rock music from American and Brittish artists, such as The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and more.
In this genre, the artists try to recreate the effect of hallutions-inducing drugs within their music. The usage of drugs is also a stereotype among western rock bands. In Japan however, this isn’t the case, most bands here were drug-free, or even strongly anti-drugs. But, they did keep the rebellious image of typical rock bands, by focussing on political and social problems, in which they were strongly connected to political student movements.

Starting from the ’70s, Japanese rock music started to diversify because of the emergence of multiple subgenres of rock within the Japanese music industry: folk rock, electronic and progressive rock, and metal.

In the ’80s, a lot of new rock and metal bands were created, which caused the rock scene to grow rapidly. This decade was also the start of Visual Kei.
Visual Kei ( ビジュアル系, bijuaru kei) is not a music genre, but rather a culture. It’s a very interesting part of Japanese rock music, but in this post I won’t be talking to much about it, as Visual Kei is worth writing a seperate post. What I will say on the subject, is that X-Japan is one of the most important bands in the creation of this culture. The idea of Visual Kei itself is about shocking people, mostly through the visual aspect, such as the appearance of the artists.
Visual Kei is an important part of the Japanese rock and metal scene, and also has multiple subgenres. But more about this later in a seperate blog post.

Rock music had won a lot of popularity in Japan, en in the ’90s the first Japanese rock festivals came into existence.
Thanks to the internatiol popularity of Japanese media (such as manga and anime), J-Rock also started to become more popular during the ’90s. This gave many Japanese rock bands the chance to go on concert tours in America and Europe.

In the years ’00 and ’10, there was a new explosion of Japanese rock and metal bands, like the GazettE, Girugämesh, ONE OK ROCK, and more. This period also saw the emergence of all-female bands, like exist†trace and Aldious. The most internationally popular female metal band, is probably BABYMETAL (though they are a special case, as they are rather an idol group making metal music).

Finally

Now I talked about the genre as a whole, next week I wil tell more about the band I’m going to see tomorrow, as well as my experience of the concert.