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Hiroko Katsuragi knew that Rinngo Sheena was special the second she laid eyes on her. The co-editor-in-chief of Oricon, Japan's weekly music-industry bible, Katsuragi sees or hears hundreds of new pop-star hopefuls every year. Most fail to make a lasting impression. Yet Katsuragi still remembers the day in 1998 when she watched Sheena's first-look videotape. Though the demo was short and shoddily made, Katsuragi was mesmerized by the then 19-year-old prodigy's presence. "I was instantly drawn into her world," she says.
Five years later, many more have been drawn into Rinngo Sheena's world. Though Japan's music industry has long been the world's second largest, it has also been something of an artistic wasteland. Barring significant exceptions, the most popular acts over the past few decades have been indistinguishable pretty faces warbling cookie-cutter tunes produced by a handful of Svengalis. That's been changing recently, however, as more rock acts are taking advantage of the recent slump in the Japanese music business (and the teetering faith in old formulas that decline has caused) to assume greater control of their careers. They're taking more risks and are recording some of the most personal, vital and creative pop music the country has ever heard.
The trend's most striking manifestation may be Rinngo Sheena, a singer-songwriter who has, over the past five years, become a leader in pushing the boundaries of Japanese rock and, in doing so, has achieved mass-market success. Though only 24, Sheena has developed into an artist with surprising maturity and depth, one who manages, like Björk (the Western musician to whom she is often compared) to retain her hipster alternative cred while still being a bona fide mainstream hit.
With the release of Sheena's first singles and her 1999 debut album Muzai Moratorium, listeners discovered her music was anything but funny and sweet. Most fresh-faced singers are still expected to be prim and practically virginal, but Sheena's songs demonstrated an often controversial, darkly sexual edge from the beginning. Like Liz Phair, a U.S. phenom of the early 1990s, Sheena pointedly contrasted her clean-scrubbed good looks with the raunchiness of her lyrics. In her breakout hit Queen of Kabukicho, for example, Sheena sang as the daughter of a prostitute following her mother's descent into Tokyo's most notorious red-light district. Not long after, she followed up with the hard-edged Honno. The video to that song caused a sensation due to its raw, sexual imagery: dressed in a tarty nurse's outfit, Sheena tears up a doctor's office, smashing panes of glass with her fist, elbow and heel and gets intimate with a female patient. In interviews at the time, she said Honno (the word means instinct) was intended to show that women had as much right to erotic fantasies as men.
Though her melodies managed to stay just within the boundaries of mainstream pop, she brought a hard-core, grungy pique to many of her songs, from her frequently rough-hewn vocals to unconventional arrangements. "Pop in Japan means conformity, being the same as everyone else," says Atsushi Shikano, managing editor of Rockin' On Japan, one of the country's most popular music magazines. "But Sheena did exactly the opposite. Her way of singing, word choices, extreme sound, radical visual images, the bitchy way she sang—no one thought of doing that before. But she showed that people wanted something different." Indeed, fans snapped up nearly 1.5 million copies of her debut album.
Since then, however, Sheena has proved that there is more to her act than raucous yet catchy melodies and an impressive vocal range combined with shocking images. An accomplished pianist, guitarist and drummer, Sheena writes all of her own material. And though it is fashionable among new-era J-pop divas such as Ayumi Hamasaki and Hikaru Utada to write much of their own stuff, Sheena's musical development and emotional growth—as demonstrated by her latest album—have been astonishing, and astonishingly rapid.
After releasing Shoso Strip, an impressive (and even more popular) sophomore effort in 2000, and a collection of cover songs in 2002, this year's Karuki, Zamen, Kuri no Hana (KZK)—which translates as Chlorine, Semen, Chestnut Flower—is a quantum leap forward, something akin to Radiohead's jump from their well-received 1995 album The Bends, to their jarring, enigmatic, universally acclaimed classic OK Computer two years later. A varied and hypnotizing collection of 11 linked songs, KZK swings between ethereal yet densely layered ballads to all-out hard-rock anthems with screaming refrains that sometimes just fade away and at other times jangle to an awkward, syncopated halt. Through its 45-minute running time, KZK contracts and expands like the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album; it's a bursting yet impressively seamless pastiche of influences including (but not limited to) '40s Big Band and swing, Indian sitar, avant-garde atonal music, trance-house psychedelia, church-organ fugues, electronic multiprocessed voice-overs and traditional Japanese koto, shamisen and flute music. The album is also a showcase of Sheena's voice, which alternates from Marilyn Monroe baby-doll lullabies to rich, velvety crooning. Like OK Computer before it, KZK baffles at first and then, after a few listens, becomes addictive. "Her first two albums were pop, very easy to understand," says Oricon's Katsuragi. "This one is harder to approach. It is something you keep chewing on and taste for a long time."
For Sheena, this album (which she also produced) marked the first time she had the budget and the artistic control to create exactly the kind of music she wanted. Here in Toshiba EMI's Tokyo headquarters, she is wearing slim, blue jeans, a sweater and a flowered silk scarf. This is a significant wrinkle in the Sheena mystique: in person she's the exact opposite of the dangerous and eccentric image she projects to the media. She brings the snacks to her own interview, speaks in flawlessly polite Japanese and asks if anybody minds if she smokes. Speaking with an easy charm and almost girlish enthusiasm, she chats brightly about shopping, American slang and her favorite European cities. Turning to music, however, she becomes more passionate, discussing over a two-hour, wide-ranging conversation everything from the finer points of orchestral arrangement, to the derivative nature of most Japanese hip-hop, to the importance of playing live shows at small, intimate venues. KZK, she says, "has been the realization of a dream." She thinks that her efforts and those of others have reflected a slow change in the industry. "For a long time I thought J-pop was weird and really artificial sounding. I have always tried to create something more genuine."
For all its heavy processing and high production values, KZK manages to deliver a deeply personal message. Rockin' On Japan editor Shikano sees it as a young musician's full flowering as an artist. "This album is pure musical pursuit," he says. Though the album is far from the smash hit her first two original efforts were, it has sold a respectable 400,000 copies, proving there is a significant audience willing to follow risk-taking artists. That's an encouraging sign for an industry looking for examples of what can work in a persistently depressed market. Seiji Kameda, an arranger and producer who has worked with Sheena since she was 17, says, "She always wanted to be a musical pioneer." At just 24, Rinngo Sheena has proved that she already is.
- Jim Frederick | Tokyo
- On the cookie-cutter pop scene, one singer goes for the unique