6. Transference of Idol Culture

So how did this idol worship cult thing get started, and why is it such a dominant force in the Japanese domestic rock scene specifically?

Here's my theory. Idol culture has been a thing in Japan since before the popularity of rock-n-roll, and so when rock-n-roll came to Japan, those pre-existing paradigms of idol culture were applied to rock music as well.

For Westerners, this may be a hard concept to grasp at first. The West doesn't really differentiate between artists and pop stars – that is to say, the West doesn't really differentiate between people who write their own music and design their own image to (presumably) express some kind of artistic conviction, and people who were scouted by record companies and dressed up by a team of songwriters and stylists into a persona created to sell records. Lady Gaga basically picks her own outfits and writes her own songs, Rihanna basically doesn't. But they both occupy the same sort of spot in pop culture: female pop superstar. For the most part, nobody cares whether they made themselves or were artificially created.

By contrast, the Japanese idol has always been an expressly artificial creation, and that's basically the whole point. An idol may stand on stage and sing songs, but an idol isn't supposed to be an artist, with artistic convictions. Artistic convictions are scary and threatening and difficult to understand! An idol's purpose is to be the target of a personality cult, in order to “heal” people.

Remember how I said flaws made targets of personality cults more appealing? Well, the idol phenomenon in Japanese pop music makes full use of this. Japanese idols should never be “too” good-looking or “too” talented, because the point of an idol is to be relatable. Ironic, that, because everything about an idol has been artificially created by a shadowy team of puppet-masters, and if you ask me, that's about as far from “relatable” as it's possible to get, but amazingly, most people seem to fall for the act. In the Japanese line of thinking, someone who's too gorgeous is liable to make the average masses feel inadequate and dissatisfied with themselves – and who wants to feel like that? Ditto for someone too talented. Idols gain massive popularity because they're just good enough to be appealing, but still average enough that their fans can imagine being friends with them, dating them, etc. At its heart, idol culture is not and has never been about music at all – it's about creating this fantasy of the close-to-home, touchable celebrity.

The fantasy is soothing because it panders to people's insecurities and offers them a safe object onto which they can paste all the emotions and desires for which they have no outlet in their daily lives. To people who are lacking intimacy in real life, idols can serve as surrogates for the friends or lovers they are missing. This is how idols “heal.” (Except they don't, actually, because idol culture does nothing to solve the structural problems in society that give rise to social isolation. If anything, I'd argue that idol culture may exacerbate those problems, in addition to seriously undermining actual art and marginalizing the efforts of “threatening” exceptional people – but that's a topic for another article.)

Okay, so that's idols. What about rock bands? They're writing their own songs and creating their own images in order to express their artistic convictions, so that makes them artists, not idols, right?

Yes, of course rock musicians are artists. But with idol culture already a robust phenomenon in Japan before the popularization of rock-n-roll, there was a dominant paradigm of fandom already in place that had nothing to do with disaffected youth protesting mainstream society. It was easy for that idol fan paradigm to get transferred onto the rock scene – and voila, the Japanese fangirl was born.

In Japan, rock music ascended to mainstream popularity in the late 80's to early 90's, during a period called the Band Boom, which also coincided with the Bubble Economy, when asset prices were through the roof and (for a brief time, anyhow) everyone was rich. The two predominant reasons Japanese people give me for why the Band Boom happened when it did are 1) all the kids who grew up listening to The Rolling Stones and David Bowie in the 70's were finally old enough to start bands of their own and 2) the booming economy offered kids the freedom to fuck around and take chances they wouldn't have been able to in a less affluent society.

In any case, for a brief time in the 80's and 90's, rock music and all manner of dark and avant-garde subculture burst forth into the mainstream and became trendy. And as with most such trends, teenagers flocked to it like moths to a flame. Many of these teens didn't know a thing about rock music or rock subculture. All they knew was that they'd never seen anything like the crazy hair and glitzy makeup of the rock stars who were on the covers of the magazines, and they wanted to be a part of this new thing, but for many of them, the motivation was shallow trend following, nothing more. If anything, trend-following is the opposite of the resistance espoused by rock subculture, but that didn't matter. Buck-Tick weren't idols, but they got treated like idols nonetheless – and so did all their contemporaries. To reiterate: the fandom paradigm of idol culture had gotten pasted onto the Band Boom.

Of course, there was (and is) a real rock subculture in Japan, which most certainly is focused on resisting mainstream culture. The ironic thing is that the kids who started following bands like Buck-Tick because it was the trendy thing to do thought of themselves as “dark” and wore black clothing, but were still fundamentally mainstream, and therefore by and large scared to death of the actual punk and goth kids who pierced their own eyebrows with safety pins and hung out on the streets of Shibuya and Roppongi. A lot of the teens who surfed the trendy waves later grew out of it, but many didn't. The idol culture approach to band fandom persists to the present day, and there's still a gaping chasm between the fangirls and the actual punk, goth and rocker kids. Fangirls may love to get dressed up in black lace and frills for concerts, but invite them out to a goth club and they'll tell you they're “too scared” to go. (This has happened to Cayce not once, but many times.)

The weird thing is, as I already mentioned, Japanese fans of Western rock bands don't behave this way. Japanese fans of Western rock bands behave in pretty much the same way as Western fans of Western rock bands. They aren't window-shopping trend-following posers, they're real members of the rock subculture.

So why the disconnect? I think it's because Japanese fans were drawn to Western rock-n-roll because they admired Western culture, and therefore they absorbed Western cultural paradigms, as well. Also, given that Western rock-n-roll has so much cachet, it stands to reason that the kinds of Japanese people who are drawn to it have a desire to gain status and “cool points.” Beyond this, the relative inaccessibility of Western rock (language barriers, import costs, etc.) meant that to be a fan required dedication – it wasn't an easy default setting, it was an appealing challenge to the types of people who liked challenges. (I ran this theory by some internationally well-traveled, Western-rock-music-listening Japanese friends of mine, and they agreed with me completely.)

By contrast, domestic rock bands are more accessible just by dint of being Japanese in Japan, and therefore more likely to attract shallow fans who might be intimidated by the idea of listening to music in another language. Since idol-style fandom was a Japanese phenomenon to begin with, it stands to reason that it would be more readily applied to Japanese bands than to bands from other countries. Also, Japanese men will by definition seem more “relatable” to Japanese fangirls than Western men will, and therefore easier to worship, chase, and fantasize about. It's pretty hard to chase the guy if he's in another country.

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