I did not want to join into this because I’m already fan of YMO and did not want to risk monopolizing or butting into in the conversation. Maybe missing the conversation and coming in with an article-length comment the next month’s worse, but I ended up re-listening to this a bunch of times and had a bunch of thoughts and context to share.
pantsgoblin YMO was absolutely massive in late seventies-early eighties Japan. The contemporary Japanese science-fiction author, Suzuki Izumi,
no slouch nor dilettante in her musical taste, couldn’t stand them in no small part because of their ubiquity (as much as YMO annoyed her she still conceded Ryuichi Sakamoto was "gorgeous," though).
BGM might have been a better choice if we wanted to get to know the different band members because that one’s production was far more contentious. You can hear the seams coming apart on the record. It’s easier to distinguish the three: roughly speaking, Hosono’s more ambient, Sakamoto’s more melodic, and Takahashi’s more a troubador. Hosono and Sakamoto were also at each other’s throats the whole time, with Takahashi being the only (the man was, by all accounts I’ve read, not just dressing the role of gentleman).
I’m not sure how much things settled down by the time they recorded
Technodelic (
BGM was recorded in January 1981,
Technodelic from March through October), but there’s less authorial imprint on the songs and the album’s far more a unified whole. Yhe seams have more or less come back together, though Takahashi’s lyricism still stands out (as do his lyrics lyrics—Takahashi spoke English and had lived in London, though was still helped out by
Peter Barakan). His "Key" feels a bit out-of-place, its romantic new wave angst better suited to his solo album (spot-the-pun)
Neuromatic, recorded at the same time.
Some of earlier YMO—between the ironic exotica and
Technodelic—sounds pretty spare: the particular song that drove Suzuki up the wall was
"Rydeen," a single released in 1980 off of their 1979
Solid State Survivor. It’s one of their most famous songs, energetic (the beat’s somewhere between disco and techno), catchy, and simple, basically just drums and a couple of synths. Suzuki’s feelings are easy to understand if you imagine it constantly coming out of every radio everywhere.
BGM was more layered and interesting, and
Technodelic is even more so, and in a completely different way. That’s in no small part because of the sampling. All that sonic texture is put into a framework that, without that added sonic variety, would be relentless. It gives your ears something to grab onto when listening deeper. There’s an element of chant (literally through the samples) and repetitive motion, with songs named ""Stairs" and "Taiso" (exercise).
If "Taiso" sounds a bit like an odd duck—it and the upbeat-sounding "Pure Jam" were the two singles—that’s because it was in part a spoofy homage to Talking Heads. You can hear it in the instrumentation and, once you know it’s a parody, the singing sounds pretty Byrne-ish and the drumming sounds a lot like Chris Frantz’s. The video’s a spoof of "Once in a Lifetime," with Byrne’s partly jerky, partly traditional-Japanese-theater-inspired, gestural choreography is parodied as an aerobics routine. I doubt this was entirely the intent but the ultra-generic aerobics class-style lyrics remind me a bit of how found vocals were used in (fellow sampling pioneer)
My life in the bush of ghosts.
Technodelic opens, though, with an expression of Takahashi’s poppier side with "Pure Jam." Sometimes you just see bread so bad you have to sing about it,
Desert Dweller ! It again, reminds me of some Beatles album. There’s a lot more to "Pure Jam", though. That bread’s a bizarre, artificial product: the song’s catchy and upbeat but there’s that weird bounce in there, almost like what you’d expect if you prodded that piece of bread. Per the lyrics it sounds like the bread’s almost from a different dimension, it sits wrong in our universe, an uncanny manufactured product, fun with the grossly artificial.
It’s an interesting thematic pairing with "Gradated grey": static on the radio fills the air while barely differentiated artificial landscapes—the spatio-visual equivalents of white noise—lie in the landscape ahead. It’s also ambiguous, though—Hosono sings that he’s afraid but sounds like he’s being drawn into heaven.
They never aped Kraftwerk, but YMO was upfront about their debt to them (unfortunately the clip of Takahashi trying to explain Kraftwerk to Don Cornelius looks like it was scrubbed from youtube). There’s a lot of inspiration sonically here, to some degree in subject matter (it’s hard to imagine “Gradated grey” without the precedent of
Radio-activity), but there’s some distance in YMO’s relation with technology, and via the sampling a willingness to reach out to other humans as well. Technology increases and decreases our ditance from each other.
Technodelic presents us with a global city: you’re driven to explore deeper, you feel contained, the world’s expansive, unknown, and constraining at once. This is also why I find "Key" so out of place: it’s about the interpersonal while
Technodelic is so about our response to the
impersonal.
Famously Kraftwerk feared they were obsolete when they first heard old-school hip hop. Ralf Hütter retreated to cycling, a more biological expression of the man-machine, before literally crashing there too. I wish we could have gotten the full 1983
Tour de France. The single used samples in a narrow focus on a mechanics of a bicycle and the basic biological responses cyclist (focusing on the vehicle versus
Technodelic’s sense of travel). Hütter’s crash and psychology—whether it jump-started his obsessive tendencies or just made them unmanageable I don’t know—brought the focus in
too tight, though.
Electric café/
Techno Pop was only released by 1986 and it doesn’t have the reach of previous Kraftwerk. ItThe topic of the music is just music, either literally ("Music non stop") or, in "Der Telefon anruf" and "Sex Object," emotionless and uninteresting because there’s nothing there but broad parody and self-parody. The element of self-parody is part of what makes
Electric café feel so
old. At least musically and intellectually, Kling Klang was a near-monastic environment. Thematically and musically Kraftwerk was hermetically sealed, stuck in its jar.
In contrast the speed and volume of YMO as a band and the individual YMO band members is breathtaking. Hosono’s proto-YMO
Paraiso and
Pacific were released in 1978 and
Technodelic in 1981. Only a couple of months separated the recording of
BGM and
Technodelic. Overlaying this with Sakamoto and Takahashi’s solo records makes them seem superhuman. While “Key” sounds like it belongs on Takahashi’s contemporary
Neuromantic, Sakamoto’s contemporary
Left-handed dream is on a completely different branch of self-orientalizing avant-pop.
The majority of
Technodelic could slip into Sakamoto’s
Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia without any problem. That album is also respected as a step forward in the application of sampling, again in how it makes use of traditional musics from across Asia.
Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, though, was recorded
three years later (memorably shown in the documentary
Tokyo Melody, also scrubbed from youtube but
still available on the Internet Archive).
Technodelic was not just at the forefront of music at its time, it was running ahead of what its individual members were producing.
As a final note I think Takahashi’s contributions to YMO—beyond its poppier aspects, his contributions to its more avant garde side, both in terms of actual sound and overall musical direction—are pretty consistently underrated. Sakamoto and Hosono had musically groundbreaking solo careers. Sakamoto became a global star, relocating to New York, collaborated with fellow global A-listers, and got a major creative, and highbrow, second wind in the aughts. Hosono put out albums that leaned into the innovative side of electronic movement but partly “retreated” into commercially commissioned works, plus some game and movie sountracks (his soundtrack for Kore-eda’s
Shoplifters is tonally similar to Eiko Ishibashi’s music for Hamaguchi’s
Drive my car or how Sakamoto’s piano arrangements for
BTTB were used in Kore-eda’s
Monster). Many of those commercial works have been
have been rediscovered and freshly appreciated, with people turning on Hosono’s background music for Muji stores in their homes (Hosono himself says he actually forgot he even wrote the stuff, surprised his tossed-off for hire work’s now seen as ambient classics).
Sakamoto was classically trained: there’s often a bit of Debussy in Sakamoto’s work, even the sampled gamelan on “Seoul Music” can be seen as a way of reclaiming Debussy—inspired by gamelan music—for Asians (and it’s hardly the only time he did this). Hosono was a rocker first but approached classical music on his own terms, with the piano on “Taiso” supposedly inspired by John Cage (that’s a prepared piano in there). Both were at the genesis of techno and dipped in and out of many streams of electronic music after that. In any event there’s either a lot of abstract music or music that can be appreciated abstractly.
Takahashi’s solo work, though, was less conceptually ambitious or abstract. It was always tied to the more conventional, emotional side of songwriting. His solo work (after his pre-YMO retro-Francophilic jazz pop debut
Saravah!) is in the new wave-synthpop mode, and he eventually slid into fairly bland adult contemporary. That doesn’t mean a his prime work from the early and mid-eities isn’t good—I’m most familiar with
Neuromantic, basically a perfect record, and
Tomorrow’s just another day, is a classic of the form. It’s not that Takahashi’s extra-YMO work couldn’t get experimental. His side project record (as the Beatniks)
Exitstentialism hits the sweet spot: still song-oriented, more musically advanced than much of his solo work, but also completely distinct and harder-edged than YMO. Nevertheless, Takahashi’s output is largely one of pop and rock songs, and have to be appreciated as such. The global, musically-curious audience that has a lot of that stuff already.
It’s an easy jump, in sound and taste, between YMO and Sakamoto and Hosono’s solo output. There’s not a wall between Takahashi’s solo output and YMO, but he used the two to explore different sides of his musical personality. That approach deserves appreciation too.
