Form and definition

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Form and definition

See: Selling out The origin of modern "J-pop" is said to be Japanese-language rock music inspired by The Beatles. Unlike the Japanese music genre called kayōkyoku, J-pop uses a special kind of pronunciation, which is similar to English language. The notable singer to do so is Keisuke Kuwata, who pronounced the Japanese word "karada" (body) as "kyerada". Additionally, unlike Western music, the major second (sol and la) was usually not used in Japanese music except art music before rock music became popular in Japan. When Group Sounds (which was inspired by Western rock) became popular, however, Japanese pop music adopted the major second which was used in the final sounds of The Beatles' song "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and The Rolling Stones' song "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". Although Japanese pop music became occidental in progress of time, J-pop is still influenced by Japanese pentatonic scale and distortional tetrachord.

At first, the term "J-pop" was only used for Western-style musicians in Japan such as Pizzicato Five and Flipper's Guitar just after Japanese radio broadcasting J-Wave was established. However, the term became a blanket term covering other music genres such as the majority of Japanese rock music of 1990s.

Japanese Tower Records defined J-pop as all Japanese music belonging to the Recording Industry Association of Japan except Japanese independent music (also known as "J-indie") in 1990, but they began to use more segmentalized classification such as J-club, J-punk, J-hip-hop, J-reggae, J-anime, Johnny's and Visual by 2008 after some indie musicians went on to release their works via major labels.

Whereas rock musicians in Japan usually hate the term "pop", Taro Kato, a member of pop punk band Beat Crusaders, pointed out that the encoded pop music like pop art was catchier than "J-pop" and he also said that "J-pop" was the music remembered by being aired many times in an interview when they completed their first full-length studio album under a major label, P.O.A.: Pop on Arrival, in 2005. Because the band did not want to perform the "J-pop" music, their music on the album featured the 80's Pop of MTV. According to another member Toru Hidaka, the 1990s influential music for him (such as Nirvana, Hi-Standard and Flipper's Guitar) was not listened by fans of other music in Japan at that time.