I kind of had this issue for a while since I took Japanese all through high school and wanted to maintain the second language while at university. I also find vast majority of Japanese music pretty bland. This isn't exactly surprising since it's a lot harder do find music beyond the usual obvious mainstream pop type stuff when you're searching in a second language. It's also made a lot more difficult by the fact that the internet is full of people who take Japanese as a second language because "its the language of anime and animes my life desu" and anime opening themes tend to centre around fairly inane pop music. In a lot of ways it's usually better to ask people who don't speak a word of the language (or want to) about Japanese music. At least they won't tell you to listen to fucking 'opening theme of soul eater its greatest'.
I did my own research on account of not having anyone good to ask. The first thing I came across was that Japan actually makes some pretty decent Hip Hop. Over time, a lot of the production has diverged from what's going on overseas and become a bit more jazzy and relaxed. Stuff I like includes:
- King Giddra: Not to be confused with King Geedorah, an MF Doom side-project, these guys are more Public Enemy than Viktor Vaughn. The three-headed monster consists of K Dub Shine, DJ Oasis and Zeebra. They're sometimes referred to as the grandfathers of Japanese Hip Hop.
Shinjitsu no Dangan is an excellent song and a great demonstration of how superb K-Dub's flow and Oasis's production are. Not a great example of the whole 'jazzy and relaxed' thing.
- Gagle:
Big Bang Theory is the title track of their album. It's also representative of the kind of stuff you can expect from Gagle. They're a lot more relaxed sounding than King Giddra, and from the songs I can understand, less political. Gagle is also pretty enjoyable to listen to, whether or not you can understand the lyrics.
- Rip Slyme: The name is a pun. "Rip Slyme" and "Lips Rhyme" sound exactly the same if you use only Japanese phonetics to pronounce them. Much more party music than the above two. I think they even did the opening to some anime thing. The album 'Five' is pretty good. I can't find my favourite song off Five so here's the anime thing:
I like it okay. Guess I'm quite the hypocrite now, huh!
- DJ Krush is pretty well-known in Hip Hop circles, I think. He sometimes works with Japanese-speaking MCs but I'm going to link
a song he did with some guys from anticon instead because I like it a lot. He also did what seems to be a completely
awesome album with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo which I cannot fucking find anywhere other than in youtube clips.
Stuff other than Hip Hop I like tends to be instrumental or use a lot of English, so while Flower Travelin' Band are great, and MONO are good if you feel like post rock, you're not likely to pick up much Japanese from listening to them. I did find the band "
FANTASYS CORE" ("We can't speak English but we can speak Rock & Roll") and pick up their album
Nagasaki Atom from CD Baby, which turned out to be money well spent. I also came across
this guy who was both an influence on FANTASYS CORE and seems to have inspired Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys (hence the naming). I am not entirely sure why I like him but I cannot find any of his albums anywhere.
If you want something easy to understand then you could go with generic J-Pop if you're okay with being very upset with yourself once you can understand the lyrics and realise what you've been listening to.
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Japanese music