User:KhannaatUofU/sandbox/editing Japanese rock 2

Contemporary female rock musicians' representations of girls, girlhood, and girl culture

"I'm Just a Girl," the song that, not incidentally, propelled Gwen Stefani to her current position as female rock icon, the performance of girlhood, although by no means a homogeneous or universal enterprise, can now be said to constitute anew cultural dominant within the musical practice of women in rock."

"Japanese women bands illustrates how women who are marginalized by dominant narratives of race and gender (understood as mutually constitutive discourses) negotiate their own parodic or complicit counternarratives. Insofar as media representations of Japanese women rockers recapitulate familiar stereotypes of Asian femininity, giving rise to images of Japanese female artists as ideally girlish and innocent (a portrayal that is not necessarily at odds with representations of "exotic" Asian female sexualities), these artists produce distinct narratives that deny girlhood the status of universality and that instead engage the cultural and racial specificity of hegemonic girlhood."

From the inception of many female groups like Band Maid or Baby Metal, there's a common distinction to be made that these bands encapsulate the rebellion to these specific narratives.

"The examples of the Osaka-based trio Shonen Knife and the New York-based duo Cibo Matto, Japanese female bands that have attracted small but significant followings among U.S. indie rock audiences, provide telling illustrations of the manner in which Asian women, whose visibility within U.S. culture is often predicated on their acquiescence to orientalist stereotypes, have had to negotiate the terrain of U.S. youth and music cultures differently than have their (primarily white) Riot Grrrl counterparts."

"In the United States, where Japanese rock musicians (whose music has become increasingly visible since the mid-1980s) are often regarded with a mixture of "sincere" musical interest and objectifying, ethnocentric curiosity, the recurring portrayal of Japanese women bands as interesting novelty acts, cartoonish amateurs, and/or embodiments of Western patriarchal fantasies of "cute" Asian femininity presents particular challenges for understanding how evocations of girlhood overlap with discourses of race, gender, and nation in U.S. popular music culture. In contrast o Riot Grrrl bands, whose reappropriations of girlhood are part of a broader effort to harness rock's oppositional energy for feminist critique, Japanese women rockers have had to negotiate a feminist cultural politics from within the context of Western patriarchal discourses that insist on positioning them as the exotic representatives of an idealized girlish femininity."

"One music journalist, in a description that conflates infantilizing images of Asian women's sexuality with stereotypes of female musical incompetence, has asserted that the band's fans like Shonen Knife because "they're little, lots of fun and can't really play" (Stud Brother 1992,6)."

cyber cultures from the east Japanese rock music

"By studying the J-rock fan community, we can be able to better understand how new subcultures emerge from an interest in media that originated in a different cultural context, the role of the Internet in creating ‘imagined communities’ in which people are connected by common hobbies and interests, how fans create an ‘imagined Japan’ based on interpretation and consumption of J-rock, and the consequences participation in the J-rock fan community has on formations of self-identity and future goals and desires."

"The spread of Japanese rock music, or J-rock, in North America has been heavily tied with the development of computer technology and the Internet. J-rock fans rely heavily on the Internet to access music files and official merchandise and to interact with other J-rock fans through virtual communities. It is arguable that, without the Internet, the J-rock community may not exist as it does today."

"It is in part because of the substantial growth of J-rock fan culture in recent years that there have been J-rock musicians who come to North America to perform live concerts and hold promotional events at Japanese animation conventions. This development in which North American promoters and businesses have become interested in marketing J-rock to a wider audience marks a transition period in which the distribution of J-rock media and bands is becoming formalized and mass-marketed."

"Easy access to information and media related to J-rock in recent years has led to the splintering of what had been considered a close-knit community into smaller, separate communities that are focused on specific bands or subgenres of J-rock."

Sources

Wald, Gayle. “Just a girl? rock music, feminism, and the cultural construction of female youth.” Rock Over the Edge, 2020, pp. 191–215, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822383376-007.

Nguyen, An. “Cybercultures from the East: Japanese Rock Music Fans in North America.” Heritage Branch, 2007, pp. 1–133.

Siebrasse, Anne, and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann. “You Don’t Know a Person(’s Taste) When You Only Know Which Genre They like: Taste Differences within 5 Popular Music Genres Based on Sub Genres and Sub Styles.” Germany, Frankfurt Am Main, 7 June 2023.

Hughes, David W., and Alison Tokita. The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music. Ashgate, 2010.

Mitsui, Tōru. Made in Japan: Studies in Popular Music. Routledge Taylor &amp; Francis Group, 2015.