There’s a particular kind of freedom many Japanese rock musicians enjoy, a weird side-benefit of inheriting Elvis from post-WWII American GI radio and never much worrying about fealty to blues or folk traditions. It’s a freedom from the burdens of authenticity, in other words, that makes an artist like Shintaro Sakamoto possible. The raunchy psych-rock Sakamoto played with his band Yura Yura Teikoku was, through its origins in San Francisco and London and Detroit, a authentic product of psychedelic and narcotic influence. Yet as Julian Cope explains in his study of Japanese psychedelia Japrocksampler, the Japanese heads who built upon and translated the post-Nuggets era into their own language, laying the groundwork for Sakamoto himself, most often eschewed drugs completely, opting for other avenues through which to get to the same dizzying musical highs.
As a solo artist, Sakamoto is so unconcerned with authenticity to a musical tradition that on record, he quite nearly disappears completely. On the 2012 LP How to Live With a Phantom, he mastered an ersatz lounge-pop that skewed as much portmortem as postmodern. The lightest, oft-cheesiest products of Western '50s and '60s pop—from the Free Design to French yé-yé and Martin Denny’s “exotica” soundscapes—have long appealed to Japanese record nerds for whom “soul” is often a very foreign concept, and Sakamoto is no exception. On his second solo album Let’s Dance Raw, he doubles down on his love for such sounds, assembling them into a whole that suggests as much the heady late '90s as the go-go '60s.
A slight shift from Phantom’s chippy disco guitar licks and smoky organs, Raw finds Sakamoto immersing himself in Hawaiian steel guitar, Brazilian cuica, and banjo—an instrument which, he suggests on “You Can Be a Robot, Too”, can be plucked and looped in a way that sounds like thousands of tiny gears operating in perfect concert. If there's any recognizable Western spirit animals for Raw (other than “Sleep Walk”), it's Beck—the heavy-lidded proto-serious iteration, that is, from 1998’s Mutations—and indie-pop gadabout and arranger-for-hire Sean O’Hagan with the High Llamas, whose '90s LPs Santa Barbara and Hawaii absorbed the Americana ambitions of Van Dyke Parks and ironed out the quirks, creating a heavily-stamped, pristine musical passport. Like Beck’s “Tropicalia”, Raw is a perfectly executed version of what Westerners might call global kitsch: a series of evocative tourist postcards showing sunny scenes from Rio and Honolulu.
What makes Sakamoto unique, though, is not simply his knack for turning the exotic West into a glimmering watercolor, or his capacity to craft a simple groove redolent of Steely Dan’s gaudy disco swan song Gaucho—though “Like an Obligation” more than qualifies—but doing so with the kind of fashionable indifference mastered by predecessors like Beck, Grace Jones, and the dazed, obsessive Yokohama teenagers wandering through Memphis in Mystery Train. Yes, Sakamoto digs into countercultural sociology on “Obligation” and “Birth of the Super Cult”, two blunted treatises against the staid social structures that still dog much of Japanese society. But before we call him a prophet, let’s keep in mind his alternative: sliding “a small chip between your eyebrows” and becoming a robot. Sakamoto has an odd way of working, sure, but it's also liberating: when you disregard authenticity as your compass, it’s amazing how far you can travel.
