EVERY GENRE PROJECT - March 7 - Japanese Hardcore

Genre of the Day - Japanese Hardcore

Album of the Day - Far East Hardcore Punk by Enslave (2014)

March 7th, 2024

Note: This article is a revision. I’m sorry for two emails, I just felt like my initial draft kinda sucked and wanted to add more context.

Today, I finally finished with classes before my spring break, which is a very much needed break after quite the rollercoaster two months. There was an expected levity to the day, but I also had to saunter down to the local science museum for a take-home lab for my general education oceanography class and it was a beautiful, sunny day so that accentuated the feeling of weight coming off my shoulders. This project always keeps me on my toes, though, and of course in contrast to that levity I get hardcore thrashing noise-focused punk. The scales always balance themselves.

This is our second foray into hardcore, with the first being with D-beat. D-beat is hardcore with a particular emphasis on a certain drum pattern, and I examined it from the lens of one particular instrument’s sound being the foundation of a genre. However, d-beat is just one strand of hardcore, and today’s album is not actually considered d-beat even though many Japanese hardcore bands are.  Always in tune with the pulse of global music, in Japan hardcore rose up in the late 1970s as the no wave movement was spreading and picked up steam by the early 1980s with the group SS. Like hardcore globally, it was unabashedly anti-establishment from the start, with the band Anarchy boldly breaking the taboo of criticizing the royal family in its lyrics. Some Japanese acts were really willing to commit: the band The Stalin became infamous for throwing pig innards and bird carcasses at its audience while performing naked. Understandably, this soiled the view of punk among the Japanese public a bit. Did they really need to be doing all that? Anyway, just like any other regional punk scene, Japanese hardcore has a lot of internal diversity and has spawned its own scenes like Burning Spirits which places an emphasis on flashy, uplifting guitar solos and lyrics of self-empowerment. Today’s album is listed as Burning Spirits as well on RYM.

The core problem at hand is that I don’t understand the lyrics at all, given that I don’t speak Japanese or scream (the album mostly features trademark hardcore screaming in a particularly impressively high pitch, with occasional spoken portions). Part of my understanding of the D-beat album of the day was because of its lyrical approach and how it melded with the instrumentals: I could not locate any translations for this album. Thus, I have to rely on my ears, which are already unaccustomed to this type of music.

I do hear the difference between this and D-beat: the drumming is slightly less forward in the mix and less visceral, and the guitars take center stage. I feel that the guitar is of a higher frequency here, leading to a slightly brighter sound. There’s a healthy balance of tempo variation as well, with occasional slower, more menacing marches like “La Haine” that then leap forth into busy, sharp cacophonies like “ONLY I CAN JUDGE ME.” With no lyrical basis to pierce beyond the thick dark cloud of instrumentals and offer a little more clarity into the genre, though, I feel like a deaf old person silently nodding and sitting in a rocking chair listening to this. All I guess I can take away is that I’m glad that across continents people are deriving the same catharsis from hardcore: absolutely banging it out on the guitar really is a universal language.