Modern Genres of Japanese Music
For my entry on music of my choice, I decided to look into different genres of modern Japanese music. There are a lot of options to pick from, but I will focus on some of the main ones, such as J-Pop, Japanese rock, and Japanese metal, along with the newer genre deemed “kawaii metal.” Many of these are popular internationally, but the first two especially have a long history of how they evolved into the genres we know now. There is some overlap with histories, but they are each unique and have each found popularity in many ways in the Western world. The beginning of the track leading to modern J-Pop goes back to the 1920s with a genre known as ryukoka. Ryukoka was a genre from the 20s to the 50s that was heavily influenced by American jazz and blues music. However, while it utilized Western aspects such as violins and guitars, it also used a pentatonic scale for the melodic lines, which is a Japanese characteristic of the music. Noriko Awaya became very popular for this gen...
