A lot of Americans feel like if the composition and lyricism is not authentic and directly created by the one artist that performs it, it isn’t real. We seem to like the cliché story of a heartbroken girl picking up a guitar and singing along with her feelings, and writing every part of the song herself. I have met lots of people – musically inclined and not, who will dislike carefully produced pop music because it doesn’t feel “authentic”, and go further as to criticize artists who do not write and perform their own music as “talentless”. In the Western World, especially in America, there seems to be a big preference towards singer-songwriter culture lately among performers and listeners alike.

They Leave the Songwriting to the Songwriters

For proof, here is a track I randomly selected from the Japanese iTunes top 10 today, without ever hearing of the song or the artist before.Ģ. I’m not just selecting the best ones either – the catchy melodies really are saturated throughout most of their music. Here are a couple examples of well crafted Japanese melodies taken from a couple different genres.: It is not that Western melodies are inherently worse when compared with Japanese melodies, but there is certainly a higher level of consistency among Japanese music. Simply put, a lot of popular Western songwriters as getting sloppy with their melodies nowadays. In most cases, it is the most memorable and emotional connection we have to a song, and thus, it needs to have special attention taken to it when composing. I am a firm believer that in most forms of music, melody should always come first. Today I’m going to go over the music of one of my favorite countries, Japan, and what I have learned that they do differently when writing, performing, and producing their music.

It is not that I have anything against popular American music in itself – some terrific, unforgettable tracks home come out of my homeland – but there are certainly some areas where I think it is generally outdone by other parts of the world. The response seems even more bizarre when you take into the account that the people who tell me this lately are students at a music college that is not located in the United States.Īmerican pop music is so ubiquitous throughout the Western World (and apparently Israel too) to the point where, from my observations, most people just think the way we do music is “the right way” and everyone else tries to write and perform just like it. Is the reaction I get from most people when I tell them 90% of the music I listen to is not from America.

J-pop, J-rock, Japan, Music, Pop, Popular Music, Rock, Songwriting Composition, J-pop / J-rock, Music, Songwriting

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