a thinkpiece on the evolution of japanese hardcore

Dec. 19, 2023 1:55 AM

This post was originally written for my Dreamwidth blog on the timestamp written above - the original formatting has been preserved whenever possible.

This is the second entry in a series of blog posts where I briefly (for a vague definition) reflect on the J-core genre over the last 25 or so years. You can find the first entry in this series, where I cover the influences and legacy of the late Betwixt & Between, here.

(See also the impetus that led to me writing about this topic here.)

I've recently been thinking about the developments of Japanese hardcore as a music genre since learning about the wider otaku subculture back in 2010, a journey that's led me down an incredibly steep, and yet fascinatingly undocumented rabbit hole in the eight or so months since it first crossed my mind. Learning about the early discography of artists like DJ SHARPNEL, Betwixt & Between, REDALiCE, and DJ TECHNORCH not only gave me an appreciation for the genre that you could only ever find in Youtube "deep dive" essays, but also presented me with a number of realisations about the early 2000s internet that only become more difficult to accept.

Betwixt & Between was a regular contributor to the foundational years of both J-core and HARDCORE TANO*C. His style of freeform trance was a hallmark of the genre during the 2000s, creating an ethereal blend of traditional hardcore and trance elements that earned him the renown of artists both within and outside Japan. Though primarily known for this uniquely darker energetic sound, Betwixt & Between would experiment with various works that were more true to form for the genres he took inspiration from, like speedcore and DJ SHARPNEL-like breakcore. There's a clear influence of contemporary J-core trends that guides much of his music, but when listening through the perspective of the genre now, it feels refreshing to gauge the complex differences that defined what tracks were like during the period.

Author's note: I have steadily been made aware of the wider history behind J-core as a genre during my time working on the J-core history video, but many have also acknowledged a considerate difficulty in collating all of the relevant information on the topic into an easily accessible and referenced document/piece.

Throughout a number of my posts on various hobbies and interests, I've often brought up the importance of "historical value" regarding how people regard their obscure hyperfixations - why greater focus is ascribed to specific works, what messages we can gather from analysing their historical significance to the culture, how important it is that we keep preserving these mediums. As one particular video essay producer has proven with his findings on plagarism over the last couple of weeks, the average person doesn't care about these deliberations. Most don't think about the prescribed value we place on anything that doesn't provide immediate financial benefit to us. Unfortunately, that sentiment runs far deeper than even those covering niche topics seem to realise, a perspective I covered in my aforementioned "finer appreciation for the otaku (speed) arts" - anime, visual novels, and the occasional magazine get top billing, while everything else is relegated to one dedicated individual forced into even more faithful depictions of Icarus for the credible information they need.

There's a point to my rambling here - it's hard to discuss the foundational years of J-core in much the same way. A lot of highly valuable primary sources relating to J-core history before and immediately after the turn of the millennium are lost to time in some form, with any records of their existence mentioned in an offhand Wikipedia footnote for a website culled before we had the Internet Archive. Trying to do research on where J-core really started is a difficult endeavour - the Wikipedia page only lists four sources at all, and the article I used as a springboard on the topic for the longest time doesn't cite any sources of their own in turn. Compare that to the dearth of sources used to discuss the overwhelming legacy of this infamous VN I can't directly name, and you start to notice a problem. A lot of primary sources on J-core are as "primary" as one gets - if you can't cite it straight from the horse's mouth, say no thank you for the horse.

Many definitive origin points of J-core are difficult to narrow down, but the most agreed-upon starting point to define the genre as we know it today is sharpnel vs Project Gabbangelion, the very first release under the "High Speed Music Team Sharpnel" moniker. I've talked a bit about this album's significance before, but listening to this album highlights just how many elements of J-core were codified by one initially obscure group in 1998. A lot of the contemporary European hardcore techno and industrial hardcore traditions of the time show their influence throughout every track here, but this work is uniquely distinct in forming a bridge between the "music junkie" and "otaku culture" perceptions of what would later be known as Japanese hardcore. One of the arguably defining traditions that gave J-core its distinct anime-adjacent identity was the (sometimes egregious) use of anime and VN vocal samples - it can be argued that this was an attempt to make this branch of hardcore music more approachable to an underground audience, who may have seen kindred value seeing this budding genre rise from the ashes of Y2K much like Serial Experiments Lain. That's hyperbole, but you can probably appreciate what I'm trying to say here.

DJ SHARPNEL's influence is widely credited as one of the progenitors behind the J-core term, as there are a number of artists and releases that still follow the general framework established by the group's music to this day. Hell, I listened to an album released a month ago that basically captures the spirit of what SHARPNEL J-core is all about. To ignore these contributions is a gross misunderstanding of how the genre has developed between the 2000s and now. That being said, I would like to draw attention to the other High Speed Music Team albums, because I think they deserve some mention in understanding how the iconic SHARPNEL sound created its own offshoot of J-core alongside the modern internet. Special shoutout to memecore, you have to listen to the genre to understand its genius.

Double Dutch is something of an enigma in relation to the wider history of Japanese underground music pre-2000. I'm going to keep any background on this album VERY brief, because it's enough for a whole Youtube video by itself (that I would LOVE to cover), but it's worth talking about it in some form not confined to a wiki summary.

To cut a long story short, Double Dutch, as well as the following mini-album From The Heart, are effectively lost media. According to notes corroborated by Discogs and VGMDB, approximately 40 copies of the former were sold at the very second M3 doujin event in 1998, with the album quickly discontinued afterwards due to the group's "dissatisfaction with the content." The second half of that sentence is a widely-circulated statement on these two sites that I was barely able to trace back to the 2015 SHARPNELSOUND CHRONICLE booklet, but the information regarding its incredibly limited print run is something I can definitely confirm. What better source to back up that claim than its mysterious absence from the discography section on DJ SHARPNEL's old website?! Alas, both albums lost their master copy data in a hard drive failure shortly afterwards, which makes both of them incredibly rare, if not pseudo-lost media.

I'm going to spare you the remainder of that background information, because it's definitely worth looking at in isolation. Nonetheless, Double Dutch is a fascinating release to listen to in hindsight, partially due to the knowledge that the SHARPNEL team weren't happy with the final product. Upon first listen, it's immediately evident that these tracks feel extremely underbaked - something feels missing throughout, and the resultant mastering process feels strangely hollow as a result. This is apparent even in some of the more fleshed-out tracks, like Heart Attack and Highspeed Star, as anyone who's paying any sort of attention can hear that some layers are considerably lacking in depth. The gabber and techno kicks used throughout feel bizarrely rough around the edges, creating this odd sense of cognitive dissonance between what you're perceiving and what you're actually listening to. That said, DJ Jea (the main act of the SHARPNEL collective) did view his Double Dutch contributions fondly, as he would revisit the previously mentioned songs in the following release, also named From The Heart (now subtitled 地獄編 or "Hell Compilation" to differentiate it.)

Highspeed Star in particular is a track that Jea sought fit to give proper justice, seeing no less than three separate revisions over the next three releases. These draw upon more upbeat makina and happy hardcore inspirations to create a livelier sound, perhaps serving as a precursor to the Bright Colors series under HARDCORE TANO*C a decade later. That being said, Double Dutch is an unintentional focal point in analysing how J-core has developed since its inception, because much of the later scene and its sub-categories would sound vastly different without its release. Artists were willing to take risks and innovate their sound to create something more unique than a simple import of European underground values, even if it didn't meet expectations - I argue that early J-core became synonymous with adaptation, morphing the inspirations of vastly different music styles to create a new blend that ran wild and free next to the early internet.

As the early history of DJ SHARPNEL as a unit is documented in much more detail than their past as the High Speed Music Team, I'd like to return to HARDCORE TANO*C for a moment, and talk a bit about their impact on the scene that's still around now. (Refer to my last post on Betwixt & Between, seen at the top of this post, for a quick refresher and general background.)

While TANO*C had established themselves within the J-core sphere as a new-blooded internet collective borne from the depths of 2ch, it is with the release of the first HARDCORE SYNDROME in 2007 that the group began to find their proper footing. J-core started to diversify in many respects - from the inspirations it drew upon, to the artists who collaborated and contributed far and wide in pursuit of their own interpretation of this post-Financial Crisis sound, the genre had become a truly international project helmed by the teens of the new World Wide Web. Just as artists like JAKAZiD took inspiration from metamorphoses in Japan, homegrown talents were more than willing to innovate on the techniques that DJ SHARPNEL had founded. You still had the hardcore and industrial techno parts of J-core still spearheading the movement, but now there was room for happy hardcore, for UK hardcore... and as USAO would showcase, Frenchcore had a big impact too. Japanese hardcore was truly worldwide.

Many of the artists featured in TANO*C compilations envisioned their own style for J-core, something that the group was enthusiastic to showcase in a variety of ways. The SPEED BALL series skews more towards a punchier hardstyle and speedcore mixture aimed at retaining parts of the genre's tradition, while the Bright Colors series skews more towards the happy hardcore vibe that became more of the "standard" in later years. There was no set constitution for J-core, and that may be the reason why its history is so hard to clarify during its formulative years. DJ Shimamura shares this sentiment in a 2018 Bandcamp article highlighting J-core artists, stating “I am only making hardcore in Japan, I do not have the consciousness of making J-core. I think that this is probably the same for many Japanese artists.” Just as J-core was a freeform genre with no set conventions, it was a chimera of artistic perspective thanks to the rise of file sharing websites like Megaupload and Youtube proliferating its spread to a wider audience than the club scapes of yonderdecade.

These days, J-core has become much harder to define. DJ Shimamura follows up his earlier statement with the idea that the term "was born as a word to easily express a lot of unique Japanese sounds" - he's certainly not wrong, if you look at what the genre has become now. Many artists are following that direction, aiming for something closer to an underground Japanese interpretation of various genres like UK hardcore, psytrance, and hardstyle, rather than a catch-all term like J-core. Sure, you can argue that "J-core" is a twist on those existing genres expressed in a number of different forms, but you end with the question of "what makes J-core any different from calling it "Japanese-inspired [insert genre here]" by that point?" Nobody knows.

I end this piece with my own thoughts on how J-core will evolve over the next decade. Personally speaking, I think J-core has mutated to the point where trying to codify a single interpretation of it feels counterproductive. A wealthy degree of new artists contributing towards the genre aren't even from Japan, while there's still some pretty clear differences between the kind of hardcore you'd hear in Europe/America and what's birthed under the J-core label. Rhythm games have started to adopt these changing sounds, for better or for worse. We're in an age of what music otaku scathingly call "otogecore," music produced for arcade games like beatmania IIDX and SOUND VOLTEX first and foremost. The side effect of this acknowledgement is that the genre has started an ouroboros of inspiration, constantly eating itself alive in a search for the next banger.

I won't say that J-core is dead. But I won't say it's alive right now, either. It's in a weird spot, what with collectives like MEGAREX moving away from the hardcore roots for a more post-modern hi-tech basis. The genre needs more artists to push boundaries, and less people citing rhythm games as their sole guideline for tracks. It's time for a move away from the banger culture.

tl;dr: Who the Fuck is James Brown?

[we love hardcore]