By SoulTrain, to red carpet appearances, to collaborations with Iggy Pop, Ryuichi Sakamoto constantly reinventing his music, breaking the rules and getting away with it. To call him a Japanese version of David Bowie is doing him short, having run the gamut and won an Oscar, Grammy, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award.
Sakamoto succumbed to cancer in late March 2023, his death was not revealed until April. His death, like his life, was one that defied the typical path of a rock star. Against his own will, he was thrust into the spotlight when his art rock band accidentally became a huge success. Using many synthesizers, he created a style of pop music that still bore similarities to Japanese music traditions, despite his adamant rejection of Japanese classical music: “I hated it all except gagaku [court music]which to me is like alien music.”
Instead of boring homages to his classic heroes, Sakamoto crafted catchy, often complex melodies for a generation that cared little for what came before. Inspired by various sources, he twisted computer-controlled sound fragments into danceable pop hits with a groove. And then, at the height of his pop stardom, he dropped it completely. Turning away from the easy route, Sakamoto remade himself as a film score composer, collaborating with Western artists without ever fitting into a category or genre.
To avoid becoming repetitive or conforming to the standards of the time, the Japanese composer challenged himself with new styles, new partners and musical philosophies. He also pursued the same interest in getting ahead and progressing artistically in his later life as a political activist.
Revolt against the system
After taking a trip to San Francisco in the late 1960s, where he mingled with burnouts, beatniks and hippies, and witnessed the protests that overtook American culture, the musician was a changed man. What he saw in the US stayed with him for the rest of his life. Sakamoto returned to his homeland with a impulse to wake up a Japan he and his artist friends saw as a very conservative, stagnant, rigid society. Music was next on the chopping block. Changing the world would have to wait.
In the 1970s, he found a home with fellow misfits in the experimental synthesizer-heavy band Yellow Magic Orchestra, playing out their exoticism for Western audiences, dressing up as parodies of Asians and filling their albums with skits that bridged the communication gap between the emphasized two different cultures. from their fan club. Jokes flew over most people’s heads as most fans took their antics for granted. Despite the lighthearted way the band handled their fame, their notoriety only grew. After a few years of toil, YMO paved the way for a generation of jazz and synth acts in Japan in the 1980s. to lay the foundation for the “City Pop” genre that dominated the Japanese music charts for nearly two decades and the Internet afterward, though he called the band’s output “technopop”.
From the margin to mainstream
(Recorded Picture Company (RPC)
Oshima Productions
Asahi National Broadcaster
Broadbank Investments
Although he grew up around classical musicians, he always leaned towards the new and strange, drawing inspiration from The Beatles as much as Beethoven or Bach. His career as a member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra propelled him to fame abroad mixing classical, synth, soul, jazz and disco. Bored and feeling that the YMO act was getting tiring, he went solo. His songs were covered by Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton, and his influences were even felt in the rap world, with his bass-heavy 1980 track “Riot in Lagos” being one of many songs endlessly sampled by admirers.
His avant-garde style had become terrifyingly mainstream, much to his horror. In 1983, he landed a life-changing gig, giving the score and acting in the role of a conflicted Japanese officer in a POW camp in the David Bowie movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Four years later, he won the Academy Award for co-writing the score for The last emperor, providing the model for fringe weird rockers like Trent Reznor to grab Oscar glory.
Getting started with illness
As much as he has been praised for his music, his most notable influence in Japan over the past decade has been his stance on the abolition of nuclear power and fossil fuels. After the 2011 typhoon and subsequent nuclear power plant disaster, Sakamoto spoke at protests, declaring that “to remain silent after Fukushima is barbaric.” After 40 years of making unconventional music that dominated the charts, he had come full circle and returned to the realm of politics that he had largely brushed aside in the 1970s.
Nicknamed the “Professor,” Sakamoto continued his work into his fifties and sixties, putting aside his past pop in favor of ambient music, and provided the score for The Revenant And Black mirror when you’re not touring or bingeing Family man or contemplate the nature of time. In the last years of his life, Sakamoto worked on “asynchronistic” music, which did not follow the medium’s traditional structure. The fact that time was slipping away weighed on his head, now determined to produce as much as possible in the last decade of his life. Battling the cancer that would eventually kill him, he told The New York Times in 2021 that his mortality had pushed him to take up new recordings. “I’m in the middle right now and going back to the hospital for surgery in the fall. It’s been a year since I left New York; I don’t know when I’ll be able to come back.” His journey to stay ahead of the competition never ended.