Simple Unchanging Stories about Things We Already Know: Japanese youth and popular songs

In Japan’s current transformational times, questions of music audiences intersect closely with issues of youth and social change, suggesting the need to extend the otherwise scant studies of Japanese youth’s music engagements for audience and media studies in general. This article frames new empirical data about popular songs and their interpretations within the social context of contemporary Japan. By combining focus groups, individual interviews and content analysis, I observe that among different tastes and genre particularities, common patterns can be recognized in audience engagements with song lyrics. The first underlines a clear-cut division between the concepts of ‘school’ and ‘work’. The second contrasts the stagnancy in gender stereotypes in lyrics with richness of audiences’ interpretations of the content. The last introduces ‘ordinariness’ as significant in young audience’s perception of songs. All three themes interconnect, presenting Japanese audiences as a potentially insightful subject for further empirical audience studies of popular music.