In the 1980s, as Japan became an exporter of both culture and technology, burgeoning scenes in the once-island nation began to create a local home for foreign sounds imported from afar. Among them was a collection of artists who created homegrown reggae music that honored the genre's Jamaican roots. Top Tokyo students of Trenchtown included drummer Masahito “Pecker” Hashida, which he recorded at Tuff Gong with Bob Marley himself, while the band Mute Beat drew heavily from reggae and dub to create a sound that foreshadowed acid jazz and trip-hop. The new collection Tokyo Riddim 1976-1985 is not snapshot of this scene. Instead, it's a treasured collection of more pop-aligned, pseudo-reggae music created by artists and producers who envisioned Caribbean influences blending seamlessly with Japan's urban-pop sound. These songs are more akin to English reggae cod artists of the same era – think UB40, the Police and Paul McCartney – than the Jamaican pioneers they stole from.
Often this influence manifests simply as an atmosphere, as if everyone involved was trying to recreate the feeling of a half-remembered concert while traveling to Kingston. Tokyo Riddim 1976-1985 even begins with the sound of crashing waves, setting a seaside mood, before Miki Hirayama's “Tsukikage No Nagisa” (“Moonlight Shadow at the Beach”) mixes the singer's refined urban-pop vocals over some lazily strummed reggae guitar. Much of the set moves to the same relaxed pace: On “Music,” Chu Kosaka—a rock artist whose reggae credentials include Jimmy Cliff's mention House of Exile as his favorite album—develops an appropriately hazy falsetto and voluptuous sax over a bass line as heavy as the setting sun.
The producers are clearly unconcerned with adhering to reggae's fundamentals, and in some brazenly experimental moments blur the genre's lines even further. The second of Hirayama's two tracks, “Denshi Lenzi” pushes the rhythm guitar and bass from Marley's “Natural Mystic” but sets it to vocals filled with futuristic robo-pop vocal effects. “Hittin' Me Where It Hurts,” by Marlene, a Filipino singer exploited by Japanese talent recruiters to become a pop star, features an airy bah bah bah harmonies reminiscent of Latin jazz, adding hints of arcade electronica, percussive percussion, brass and vocal effects that break up Marlene's flashy big-band-style performance into a fantastical, cross-cultural melange.
