3 - The Lost and the Relaxed

Summary

Abstract: This chapter introduces the generational frame in music audience research and discusses audience data from the two analysed cohorts. It begins with an overview of the concept of generations and then recaps the socioeconomic context of ‘the lost’ and ‘the relaxed’, emphasising the histories of the two labels and their ambivalence. In the main part of the chapter generational identities emerge in and through listening practices and interpretations. In particular, the chapter demonstrates how musical playlists are often inter-generational but their meaningful interpretations are not: generational actualities relate to the ways the same music is differently experienced and understood. Last, the chapter investigates the shape and place of the concept of generations in future media and music studies.

Keywords: generation, cohort, yutori, Japan, identity, audience

Of all media, we have often reached to music for discussions of generational identities. This may be somewhat less visible now, as practices and emerging technologies inspiring new generational labels have shifted interest towards the online sphere. Still, music remains a significant part of generational experience, but how so?

In Club Cultures, Sarah Thornton describes music as the cultural form closest to the youth (1995, p. 15), and since in scholarship it is the young, adolescent cohort that is usually investigated and dubbed a certain way, music emerges as an important cultural artefact and/or practice. For Thornton, it was rave culture as a rite of passage for young single Britons living with their parents in the early 1990s. Earlier, for Dick Hebdige (1979) it was punk as a youthful counter to the British crisis of the 1970s. For scholars of Japan, it was the development of politicised, protest performance spaces (Manabe, 2016a) or the emergence of hip-hop and the new reality of Japanese modernisation and urban youth (Condry, 2001). Other studies, of course, can easily be found, and across them a strong link between music and identity, stronger, perhaps, than in other cultural forms (Frith, 1988; Bennett, 2000).

Although this book is not about lyrical trends in Japanese music, the texts and their interpretations remain vital. When popular songs in Japan make generational claims, they usually do it subtly, and it is in their readings by the audiences that the meanings take specific shapes. Sometimes, however, the songs are more overt.