The Red Bulletin November 2019 (UK)

DYGL
“Those in power
don’t care about
the impact of
music. All they
want is control”
outsiders in their own country – “People
label us as ‘the band that sings in English’”
– as well as abroad. Yet the decision was
vindicated. “A cultural paradigm shift
happened around that time: people began
to look over the rim of the teacup and be
more open to minority culture.”
Thanks to the likes of YouTube and
Soundcloud, music lovers now have more
opportunities to discover new sounds
for themselves, and, importantly, have
wider access to music outside the Anglo-
American canon, which explains the
recent success of Korean pop music
in the US charts, a phenomenon that
would have been hard to imagine
15 years ago. People are seeking artists
who feel new and different. And since
being able to gain attention and stand out
are invaluable assets for any musician in
the 21st century, the time seems right for
a Japanese band playing fresher Britpop
than any British act right now.
Akiyama is quick, however, to state
that DYGL’s musical direction is not some
calculated marketing strategy. “Tokyo is
far from the traditional epicentres of
pop culture, like London and New York,
so it feels natural for us to receive foreign
music without bias, and to freely pick
and choose elements from all genres
and countries.” When asked about the
Japanese elements in DYGL’s music, he
replies like a shot: the melodies. “Music
from foreign bands who break through
in Japan is very melodic. The Japanese
don’t speak much English, so they
connect with the melodies, not with the
lyrics,” he says. “I think that’s also why
people here embrace our songs so much.”
Although Akiyama stresses that
DYGL aren’t an explicitly political
band and that many of their songs
are about love and friendship, it’s
their more socially aware material that
has gained them the most attention,
especially abroad, since few Japanese
bands grant Western listeners such an
intriguing insight. Take the song Don’t
You Wanna Dance in This Heaven?,
which tackles Japan’s repressive history,
specifically the country’s archaic fueihō
law. Introduced in 1948 to regulate the
sex industry, the law prohibited people
from dancing after midnight at many
venues, but this went largely unenforced
until 2010, when authorities found a
reason to crack down on nightlife and
revived it. The law was revised in 2016,
but it remains symbolic of politics in
Japan, says Akiyama: if you strip people
of their right to dance, you strip them of
their freedom of expression. “It shows
that the people in power don’t care about
the cultural impact of modern music –
all they want is to control people.”
This tends to be a systemic problem
in Japan, as Akiyama points out. In one
recent scandal, it transpired that several
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