The Genius of Sheena Ringo

November 10, 2014

When a member of Japanese girl group AKB48 made headlines worldwide by shaving her head as self-punishment for breaking the group’s “no dating” rule in 2013, it confirmed that little has changed in the business of Japanese pop. The 20-year-old singer had signed away her freedom in exchange for membership in one of the highest-earning pop groups in Japan’s history, and her “crime” of having a boyfriend nearly cost her job. The AKB48 machine – powered by a teenage army selling both sex and virginity – has made a very wealthy man of its founder, Yasushi Akimoto, who finds no fault with intruding on the girls’ private affairs and having them prance around in thigh-high skirts singing, “I want to take off my school uniform.”

Japan’s music past is littered with idol singers and girl groups like AKB48 who had no ownership of their art and whose personal and professional lives were controlled by a male-dominated industry of talent agencies, managers, and production svengalis. That a female musician as uncompromising and ball-breaking as Sheena Ringo could emerge and thrive in such a climate was nothing short of revolutionary.

Only the most skilled of songwriters could pervert their creations with piercing screams, deafening frequencies, and the hum of a vacuum cleaner and still end up with brilliant pop songs.

There have been a few one-off, creative female artists who managed to slip through the cracks of the pop machine through the years. Lyricist Yasui Kazumi, folk rock icon Matsutoya Yumi, and pop singers Chara, Bonnie Pink, and Utada Hikaru all wrote their own material and enjoyed healthy careers in the Japanese mainstream. But Sheena Ringo was different – dangerous, even. For decades, the female experience had been scripted by men, and all of a sudden, here was a woman unafraid to turn her insides out, and transform the dark side of female emotion into beautiful, brutal pop songs. It felt like the first time a Japanese female artist had spoken the truth. And you didn’t need to speak a word of Japanese to understand.

Sheena wrote blunt, witty lyrics about self-loathing, prostitution, and the mundanities of modern living, but saved the real meat for the music. No genre was off limits. She worshiped jazz, the Sex Pistols, Tony! Toni! Toné!’s Sons of Soul LP, and kayoukyoku (Japanese popular songs of the ’60s and ’70s), and delighted in blending them. Only the most skilled of songwriters could pervert their creations with piercing screams, deafening frequencies, and the hum of a vacuum cleaner and still end up with brilliant pop songs. She was at once mass culture and avant-garde, Eastern and Western, submissive and dominant, and keenly aware that it was the tension in these contradictions that made for the best records.

Koufukuron

I caught my first glimpse of Sheena Ringo in the pages of Japanese teen-girl fashion magazine, Zipper, in the summer of 1998. The four-page spread featured the then 19-year-old singer modelling glitter eye shadow and cheetah-print camisoles and holding the powder-blue Dusenberg Starplayer guitar that would become her axe-of-choice and later earn mega-bucks for the little-known guitar manufacturer. It looked like your average fashion editorial; only a teensy blurb at the top of the page made mention of Sheena’s artistry and the release of “Koufukuron,” (“The Happiness Theory”) her playful power-pop debut and the most vivacious, quirky, and melodic single to hit me in years.

Sheena hated it, thought the poppy production made her sound like a “goody-two-shoes,” and begged EMI to choose a different single. This was not the first time she had clashed with her record label. The staff assigned to her project were highly critical of her demos, dismissing her lyrics as negative and questioning her ability to sell records. She chose EMI for the Beatles and its rock-heavy roster, but was met with her staff’s puzzled looks when she asked after Blankey Jet City, Original Love, and Elephant Kashimashi – her favorite Japanese rock bands on the label. Entrusting her debut album to those hostile to her tastes and wishes was difficult for an artist so fierce in her independence, but the chart failure of “Koufukuron” was a blessing in disguise: It enabled her to wrestle more control from a label that no longer considered her a priority.

Any worries about being viewed as prissy were put to rest by follow-up “Kabukichou No Joou,” (“Queen of Kabukichou”) a no-nonsense alt-rock single about Tokyo’s red-light district. She wrote it soon after leaving her hometown of Fukuoka for Tokyo, when she would walk the streets of Shinjuku and attract the attention of scouts from hostess bars, S&M clubs, and love hotels that lined the triple-X alleyways of Kabukichou. In the lyrics, she flirts with life as a prostitute, inviting prospective clients to her “garden,” the “pleasure center,” the “big playground called Kabukichou.” Critics began to take note of her refreshing lack of sexual constraint, sophisticated way with words, and use of complex, antiquated kanji (Japanese characters). Reviews praised her post-war Shouwa-era style, the period from 1945 - 1989 when popular music took equally from the East as from the West. But Sheena was way too rock & roll for fans of Japanese oldies and the public hardly cared about her proficiency in music history and linguistics. “Kabukichou No Joou” was perhaps one step too saucy, and it stalled at #50 on the Oricon charts.

Shiina Ringo – Koko De Kiss Shite 在这里接吻

Fishing for a third single from the large reserve of demos she composed as a teenager wouldn’t be difficult. Amongst the power ballads, salsa, supper-club jazz, baroque waltzes, punk, and bubblegum pop came the crushingly mediocre “Koko De Kiss Shite,” (Kiss Me Here) which had neither the sparkle nor the swagger of her previous two singles. In a shrill, sometimes grating voice that earned comparisons to Alanis Morrisette, Sheena opens “Koko De Kiss Shite” with her most vapid lyrics yet: “I’ll never be able to give up on you, so never say goodbye and kiss me once again.” Aside from the curious references to Sid Vicious and anarchy, “Koko De Kiss Shite” was an unremarkable grungy love song with karaoke-friendly lyrics and a catchy-enough chorus that helped position Sheena Ringo as an artist the public could finally get behind. It was a clever and necessary move – one made by less commercially viable artists to quickly secure a large fanbase and then gently, single by single, creep further into the esoteric while assuring continuous and plentiful record sales. “Koko De Kiss Shite” reached #10 on the Oricon charts, was certified gold, and transformed Sheena Ringo into a mega-star.

Success had little effect on Sheena’s debut album, Muzai Moratorium (Innocence Moratorium), which went straight to #2 upon its release in February 1999. It had all the fire and untamed rage one could hope for, yet never veered too far from its pop roots. She declared outright war on “Koufukuron,” stripping the song of any resemblance to the original single version and then speeding it up and drowning it all in distortion. The chaotic and oddly timed “Tsumiki Asobi” (“Playing with Blocks”) is wholly uncommercial and difficult to grasp, but pays off big-time with an unexpected shift into throbbing techno-pop elevated by synthetic plucks from the koto, a traditional Japanese instrument. Sheena likened songwriting to an act “as natural as excretion,” and wrote music as therapy, exorcising self-doubt, the injustices of the music business, and homesickness on the album’s 11 tracks. Reading the lyrics to album opener “Tadashii Machi” (The Right Town) and “Marunouchi Sadistic,” one could see her struggles with big-city life (“I love Tokyo, but there’s nothing there”) and a melancholic nostalgia for Fukuoka, the Southern capital that she calls home.

Sheena was born in Saitama, essentially a suburb of Tokyo, but moved to Fukuoka in her early adolescence. Soon after her birth, she underwent a number of surgeries to fix a congenital disorder called esophageal atresia, which left her with large wing-like scars on her shoulder blades and a slightly disproportionate figure that would later inspire her obsession with symmetry. She credits her father with cultivating her love of the piano, jazz, and classical music, and her mother’s mixtapes for introducing her to ’70s kayoukyoku. When she recorded Utaite Myouri: Sono Ichi (Singer’s Luck: Part One), a double-album of covers in 2002, many were astonished by the cross section of songs and artists featured – Janis Ian, Chopin, Andy Williams, France Gall, and a shimmering version of Ota Hiromi’s ’70s classic “Momen No Handkerchief.” Teenagers rarely share the musical tastes of their parents, but Sheena clearly didn’t discriminate.

Her favorite quote? “A woman is courage.”

When she was 15, at her parents’ insistence, she signed up for an audition organized by HoriPuro, a mammoth talent agency on the prowl for potential idol singers. She remembers feeling extremely awkward attempting a cover of Mariah Carey’s “Hero” and was further horrified when she learned that a swimsuit competition was part of the audition process. Sheena was clearly not idol material. On her application she listed her favorite artists as Björk, UK girl group Eternal, Marvin Gaye, and a little known New York freestyle singer named Lisette Melendez. And for her favorite quote? She wrote: “A woman is courage.”

When she performed at the Music Quest competition in her late teens, the judges’ comments about her “coquettish attraction” and “sexiness” prompted a furious retort. “They picked out all of the things that I didn’t want to be noticed for,” she said. “The male perspective is just so dirty, it makes me sick.” Similar complaints are lodged against the music industry by female artists worldwide, but Sheena was operating in a country where gender equality was far behind that of the West.

The scarcity of successful female songwriters in Japan also led to questions about Sheena’s authenticity. One radio DJ suggested that Sheena couldn’t have possibly written her own material. It must’ve been tough to resist telling the DJ where to shove it, but she instead challenged these assumptions via her art, crowning herself “the Sadistic Princess” and brandishing a whip onstage during her many provocative performances on the “Senkou Ecstasy” (First Attack Ecstasy) tour in support of Muzai Moratorium. It’s tempting to say these gigs annihilated the long-held beliefs that a woman couldn’t be both sexual and intelligent, but I’d imagine many didn’t see beyond the titillation.

The medical motif was used to great effect on the Gekokujou Ecstasy tour, where heart monitors, surgical lights, and musicians in scrubs transformed the stage into a massive operating theater. Sheena wore a floor-length white gauze gown, soaked in blood.

It was likely the same for “Honnou” (Instinct), one of Ringo’s best songs. For this 1999 single, she swiped the backbone of “Puttin’ On the Ritz” and slathered it in deafening noise and a heavy jazz groove. The video was as red-hot as the record. Sheena, in a starched white nurse’s uniform, shatters glass with her fist and straddles and seduces female patients asleep in their hospital beds. She said she wanted to show that “women had as much right to erotic fantasies as men,” though I’d bet the majority of viewers weren’t appreciating the girl-on-girl action for its feminist statement. Her popularity was at an all-time high following the success of “Honnou” (#2 on the Oricon charts), and its follow-ups “Gibs” (Cast) (#3) and “Tsumi To Batsu” (Crime and Punishment) (#4).

When sophomore album Shouso Strip (Lawsuit Winning Strip) was released in March 2000, it debuted at #1 and sold over 2.5 million copies. It was an impressive feat for an album far more extreme and idiosyncratic than its predecessor. She sounded fearless and full of venom, naming songs “Byousho Public” (Public Sickbed) and “Yokushitsu” (Bathroom), writing lyrics backwards, and using every tool at her disposal to disfigure anything too easy on the ears. She used orthographic symmetry as a way to organize the album’s track titles and themes, with the songs on the A-side mirror-imaging the songs on Side B. For example, both the opening track “Kyogen-shou” (Compulsive Lying) and album closer “Izon-shou” (Dependency) share similar kanji characters and themes of mental illness. The medical motif was used to great effect on the “Gekokujou Ecstasy” (Tail Wags the Dog Ecstasy) tour, where heart monitors, surgical lights, and musicians in scrubs transformed the stage into a massive operating theater. Sheena wore a floor-length white gauze gown, soaked in blood.

If third album Karuki Zamen Kuri No Hana was intended to sabotage years of success and celebrity, then mission (nearly) accomplished. It was a radical and disorienting departure from her prior efforts. In other words, it’s completely mental. The title itself, translated as Chlorine, Semen, Chestnut Flower, was a hilarious and demented choice, inspired by Sheena overhearing a group of men talking about how the smell of semen resembled chestnuts and chlorine. The album had no obvious singles and the list of instruments alone – shamisen, jaw harp, kalimba, koto, ehru, hurdy-gurdy – is enough to boggle the mind. She had clearly exhausted pop’s possibilities and found greater pleasure in experimenting with traditional instruments, classical arrangements, dissonance, and abstract electronica.

Karuki Zamen Kuri No Hana requires time, concentration, and headphones to warm to its enigmatic, free-form philosophy. You’ll first pick up on the more accessible moments – the exuberant pop of “Yattsuke Shigoto” (Crap Job), the lovely melodic verse in “Ishiki” (Consciousness) – before coming around to the more mind-warping “Shuukyou” (Religion) and “Souretsu” (Funeral Procession). Her obsession with the modern and traditional seeps into the album’s artwork; there are photos of porcelain teacups, traditional Japanese desserts called wagashi, a guitar on one page and a shamisen on the next, and perhaps most revealing of all, Sheena in a dazzling black kimono holding a flying V guitar. The album sold a few hundred thousand copies before word spread that Sheena had maybe lost the plot. But there are many that are convinced it’s her masterpiece.

I was living in Tokyo when Sheena played the famous Nippon Budokan stadium on September 27, 2003, the final date of her “Sugoroku Ecstasy” tour. When she took the stage wearing an elaborate sky-blue kimono and geta – traditional wooden Japanese clogs, screams of “Ringo-chan!” echoed throughout the arena; everyone was ridiculously excited to be there. I felt like a child witnessing something extraordinary for the very first time, and kept having to confer with my friend David that this was real – that that girl over there, just fifty feet from us, the one shouting through the megaphone, was Sheena Ringo. It felt too good to be true.

Her performance, which leaned heavily on songs from Karuki Zamen Kuri No Hana, was as mind-blowing as you’d expect. For the final encore, she debuted her upcoming single, “Ringo No Uta” (Ringo’s Song) accompanied by a peculiar video that focused predominantly on the mole just below her left cheek. It was her signature beauty mark – prominent in every photo and video – and all of a sudden it was gone. We hadn’t known it at the time, but we were witnessing the end of Sheena Ringo.

The ass-kicking version of Sheena Ringo may have had her day, but she leaves a spectacular legacy that no Japanese female artist has managed to surpass.

Months later she had her mole surgically removed and announced that she would be ditching her solo career and forming a jazz-rock band called Tokyo Jihen (Tokyo Incident) with the musicians from her “Sugoroku Ecstasy” tour. Their second single “Sounan” (Distress) was as high quality as many of Sheena Ringo’s solo singles, but the bulk of Tokyo Jihen’s material leaves me wanting more.

As I write this, girl group AKB48 sits at the top of the Oricon charts, with a slew of idol groups like Kara, Lovely Doll, Negipecia, and SKE48 close behind. Somehow, the bland, ultra-commercial J-pop Sheena Ringo countered in the late ’90s sounds far worse today. Unfortunately, Sheena’s latest material offers no escape. I wish I could say the resumption of her solo career in 2006 resulted in more thrilling, psycho-sexual pop, but 2007’s Heisei Fuuzoku (Japanese Manners), which soundtracked the film Sakuran, mainly features updated versions of old material. And her fourth solo album, Sanmon Gossip (The Threepenny Gossip) is a limp collection of jazz-pop lite.

When she appeared in Shiseido’s “I’m Virgin” [sic] makeup campaign, hawking foundation in a similar style to L'Oreal's horrendously slick “Because I’m Worth It” commercials, it seemed she had completely lost her way. The fearless, convention-busting pop star was nowhere to be found, gone the way of her mole. Perhaps it’s wrong to expect her to continue fight in the same way. Artists age, mellow out, seek new pastures. Sheena Ringo may have had her day, but she leaves a spectacular legacy that no Japanese female artist has managed to surpass. Yet.

On a different note