I'll start with an admission: I didn't like Heisei Fuuzoku at first. My expectations were high, of course, being a huge fan of Shiina Riingo's last solo album, Karuki Zamen Kuri no Hana (KZK for short), which merged diverse trends and traditions in jazz, fusion, rock, and pop into a strangely realized album. It was one of those rare discs that transcends most notions of its genre, while embracing it all the same. And unlike Heisei Fuuzoku, KZK still had roots in the American underground. The live drums were huge and distorted, the electronics glitched out, and the instrumentation ever expansive and ambitious. Almost everything about Shiina Ringo upon the album's release was ambitious, and for a moment, she created a new template for pop starlets. Coming from a lower-class Japanese family, her rise to fame was somewhat taboo, and her subsequently unreserved persona surely liberated the J-pop fanatic's mindset in one way or another. If KZK was the culmination of that persona, Shiina's creative peak, then Heisei Fuuzoku is the apparent come-down.
So, why didn't I like it at first? For one, only 4 of the 13 tracks are new. The others are taken directly from past Shiina Ringo albums, and we find them here reworked and rearranged, largely in her (often flirted with) lounge jazz idiom. What impacted me most on first listen wasn't the change of flavor, but rather the actual sound of the album. After the sonic histrionics of KZK, it's surprising to hear such relative austerity on Heisei Fuuzoku. Each instrument is presented at face value, sitting modestly in the overall mix. The drums sound like live drums, the strings like strings, the piano, piano. In a way, Heisei Fuuzoku's presentation is unspectacular, reserved even, and it initially obscured the true power of Shiina Ringo's songs for me.
An additional source of confusion was the aforementioned jazzy reworking of Shiina favorites. Her interest in big band-era crooning has always been apparent, but when the aesthetic appeared on previous albums, it was usually masked in clever, wholly modern production techniques and arrangements. In a sense, Ringo's handling of the Golden Years of jazz played like simple homages, best taken with a grain of salt. Heisei Fuuzoku completely and shamelessly discards any such irony and approaches some often forgotten sounds with straight-faced veneration. Never before has Shiina's music been as stripped-down on record, and never before has she sounded so at home. The more you let yourself get lost in her songs, the more you'll give in to their demure beauty, their subtle charms.
Listening to Heisei Fuuzoku, I'm reminded that artists don't have to rely on sonic gimmickry to connect with an often jaded demographic of listeners. The lack of any obvious selling point here indicates how removed Shiina has become from the musical culture she once embraced, and that once embraced her. In the place of a smirking pop queen is an artist doing exactly what she wants, when she wants, and the greatest compliment I can give Heisei Fuuzoku is that it plays like a forgotten gem. It's fairly swanky, and while it does appear to be taking direct cues from big band and swing, there's also lot more to it. Regardless of transparent influences, Heisei Fuuzoku is not wholly connected to any one time period or trend. Its production may be uniform, but the rich cultural heritage it draws from certainly is not, which creates a baseline pastiche of familiar sounds that some will find trite or passé.
If you want to delve even deeper into the sound, Heisei Fuuzoku might as well represent a branch of post-war Japan that has completely assimilated (and embraced) an occupying American culture. Whether intentional or not is debatable, but when Shiina sings Japanese in one electronic/jazz inflected verse, then French and English in another, it's hard not to look at her as a global personality. She seems content creating a new template for the modern pop star, one that ironically, and sadly, is ubiquitously ignored in the states; sad, because Heisei Fuuzoku should resonate most with Americans. After a few listens, it becomes apparent that Shiina Ringo's genre exercise transcends most similar affairs because the stuff is in her blood. Frank Sinatra really is a part of this 20-something, Japanese pop star's being, just as Björk and Stravinsky probably are too. Through one path or another, these lines of culture and heritage have molded a new Japanese musical sensibility, a notion that runs in tandem with the actual sounds on Heisei Fuuzoku, one that elevates it beyond the ranks of harmless throwback albums and plants it somewhere very new.
(Note: There are multiple spellings of "Shiina Ringo," including "Sheena Rinngo," that appear on KZK. I'm sticking with "Shiina" for arbitrary reasons.)