The Week Kyary Almost Won Japan

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu spent the spring of 2014 somewhere over the Atlantic on her Nanda Collection World Tour, performing to European audiences who’d spent months watching her videos on loop and weren’t entirely prepared for how small and precise and fully committed she is in person. On the night she played Cologne, her single Family Party landed at number two on the Japanese charts—just close enough to the top to feel like a near-miss, squeezed between ClariS and Morning Musume, two groups that represent entirely different versions of what J-pop is supposed to be.

ClariS are the anonymous ones—two girls who performed for years without revealing their faces, their music clean and emotionally sincere in the way anime tie-ins tend to be when they’re actually good. Morning Musume are the institution, the idol-group template that everything else in Japanese pop has been either following or reacting against since the late nineties, their current lineup young enough that the original members have already lived entire careers.

And then Kyary, who fits into neither category—too strange for mainstream idol pop, too mainstream for Harajuku underground, existing in her own pressurized atmosphere of pastel and synthesizer. The rest of the chart that week included Sekai no Owari, who dress like clowns and play arena rock with total conviction; Namie Amuro coasting on what felt like a permanent state of grace; and Ken Hirai, whose pretty-boy status has outlasted at least three cycles of what "pretty" is supposed to mean in Japan.

What I love about Japanese charts is how little they resemble anything else. The genre logic is different. The fanbase loyalty operates at a different intensity. The relationship between artist and audience feels almost contractual—which sounds cold until you hear how it actually sounds, which is frequently like something assembled with tremendous care for a specific person who was always going to love it.