Katamari Damacy – The Sounds of Shibuya | Games Are Evil: 360, PS3, & Wii Console Gaming Magazine

The music of Katamari Damacy is often regarded with reverence by many gamers as a breath of fresh air that compliments the equally original yet absurd gameplay and graphical style of the game itself. The music represents such an odd combination of styles and genres that most people are to a large extent confused about where it comes from. The soundtrack plucks elements from electronica, pop, samba, and jazz, and (much like The Prince, Katamari’s protagonist) rolls them into one giant ball. The results sometimes end up a tad cumbersome, but the fun is really about the journey here and not the end result.

When most US gamers try to contextualize the soundtrack put together by the composer/sound director Yu Miyake, they have absolutely no basis of comparison. To understand this cultural disconnect and lack of familiarity, you needn’t look any further then the music scene of New York City. The city that never sleeps has been host to a hugely diverse group of musical styles and trends over its storied history. From the rise of punk to the genesis of hip-hop, and more recently the explosion of indie and garage rock outfits, the only thing that defines the city’s music is it’s lack of a definition.

So I bet at this point you are lost as to what the New York City music scene and the soundtrack to a Japanese video game have in common, and I promise, I’m getting there. Tokyo is a city that draws comparisons to New York City for a variety of reasons; It is the cultural and financial center of its respective country, it’s divided into unique and diverse neighborhoods (or Wards, in the case of Tokyo), is very self contained, and most importantly (at least for the sake of my argument), is the similarity in the nature of each city’s music scene. Much like New York City, Tokyo has also seen a number of musical trends come and go, even going so far as to define a few new ones on the way. Although Tokyo, and Japan for that matter, is best known for it’s ultra-bubblegum pop singles from its flavor of the week idols, beyond this layer of shallow and overproduced rubbish lies a number of creative and talented musicians.

And with that, I’ve made it to my point; The Katamari Damacy soundtrack is a direct evolution of the Shibuya-Kei style, which, as it’s namesake suggests, was a style synonymous with Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward that peaked in popularity in the late 90’s. Taking it’s inspirations from the French Yé-yé movment of the 1960’s, who’s purveyors included the prolific Serge Gainsbourg, Shibuya-Kei encompasses a wide variety of previously established genres which include, but aren’t limited to, jazz, bossa, lounge, and pop. Among the bands that favored this style, arguably none were more successful then Pizzicato Five.

Pizzicato Five’s 1991 breakout album, ‘This Year’s Girl,’ is often regarded as the textbook definition of what the Shibuya-Kei sound encompasses. Keep in mind that this was 19 years ago; To put that date into perspective one need only look at the Grammy winners from 1992, which include Michael Bolton, Natalie Cole, and Bonnie Raitt. I mention these artists simply to show the huge disconnect between Japanese and American popular music in the early 90’s (And to try and figure out why Michael Bolton has a Grammy award).

I didn’t write this article with the intention of lessening the importance of the Katamari Damacy soundtrack, which in itself is an incredibly creative musical composition, but instead to show why the soundtrack was met with such unexpected enthusiasm in the United States. By the time Katamari Damacy was released in 2004, the Japanese audience had been listening to Shibuya-Kei for over a decade, but it was the first exposure to this style for a vast majority of American gamers.

Katamari on the Rock ~ Main Theme – Yu Miyake, Masayuki Tanaka