Don’t you just love it when everything comes together? Kenji Sawada must have taken forever to match up his forward-thinking persona with his stagecraft and music, but on Aux Femmes 女たちよ) it all fell into place. Toying with gender, electronics, and all sorts of compositional elements, Aux Femmes 女たちよ proved he just wasn’t some emptyheaded provocateur but a force to be reckoned with.
Kenji was the rare breed of musician who began his career very early in contemporary Japanese culture. Raised in Kyoto, Kenji originally shined on the baseball diamond and was (surprisingly enough) on a trajectory to play it in Japan’s major leagues. One day, while working as a bouncer in a Tokyo nightclub, Kenji caught wind of rock n roll music and his whole life changed.
Joining one of Japan’s earliest rock groups, The Tigers, he christened himself on stage as “Julie” en homage towards his favorite actress Julie Andrews. Donning long hair and using makeup to accentuate his image, Kenji was one of the first (if not the first) pop idol to introduce Japan music culture to the ideas of dandyism and androgyny slowly taking hold through the likes of others elsewhere. Huge crowds took to him and The Tigers, and swiftly Kenji aimed his ambitions far further.
From acting in films and tv to trying to crossover into foreign markets, whatever Kenji tried to do to further his profile, he took aplomb to accomplish. When he embarked on his first solo release, 1969’s Julie, no one would have expected more than a decade later, Kenji would have tried his hands on so many musical ideas: balladry, pop, AOR, MOR, funk, reggae, confessional folk and rock, all came under his mercurial inspiration. By the time of 1975’s The Fugitive, Kenji had developed such a huge solo following that he found himself performing to sold out stages as far as Hawaii and released singles in places like Europe with hit singles actually charting in places like France.
Always the fashion innovator, Kenji would be able to synthesize some of the prevalent fashion trends and adapt them, mutating them further for his much larger Japanese audience. It was during the glam era that his once shocking overtly “feminine” became less so and rather than toning down his prickly identity for his more conservative homeland, he increasingly took it up a notch. From donning blood soaked soldier’s uniforms to wearing outfits that were variations on dresses worn by another idol of his, Marlene Dietrich, Kenji didn’t bother toning down his identity. While he may have appeared as a strong, butchy man in film and screen, on-stage he would shift to this slithery, sexy being, singing for/to both identities.
In the ‘80s Kenji shifted to splitting his time between acting and music-making. On the music side he had felt a shift in creativity coming from new styles like new wave and techno-kayo, realizing he himself must adapt or be forgotten by this new generation already used to these ideas of cross-pollination.
1981’s STRIPPER served as the perfect way to reboot his own image. Inviting his much younger, touring band he dubbed the “Exotics”, members Ken Yoshida, Kazuhiko Shibayama and Akira Nishihira, brought in fresh new ideas that were cognizant of all sorts of new technology and styles that he hadn’t toyed with and as “Julie and the Exotics” rekindle a new era of experimentation for Kenji. He now had genuine hits that didn’t sound out of place in this new musical environment.
Feeding off the spirited work of the group and off this fresh start, Kenji took to the ‘80s with fascinating aplomb. Mutating the burgeoning sophisticated pop scene of the day, on stage audiences would be treated to the collective’s askew vision of hypermodernism and upwardly mobile Japan.
Performing as the elder statesman of Japanese art pop, stage shows twisted with dark funk and electro-pop songs created for albums like Mis Cast. and A Wonderful Time. Launched under his own label, Julie, it was Kenji staking his own turf as visionary and putting his own career at risk for it. By the time of 1983’s Library, the Exotics had the clout to merit their own vision, showing all the personalities running the braintrust behind this new man.
What’s fascinating about Aux Femmes 女たちよ is how that bit of breathing room allowed both of them to come together for their best work yet, if not in their last album together. Using Japan’s earliest literary masterpiece The Tale of Genji as inspiration, they took visual motifs. Rethinking lyrics from it, they drew parallels between the protagonist’s many romantic liaisons and the story itself with Kenji’s own supposed notorious backstory, imagining a new character out of thin air.
Assuming in songs (and in tone) either the male or female side of the equation, Kenji drew a weirdly affecting, somewhat self-referencing album that used exploratory sonics to explore issues of love in only the way he could. Augmenting his Exotics with the likes of Hideki Matsutake on synth programming, Pecker on drums/drum machines, and Mr. “A Touch Of Temptation” himself (Masaaki Ohmura), for once the sonic atmosphere drew you entirely in from first note to last with no superfluous nods to past-time glories, with all contributors acting as perfect foils to the topic at hand.
Famous Japanese queer literature author Mutsuo Takahashi reinterpreted whole poetry from the original novel as lyrics for this new album, giving it the unique perspective required in righting the faults of that oldest tale. And Kenji put in his most fascinating vocal phrasing into it. Belying all these new advancements, the shape of Aux Femmes 女たちよ just permeating with good taste, keeping all these ideas intensely honed (once again) on that mysterious, amorphous, nocturnal atmosphere. Every small detail isn’t spared to draw you in at any point in the album.
Somewhere, though, one of pop history’s biggest mysteries is how such an intensely new thoroughly Japanese masterpiece gets lost in the shuffle during our rekindling with Japanese pop culture.