Marketing Affect in Japanese Idol Music

The cheerful music performers called idols, and their numerous attendant media products, pervade everyday life in contemporary Japan. Media companies maintain large capacities for production, and fans have voracious appetites for those products. Idol singles dominate Japan's record sales charts, typically outselling even high-profile international acts. Idols' musical and dance talents, however, usually come across as average at best. Their unimpressive skill helps them to feel approachable, like a friend more than a hero. By coming across as not untouchable stars but average flawed humans, they position themselves ideally for fans to feel affectively close to them. The dissertation explores the social meanings of the idol aesthetic as well as its historical dimensions, using the technopop idol trio Perfume as a central example.;The dissertation opens with a set of three chapters laying out the aesthetic conventions of the idol genre. Chapter 1 explores how idol style constructs a persona I refer to as endearing vulnerability, using a social framework known in Japanese as amae to encourage fans to feel affectively close to their favorite idols. Examples from the groups AKB48 and SMAP show how idols' intentionally amateurish performances feed into this aesthetic aim. Chapter 2 turns to idol trio Perfume to demonstrate how their distinctively un-idol like style, which includes smooth, electronically processed voices, precise choreography, and clean electronic dance instrumentals, produce the same aesthetic of amae through different means. The core of the group's identity, however, remains an idol-like affective closeness. The third chapter considers issues of choreography in greater detail, showing that idol music's style of mimetic gesture draws indirectly from early modern Japanese dance genres. Idol music's mimetic gestures illustrate the lyrics directly, allowing fans a means of visceral engagement and complementing the musical amae..;The later chapters move into the realms of mediation and interpretation. Chapter 4 looks at the semiotics of idol media to see what, if any, structural logic underpins the overwhelming plethora of idol goods. Related production models known as the sekaikan (worldview) and media mix demonstrate how a semiotic logic allows idols to circulate through densely multimedia frameworks while maintaining coherent affective tones. The chapter concludes with a case study based on Perfume's sekaikan and media mix. The final chapter takes as its subject idol music and its relation to capitalism. Many conventional theories assume that critical discourse and participation in mainstream market economies are contradictory. Using models from the contemporary Japanese art scene, the chapter shows how Perfume and solo idol Kyary Pamyu Pamyu in particular engage in a playfully optimistic form of critical discourse within the realm of idol performance. This stance rejects universalist assumptions of contemporary avant gardes related to the meanings of capitalism. The epilogue of the dissertation uses a thick analysis of a live Perfume concert to show how the many themes of the dissertation operate simultaneously within a single context.