Electronic organs have been part of the Japanese DJ’s toolbox for more than decade, but it took YouTube to make Electone artistry an American sensation. When video clips of the hyperactive DJ Tucker lighting a fire (literally) on a Yamaha Electone electronic organ (while standing upside down) began making the rounds on YouTube in the spring of 2006, a phenomenon was born. The intensity of Tucker’s performance — and the crowd’s mounting energy — reinvented this usually staid instrument.
Tucker’s confounding, high-energy mix of rock and roll, punk, pop, and hip hop leaves critics fumbling for words. The electric organ fan site Electone Zone described it dizzily as “a 21st century Neo-Tokyo vaudeville show.” Other fans describe his sets as “performance art” (in 2006, Tucker appeared at Barcelona’s Sónar multimedia music and art festival).
“Vaudeville” implies comedy, and laughter is the obvious response when Tucker spins the “Pink Panther” and “Sesame Street” theme songs, scratches records with his nose, or leaps shirtless into the crowd. Music critics’ vocabulary is rarely so taxed, but coming up with a way to describe someone not entirely hip hop, not entirely rock, not entirely retro, and perhaps not ever entirely serious has left many at a loss. Even Tucker’s show-stopping blazing organ trick is both a Hendrix send-up and a gutsy act of vandalism more punk than hip hop. Tucker’s mash-ups are knowing and often more than a little tongue-in-cheek, but his reverence for retro instruments and melodies goes well beyond the merely ironic.
“I started using organ and turntable around 2004,” he says, “which is about the same time I started my solo concert. At first, I was playing at cafes, but after I played at my friends’ punk band events, I started my original playing style — playing electronic organ by standing on my hands on a keyboard or setting fire to the rhythm box as performance. Usually, I perform for many different kinds of shows, such as hip hop, house, techno, hardcore punk, garage, and noise.”
In 1998, Tucker released his single, “The Man from Electone,” while touring the United States as the keyboardist for Natural Calamity. The following year brought him back to the US as keyboardist for Jackie & The Cedrics. Tucker’s first album, Tucker is Coming, was released in 2003 with Japan’s OddJob Records, the same year that he played at the Fuji Rock Festival. In 2005, he released “Electoon Wizard” featuring DJ Ken-One, with whom Tucker battles in another YouTube must-see clip.
On stage, Tucker flings his slim body tirelessly between the electric guitar, bass, drums, and turntables, but it’s the Electone that garners the most attention. (The Electone trademark is used for Yamaha’s Asia-only line of electronic organs.) Tucker’s preferred instrument is a fully programmable digital synthesizer that can mimic a full orchestra but whose outward appearance still hearkens to the homely domestic instrument that appeared in Japanese homes in 1959.
Tucker recalls, “About 10 years ago I heard my mom was playing electric organ. She was playing enka, Japanese traditional songs, and it sounded fresh and cool to me. I started playing [the electric organ], which was different from a Hammond organ. I realized that the sound was cheap and strange but very interesting. I used to play guitar, but I thought electric organ had more possibility, and that I would be able to show my originality more with electric organ. I also started using electric organs because they’re not valuable instruments, so I could get one for free. I thought it would be meaningful to make the instrument interesting and valuable through my own efforts, rather than something that others have already explored.”
Tucker’s well-trafficked MySpace page proclaims, “Tucker combines Electone, synth, scratching, and literally BLAZING theatrics to create crowd pleasing performances that dispel any belief that Electone isn’t cool.”
The Electone’s reputation as cheap and uncool — a mom instrument — also gives it the ultimate hipster cache. Today there’s a thriving underground of Japanese Electone enthusiasts giving birth to fan sites like Electone Zone and trading YouTube links to videos of Japanese schoolchildren rocking the Electone — everything from “It’s a Small World” to Kansas‘ “Carry On My Wayward Son.”
The Yamaha corporation also fosters the community by sponsoring junior competitions such as Electone Stage 2007, the Yamaha Electone Festival, and biggest of all, the Junior Original Concert (or JOC). The JOC, established in Japan in 1972, showcases the work of children who have participated in the international Yamaha Music Education System, and in recent years has featured some daring original compositions — though nothing as daring as setting their organs on fire.
Tucker started his musical education playing guitar. “When I was a high school student, I went to a school that taught theory of jazz for about two years,” he says, “but because studying theory is boring, I was always doing impromptu guitar sessions with my teacher and friends. I think that was helpful. I never studied the piano or organ formally, but when I was still working for a company, I practiced organ everyday after the work.”
The organ was an ideal instrument for Tucker’s boundless energy and sense of showmanship. The electric organ is an inherently theatrical live instrument, requiring its player to move rapidly between two keyboards, two or more sets of foot pedals, and an additional lever usually operated by the performer’s knee. A dynamic Electone player appears to be simultaneously dancing and playing, and that’s before adding the other equipment that makes up live sets. Tucker’s sets are a full-body experience and an impressive display of musical savvy and athletic prowess.
Tucker’s music defies easy categorization, but many of his supporters are part of the broader Japanese hip hop (or J-hop) movement. The history of hip hop in Japan is long and controversial, a microcosm for issues of authenticity and globalization.
Ian Condry, an assistant professor of Japanese cultural studies at MIT, maintains a comprehensive website devoted to the history of Japanese hip hop. One of his frequently asked questions is, “Isn’t it just imitation?” — a question leveled at all non-African American hip hop performers, and one that is particularly sensitive in Japan, where the small ganguro (or “blackface”) movement has received an outsized amount of media attention.
J-hop began with dance, an instantly captivating art form that arrived without rap’s linguistic difficulties in the early 1980s in Tokyo. Graffiti, deejaying, and rap followed, though the Japanese language is not well suited to conventional American-style rap. As early as 1986, Tokyo’s Shibuya district had its own hip hop club and with it a tradition of music, dance, visual arts, and fashion. The nightclub district became known as the genba, or localized site, of a specifically Japanese movement.
In essays such as “Japanese Hip-Hop and the Globalization of Popular Culture” from the book Urban Life, Condry tackles the “legitimacy” of Japanese hip hop by locating the emergence of the J-hop market as a confluence of global media and local creativity. As the home-grown hip hop movement developed, Japanese artists found their voice and began addressing specifically Japanese concerns, replacing an American focus on weapons and violence with a criticism of the Japanese work ethic, social conformity, and education system. Where violence (either literal or metaphorical, as in DJ “battles”) appeared, it was often represented in the guise of the Japanese samurai.
Yet debates on whether Japanese (or any international) hip hop is “real” seem beside the point when artists like Tucker continue to break boundaries of genre, geography, and decade.
Down-to-earth Tucker is a little taken aback when asked what makes Japanese hip hop unique.
“Because I am Japanese,” he says, “I am not sure what is unique about Japanese hip hop. But I think it is interesting that many Japanese rappers are singing about something [that they] relate to themselves these days. People realized it was not always necessary to perform like the original [African-American] rap performers. I think their performance became unique and more interesting.”
Tucker’s playfulness, his willingness to appropriate what he chooses from punk, ska, heavy metal, and even “Sesame Street” points to the success of this unique approach. His “retro-Vaudeville” style is boundlessly allusive and energetic. His growing global fan base is thanks in large part to the democratizing borderlessness of YouTube, which broadcasts little girls’ organ concerts to international applause. And though the Yamaha Electone is currently unavailable for export to the west, that doesn’t stop US and European collectors from scheming to import them — but at $2,000 a pop, it’s unlikely that anyone will be setting them on fire.